Why Self-Compassion is Important

"Lack of self-compassion manifests in a harsh and judgmental relationship with others. Many people believe that unless they are critical and demanding, they will be failures, unworthy of recognition and undeserving of love."*

Perhaps we feel we deserve to be harsh and critical with ourselves and beat ourselves up for misspoken words and mistakes made. I was used to such negative self-talk after years of practice. My mind was etched with deep familiar ruts of self-reproach. It only took a small mistake, or perceived mistake, for me to stroll down those old, comfortable paths of self-criticism. What's wrong with that? Didn't I deserve it for being such an idiot?

What I hadn't seen was the danger of that habit. Those worn pathways are the very thing that blocks compassion for other people. A mind effortlessly flowing to the trails of self-recrimination is a mind in which negative and critical thinking have become deeply ingrained habits. It then becomes natural to walk down those same rutted pathways when thinking of other people and their actions.

In order to be able to treat others with compassion, we must first cultivate a compassionate attitude towards ourselves. We spend more time inside our heads with ourselves than we do thinking about other people, and the pathways that we use during those hours are the ones most deeply ingrained. We have to create new, positive, mental pathways and to allow the paths of negative self-talk to become grown over and forgotten, which takes conscious effort.

This does not mean lying to ourselves, or living in denial of bad behavior, but rather an honest look at ourselves, doing all we can to make things right with those we've hurt, and then a sincere forgiveness of ourselves. After all, we, too, are vulnerable humans. 

"Understanding and accepting ourselves is fundamental in having compassion for others. It is hard to love others as you love yourself, if you don't love yourself."*

*The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Chapter 25

See also: Guilt, It's Only Jesus, Self-Forgiveness, and The Past is for Education, Not Self-Reproach.

Finding Balance

An older man stepped into the small jacuzzi where I was relaxing after my swim. In spite of showering, the acrid aroma of his stale aftershave along with the residual reek of tobacco obtruded into the steamy air.

I wonder if he's tried to quit? I mused. Surely doctors would have told him to. I guessed his age at maybe somewhere in his 60's or 70's. My imagination stretched into further assumptions, Perhaps he has smoked since his youth. I suppose he enjoys this vice to which he is captive.

Captivity is something I could relate to. I had allowed myself to be psychologically captive to a cult for too many years, and I now loathe the thought of being captive to a vice. Then my mind took another leap.

Vice or not, depending on your perspective, people denied pleasure in a repressive society can easily jump on the treadmill of hedonism, not unlike preacher's kid syndrome. One luxury that brings exultation soon becomes normalized. Then, like a junkie looking for his next fix, the search for the next novelty begins. When that is found, the initial rush fades all too quickly and the item or experience becomes mundane, the behavior habituated. (Habituation put simply: Why the fifth bite of your favorite dish never tastes as good as the first.)

On the cycle goes. Endless.

Walking hand-in-hand with hedonism is the avoidance of pain and the rejection of any negativity. This brings to mind the hackneyed, "get rid of negative energy from your life." I would call it denial. Life is not a bed of thornless roses.

The Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, in The Book of Joy, describe eudaimonic happiness which is born from self-understanding, growth, and acceptance of life's joys and sufferings, sadness, and grief. To me, this seems a more realistic approach to life and happiness.

May I never again forfeit my freedom and self-determination to live in a dream world again. 

(See The Experience Machine for the ultimate in hedonism.)

Guilt

After leaving the cult and the initial jolt of horror looking back at the wasted years, as the mist finally started to clear from my mind, I was flooded with paralyzing guilt. Unshakable guilt. Part of this could be due to my Catholic upbringing, but wherever it came from, it was nurtured and grew to overwhelming degrees in the cult. 

I felt I could never apologize enough to my children. Yet even their kindness, understanding, and forgiveness did not make a dent in my self-condemnation.

Each day was filled with self-recriminations. How could I have? I've ruined my life and my kids' lives! It's all my fault! I hate myself!

In spite of my niggling self-talk, I studied and listened to audio courses and did what needed to be done each day. I had a lot of kids and responsibilities, so much of the day I was too busy to think. Finally, some light broke through.

First of all came the dawn. This guilt only shows that I am kind-hearted. Psychopaths do not feel guilt.

With that foot in the door, knowledge and realization started to trickle in. Guilt is a waste of time. It does no one any good. It is not productive. I am paralyzed and wallowing. 

Then came the hunger to learn and the resultant study to find out why I had joined and stayed. I worked to build new pathways for my brain. I had to make a conscious effort to not walk down the well-worn path of self-loathing and recrimination, to deliberately work to change the self-flagellation after any perceived mistake into the more productive, I can learn from this and do better next time. And I had to forbid myself from saying, I hate myself.

That may sound childish and silly, but through all those years in the cult I believe I remained a child in many significant ways. Just like an alcoholic turning to the bottle in times of discomfort or confrontation, I turned to the magic of prayer. No facing down problems, no dealing with issues, just "give it all to Jesus" and keep on. There can be little maturity in such an approach.

Finally, I faced the obvious fact that I will need to live with myself for the rest of my life, so it behooves me to get along with myself. To be kind. To treat myself as I would a friend.

As the Dalai Lama has said, self-compassion is closely connected to self-acceptance. More than acceptance, it is actually having compassion for our human frailties and recognizing we are vulnerable and limited like all people. Understanding and accepting ourselves is fundamental in having compassion for others.

The Travesty of Being a "Bible Woman"

Before, I surmised that abusive parents must have a disconnect with their future selves. They must be blind to the fact that the children they treat so harshly will soon be adults who remember. That seemed to me the only way to explain the abuse of vulnerable children.

What I hadn't considered was the quieter damage done by mothers in their striving to be "Bible women." That sickeningly self-abasing behavior implanted destructive mores in the psyches of the girls in the cult, and also likely taught the boys a Scriptural type of misogyny. Good "Bible women" were supposed to "submit to their husbands, as unto the Lord." Females were taught that it was their God-given duty never to refuse a man.

Girls were not taught a thing about boundaries. They never heard that it is OK to say "no," nor that their body was theirs. They learned these wrong ideas from the Mo Letters and, sadly, from observing their own weak, beaten-down, often exhausted, mothers.

Women, like myself, felt unworthy, "deserving of nothing but hell," as Berg wrote. "The only thing good about us is Jesus." There was no room for self-confidence, self-respect, strength, or growth. Submission was the rule. No need to question or try to get out of a bad situation. Just endure. We deserved nothing better.

Step out of that cult, and besides the myriad of other shocks and changes, we were faced with the challenge of overcoming that behavior. But first we had to notice it. It was part of our thinking, our unquestionable "normal"—the water we "fish" swam in—and thus, pretty hard to see. People continued to walk all over us. It took hard experience for us to, hopefully, learn that our concept of normalcy needs serious alteration and that it was all right, even necessary, to stand up for ourselves.

See: Habits of Mind

The Experience Machine*

Imagine you are given the opportunity to plug into a virtual reality machine that would be preprogrammed with all your dreams, creating for you an imaginary life where you can be and do whatever you want. If you have noble ideals, perhaps your world would be programmed so that you, through trial and error, much work and research, discover the cure for cancer. Maybe you would write the greatest novel ever written. Maybe you would go full-hedonism and just lay around on a beach, drinking pina coladas. That would be your entire reality.

You would have no idea that your body was really floating in a vat of liquid with electrodes attached to your brain. Your reality was what you were experiencing in your brain.

Would you do it?

Or what if you woke up today and found out that your life has been lived in an experience machine, and nothing is real? How would you feel?

Is there value in living an authentic life, striving to be honest with oneself? Or is a pretend life better if it means one can be "happy"?

* The Experience Machine is a thought experiment developed by American philosopher, Robert Nozick.

When "Normal" isn't Normal

It's not just in the isolated life of a cultist where a false sense of normal can be dangerous.

Let's take a look at an incident from the history of medicine. From the Resurrectionists of the early 19th century (aka, body snatchers) and the innovative William Burke, to the ongoing illicit cadaver trade of today, the corpses of the poor have been the mainstay used in autopsies for medical training.

(William Burke was a Resurrectionist whose chosen work entailed digging up graves and exhuming corpses to be sold for study, but he tired of that backbreaking work. He and his accomplice, William Hare, found an easier method. They would ply their victims with whisky, suffocate them in their sleep at Hare's lodging house, then deliver the bodies, some still warm, to a generous doctor.)

Nearly exclusive use of poor people's cadavers for medical studies can be problematic. The poor suffer from malnutrition and chronic stress, and these stresses have an effect on the body, namely atrophy (shrinkage) of some organs and hypertrophy (enlargement) of others. Of particular importance to this story is the fact that the thymus can shrink to one-fourth its normal size due to stress. Assuming that these stress-ravaged bodies represented what was normal was a very bad idea.

In the early 1900's, doctors were searching for the cause of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), which generally occurred in middle and upper-class families. Why had these healthy babies died in the night? To find out, doctors autopsied babies who had died of SIDS. Lo and behold, they found that these babies had abnormally large thymus glands. Had they found the cause of SIDS? Had the enlarged thymus compressed the trachea in the night, suffocating the babies while they slept?

Preventative measures were needed to thwart this supposed killer disease of enlarged thymuses. In the 1920's a method was found to shrink the dangerously large gland - radiation. Babies were treated with radiation which did indeed shrink their thymuses, with the unintended consequence of irradiating the thyroid gland next door, causing thyroid cancer resulting in over 10,000 deaths.

Help finally came from the bodies of babies who died in car crashes. A doctor autopsying those poor little victims in the 1930's discovered that they also had "enlarged" thymuses. Was the disease more widespread than they realized? Or were doctors seeing the picture backwards? Were the so-called "enlarged" thymus glands actually normal size, and the smaller ones abnormal?

Yes, that was the case. Sadly, much damage had already been done.

What can we take away from this? Perhaps it is that we should be very careful in deciding what "normal" is, because once we do, the confirmation bias keeps those fires stoked, and disconfirming evidence rolls off like water off a duck's back. None of us are immune to developing a false sense of "normal."

"American Heiress" and Brainwashing

American Heiress is Jeffrey Toobin's thorough recounting of Patricia Hearst's kidnapping by and involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army - an "army" of six. Aside from the wealth and influence of her family and the powerful role that that played in her light sentencing and eventual Presidential pardons, the crux of her trial came down to whether or not she had been "brainwashed."

Did she wholeheartedly join the cause of the SLA, or was she coerced and just went along with them to keep from being killed? If the latter, as she claimed afterwards, then why did she not escape when given so many opportunities over the 19 months she was with them? She was left alone many many times. She had people that would take her in. She did not lack for money. She was not completely isolated from society. She had family that cared about her and were willing to help her.

It's hard not to conclude that she was enamored with their cause.  

After she was arrested she still held onto her revolutionary beliefs for a while, but her enthusiasm faded as the days away from the influence of the SLA grew, gradually replaced by the influence of former friends and family who were visiting her daily. With this came a change in how she viewed her past. Like the rest of humanity, she began to view her experience through the filter of her current mindset. 

Surely, she had been coerced. She had not had consensual sex with the man who had given her an obviously sentimental amulet necklace that was found in her purse when she was arrested, a year and 4 months after he had died. Sentimental? No, he had raped her - apparently, repeatedly.

Did she need to tell herself that story in order to preserve her sanity and to corroborate her claims of innocence? How could she, a "good girl" from a "good family," have committed such crimes in the name of the SLA? "Impossible," pronounced her new default narrative in protection of her ego.

Perhaps her situation echoes Stanley Milgram's conclusion. "Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act."

Could it be, that we are all more vulnerable than we think? Given the right set of circumstances, can we be certain how we would react? 

Abuse seen as "a labor of love" - a new take on the Milgram experiments

I wrote about the Milgram experiments in reference to why people engaged in Flirty Fishing in the COG here.  

This speaker talks about revisiting those experiments and coming to a slightly different conclusion - one that is even more terrifying - people harm others when they believe they are doing it for love. Shades of the Manson Family killings.

Cults and Abusive Relations are Alike

The similarity of mental process that I demonstrated both in my cult subservience and in my abusive marriage lead me to believe that the psychology is one and the same. 

One important characteristic of cults, in order for them to continue and thrive, is isolationism—if not physical isolation (like Jonestown), then social isolation (like TFI, where we were taught that "you are in the world, but not of the world," and to "keep yourself unspotted from the world," as the Bible admonishes). Separation from outsiders, a "them and us" mentality, is a crucial part of the doctrine.  

This same condition applied to my nuclear family life. After leaving communal life, we remained in a country that, shall I say, is not particularly open to foreigners, nor is the language easy to pick up. We were looked on as "outsiders" by the community around us, which seemed to suit our mentality just fine, having been immersed in the isolation of cult life for all of my husband's and my adult lives. Isolation and "being separate" were second nature to us.

In this atmosphere of isolation, my loyalty to my family was strong, as had been my cult loyalty which fortunately, by this time, was beginning to wane. (This period coincided with the publication of remarkably bizarre new doctrines which the "Prophetess" had "received from the Lord," as I wrote about previously. See Finally.)

Both cults and abusive relationships rely on belief in delusions. 

The TFI has so many delusions that it has filled volumes, highlighted by the collective wish-fulfillment of being God's children with the promise of heaven. As for my marriage, my delusion was also a form of wish-fulfillment—believing that my husband was the good, loving husband and father as described by my internal narrative. As is the nature of beliefs, I wanted to believe them, and in so doing unwittingly suppressed the reality testing function of my brain.

Moreover, both cult-life and my married-life played on my human need for acceptance and belonging. I have a desire to be useful and needed, along with the rest of the human race, particularly mothers. Both situations—cult and marriage—played to that need as well.

Happiness

With the "power of prayer" at our disposal, of course we were "happy." In fact, we were constantly reminded in the letters from Berg that living for the Lord in the cult was enjoyable. We were experiencing God's blessings, we were playing the "glad game" (like in the movie, Pollyanna), and we were the happiest people on earth. After all, we were the "chosen ones."

In 1959, psychologists Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith conducted interesting experiments on cognitive dissonance, one portion being on people's attitudes toward the enjoyment of a very boring assignment, such as mindlessly turning knobs on a board.

When they were done with the tedious job given them, the participants remaining in the study were offered the job of explaining to the next participants how enjoyable the tasks were. Some people were paid $1 to do this; others were paid $20. Those who only got $1 felt they had to justify to themselves why they were telling the next participators how fun the very boring job was, so they convinced themselves that indeed the tasks were enjoyable. Those who got $20 were content to lie just for the money; no need for self-justification. ($1 obviously being considered not enough to pay someone to lie.)

The researchers concluded that when people are compelled to lie about, in this case, the supposed enjoyment of a boring task, in order to relieve the cognitive dissonance of the contradiction, they convince themselves that the lie is not really a lie but is actually true. Lying to themselves to justify lying to others.

In a curious admittance of the folly of our happiness delusion, although not seen as such, Berg wrote (among other things), "I'd rather be happy in madness, than only be sane and sad." So madness is better than sanity as long as one is happy.  

I've only included parts of this experiment that I felt pertained to my point of the idea that Family members considered themselves to be happy in spite of the circumstances. On the surface, that sounds like a wonderful positive outlook. In reality, it was mindless and crippling denial.

If you care to read a more thorough synopsis of the study, you can find it here.