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.

Why didn't we balk at the Mo Letters?

How could I have been OK with the Mo Letters? They were blatantly horrible and overflowed with delusions of grandeur. The cover art was more than cringe-worthy, the writing was embarrassingly juvenile, and the overuse of all caps, underlining, and exclamation points was inane. How is it that we cult members didn't think about our future children looking at them and concluding their parents had been idiots for believing such nonsense?

When I ponder the stranger who is my past self, I marvel. I naturally look back through the filter of my present views, but nevertheless, I remember being embarrassed by the Mo Letters and hoping no outsiders would see the most atrocious ones, but that shame didn't wake me up. Why not?

It was a surprisingly quick slide into the depths of delusion. Upon joining, a requisite was to accept that we were "babes in Christ" and needed retraining in the ways of the Lord. Berg was our "father in the Lord," and on top of that, we were taught he was the Endtime prophet prophesied in the Bible. (Hosea 3:5, Ezekiel 34:11, 23, 24, and Ezekiel 37:24)

Once that foundation of belief was in place it was reinforced by required daily reading of Berg's Letters. By and by, our brains were prepared to accept whatever came from him as the gospel truth. We were to be "new bottles," willing to accept the "new wine that God was giving" through Berg, and not like "unrevolutionary" Christians who he disparaged as "old bottles," the title of a Mo Letter written in 1973. "Old bottle" became a byword in the cult for those who did not eagerly accept the new Mo Letters. Social norming—and harsh corrections—dictated that no one wanted to be accused of that.

In 1975, Berg took this to a higher level with the publication of the Mo Letter, "Strange Truths." In it, he recounted a dream about a fountain of water that he had discovered, symbolic of his source of “the words of life” from God. Strange creatures lived in the water, which some people liked and others looked on with suspicion. Berg concluded that the creatures must be good since they came from “the source” (God), and that people who didn't like them “because they were contrary to their ideas of what the water [the Word] ought to be like” left the fold. Shame on them! Thus the tone was set for the acceptance of Berg's Letters, no matter how strange we thought they were, because they all came from the source of Truth—Berg with his hotline to God.

As the years passed, in obedience to Berg's decrees, the number of people in our communal Homes grew, which exponentially intensified the ingrained human tendency towards group conformity and obedience. (See studies done by Solomon Asch; larger numbers greatly increase the conforming power of a group.)

Complementing the basic premise of accepting any bizarre idea that came from "the source" was our constant state of busyness, giving us no time to raise our heads and think about our situations. I worked to the point of nervous breakdowns in large School Homes, filled to the brim with children packed two to a bed in three-tier bunks. How to educate and care for them, with basically no money and always short-handed, was my ever-present concern—and we always seemed to be playing catch-up.

As if the physical work wasn't enough, like all plebeian members, I lived under the burden of responsibility for righting my sorry spiritual state. I needed to learn "submission" to God, my leaders, and to my husband—to be a good "Bible woman." I was often called in for "talks" with the leaders, excoriating corrections for my many "sins."

My mental bandwidth was taken up with marriage problems, children's needs, my own spiritual inadequacies that I needed to conquer, lack of money, and constant work. When the mind is running multiple programs, our mental processors begin to slow down. I didn't have enough time to take care of all the needs before me, let alone think about the future, or "give place to the devil" by "doubting" the Mo Letters.

We were exhorted to live in the present and "take no thought for the morrow." We had an absolute disconnect from our future selves, and an absolute lack of foresight into our children's or our own futures. Worse, the groupthink of the cult resulted in the deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgments. Thinking was out, the "joy of the Lord" was in.

In the Stanford Prison Study, I wrote that when those volunteers who had played the role of guards looked back on the six days of the study, they were alarmed at what they had been capable of doing. Perhaps even more telling is that those who had been prisoners were also dismayed at their behavior—at how quickly they had been broken into passivity.

The architect of the study, Philip Zimbardo, stated that the issue isn't how a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel; it's how a bad barrel can turn any apple bad. Situations matter. Average people can, and often will, go along with absurdly incorrect assertions and do stunningly bad things in the name of obedience and conformity. (Hello, Abu Ghraib.)

The cult was the perfect setup for mindless conformity, and that conformity included acceptance of the Mo Letters.

See also: Motivational Influences on Perception

Motivational Influences on Perception

Further research into a slightly different aspect of the confirmation bias was carried out by Emily Balcetis and David Dunning of Cornell University.* 

They did numerous experiments to test the hypothesis that people see what they are motivated to see. One such experiment was as follows: Subjects were presented with 2 beverages, one tasty, one disgusting-looking. They were told that the one they would drink depended on whatever image flashed on the computer screen before them for only a fraction of a second. This image was ambiguous, it could be interpreted as either a horse or a seal (or in another experiment, a B or a 13). The subjects were not told what the object they would see would be, but rather were told in general terms that it would be either a farm animal or a sea animal. Different groups were assigned differently, but the results were consistent in this and all their experiments.

The participants' motivations to avoid the disgusting drink and get the desired juice biased their perceptions. In cases where the farm animal meant they would have the juice, the vast majority saw a horse. If the farm animal meant they were to have the disgusting beverage, the vast majority saw a seal.  

This is quite an eye-opening finding for those of us who have been duped by cults, namely, that we saw what we were motivated to see. I surely spent many years giving way to the bias of wishful thinking, which Dunning describes as, "the motivation to think of one’s self and one’s prospects in a favorable way, to believe that one will achieve positive outcomes while being able to avoid aversive ones, and to enhance self-worth and esteem." The implications are wide, and can be thought of in terms of so-called answered prayers, and the concept of faith and the afterlife in general. "God will take care of everything!" we blithely believed.

Not only that, but we, as humans, also tend to be less questioning of messages that we feel are favorable for us. This has obvious implications regarding cult literature. Dunning goes on to say, "Other work in motivated reasoning has shown that information consistent with a favored conclusion is held to a lower standard of scrutiny than information consistent with an unwanted one." In my case, cult literature definitely received very little scrutiny before acceptance. If I had questioned, well, that would be considered the sin of "doubt." I was motivated to believe.

This tendency not only affects information we receive at the time, but it also influences our evaluation of ourselves and our futures, and helps us to make sense of our pasts, providing an internal impetus for the self-serving confabulation and rationalization of our memories.

*See What You Want to See: Motivational Influences on Visual Perception

Clinging Tightly

Closely related to loss aversion is the endowment effect, where we highly value things we possess. In loss aversion, we cling to what we have, not wanting to part with it. With the endowment effect, things we possess gain value merely by virtue of possession. This also can be applied to belief.

Daniel Kahneman repeated Richard Thaler's classic experiment with coffee cups many times, always with the same results. It is a simple demonstration of the endowment effect.

"Mugs were distributed randomly to half the participants. The Sellers had their mug in front of them, and the Buyers were invited to look at their neighbor's mug; all indicated the price at which they would trade. The Buyers had to use their own money to acquire a mug. The results were dramatic: the average selling price [determined by the one possessing the mug] was about double the average buying price [the price a buyer deemed he would be willing to pay for that mug], and the estimated number of trades was less than half of the number predicted by standard theory."

More than a coffee mug, beliefs are things that we cling to. We don't want to part with them; it is like they are a part of us and who we are. We gave up our former lives and our families for those beliefs. They cost us a lot. We value more highly things that require more effort to attain.

COG members were required to "witness," i.e. try to convince others of the value of our beliefs. Like the techniques used in multi-level marketing, the more we worked to "sell" our religion to others, the more we treasured it ourselves.

What of disconfirming evidence? 

"It is extremely rare for someone to simply abandon a valued belief when confronted with disconfirming information. In fact, recent psychological research shows that when this happens, people tend to hold the erroneous belief even more strongly." Daniel Kahneman

Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills