This is by far the most difficult flow of the three flows of compassion. To experience being sensitive to your own pain and suffering, stay with this pain and suffering to work through it and develop the skills and motivation to prevent or alleviate it is incredibly challenging especially for avoidant and anxious attachment personality types.
Looking back over my life events I have many times ran away from my own suffering in fear of not feeling emotionally able to stay with it because the version of my self-critic has felt too dominant.
However, continuously developing and maintaining a deeper awareness of myself through my counselling training and personal therapy, continued professional development, having an excellent supportive clinical supervisor, accepting colleagues, friends and family who believe in me has given me the courage, strength and wisdom to keep revisiting my own pain and suffering.
Knowing I can work from different versions of myself really empowers me to accept that the anxious version of myself will show up when I am triggered back to past uncomfortable memories, experiences and my self-critic voice will become louder.
Nevertheless, this is just one version of me I can now recognise and thank for showing up because its giving me a warning of I can be more compassionate to myself. Through my CFT training, we engaged in some imagery work of what our own self critic would look like which for me was an orange bouncy ball. In the imagery I was able to describe the features of our self-critic and this experience holds firm in my memory.
Becoming aware of what blocks, fears and resistances come up for you to these three flows especially the self-compassion flow creates opportunities for recovering from past experiences, early messages that can feel so deeply held within your belief system and limits your growth and development.
So why not get in touch so we can begin or revisit your understanding of yourself and together see how these three flows of compassion flow within you. It is okay to feel at a loss at times, getting caught up in tricky thinking loops, feeling overwhelmed by life events or just wanting to flight from a situation.
However, if you do not face difficulties long term suffering and pain will become too unmanageable and your mental health and well being will cause distress on your mind and body.
Could this be a time you can find your courage to get in contact?
To put your trust in me to enable you to see the bigger picture and enable you to work on developing all the skills you require to prevent or alleviate your suffering.
Developing compassion for one’s self and towards others can feel enormously tricky especially when you have experience neglect, mistreatment and abuse from others. Though I am here to let you now I believe you deserve to be more compassionate to yourself and can heal from past experiences I am willing to show up along side you, be with you as you discover and develop these new skills, awareness and wisdom.
