social nature. But then may come the emotional memories associated with what has happened in
earlier “close relationships” that gave birth to the fears of closeness and connectedness. This can
create an almost irresolvable conflict of both starting to yearn for compassion but also becoming
deeply fearful of feelings and memories associated with this yearning. For some people this
powerful conflict between threat and affiliation can lead them to turn away and even disassociate
from or close down the whole compassion journey because compassion is somehow seen as very
unhelpful, or even dangerous!
Even feelings of safeness can be tricky. A patient told me how she had memories of playing with
friends in the garden one day – a lovely blue-sky day, just having fun. Then out of the blue her
mother, who was sadly an alcoholic, came rushing into the garden screaming and hitting her
because she’d been trying to sleep and the noise of the children had woken her up. My patient
looked at me with sadness and said, “you must never allow yourself to let go, to have fun, to feel
safe because that’s when you never are!” We call these conditioned emotional memories, where
one emotion starts to trigger another emotional memory because of how they’ve been paired
together in the person’s life. Indeed, for this lady, beginning to feel safe, connected and with
kindness caused almost panic-like feelings.
Another patient wasn’t “frightened” of her parents but told the story of her agoraphobic mother and
how at various times she would look forward to going out, maybe to theseaside. One time she
recalled wanting to go and see Santa. But commonly the children would get excited and get their
coats on, but then mother would have a panic attack, and they were not able to go. Sometimes
father would be angry and mother would become tearful. So this patient’s experience was “I
learned never to hope for too much really; I knew you couldn’t rely on other people to follow
through on things or help you, and in any case you’d be a burden to them if you wanted too much”.
For this lady, beginning to have compassion actually started to generate feelings of unrecognized
anger towards her mother, which she also felt very guilty about and tried to suppress. “How can
you feel angry with somebody who is so frightened and only trying to do her best? How can you
feel angry with somebody who you know loves you and you want to love?” But, of course, when we
stand back we can see the sadness and frustration in the young child because she wasn’t able to
do the things that other children could and often had her excitement dashed. It’s quite normal to
feel angry in those contexts. But it can be difficult to recognize anger as a normal process if you
see it as evidence of being bad in some way. It doesn’t make one a bad person to feel angry for
that type of life – these are just normal reactions that we can then choose what to do with. So
compassion for these types of emotions and dilemmas becomes very important. Emotions are not
simple and are often in conflict (we can be angry at getting anxious and anxious at getting angry).
Our emotions can seem at odds with our desires, for example feeling angry with people you love,
or falling in love with people you know are destructive to you.
So we can see, then, that compassion can lead to us beginning to experience affiliative emotions
but that can lead to grief, and feelings of closeness can stimulate fears of closeness; looking at the
rupture in early relationships can reveal anger that we might feel guilty about. So the paradox is
that compassion does not necessarily lead to affiliative emotions in the first instance – the reason
being that it engages with our memories of being cared for and painful experiences associated
with those memories. So compassion takes us down into the mud of suffering and reveals things
that perhaps we were not aware of. If we “hold” here with the compassionate focus we can heal.
Different Types of Self-Criticism and Self-Hatred
Self-criticism, when associated with negative emotions towards the self, such as frustration, anger,
contempt and even hatred, is one of the most toxic processes to developing self-compassion
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