What does it mean to be self-compassionate? It refers to being able to be emotionally connected to yourself, to give yourself support and care, to step back and hold a wider outlook, and to extend an attitude of acceptance, generosity, and patience toward yourself amid your hurts, struggles, shortcomings, and mistakes. On the other hand, self-uncompassion means reacting to your distress, challenges, imperfections, and errors by being merciless, fault-finding, and insensitive toward yourself, to set yourself apart from others, and to either run away from or fixate on what’s bothering you.
But how are self-compassion and self-uncompassion related? If you extend more compassion toward yourself, does that signify that you’re also going to reduce your self-uncompassion later? In other words, are self-compassion and self-uncompassion basically two sides of the same coin? Or, could it be that the amount of self-compassion you give yourself now doesn’t really shed light on how much uncompassion you might direct your way later? That is to say, are self-compassion and self-uncompassion two distinct ways of relating to yourself that deserve to be treated differently?
Scholars have been contending with this question and they don’t all agree. In a new study, a team of researchers studied how self-compassion and self-uncompassion shift and how they interact with each other in a person as time passes. They tracked people’s self-compassion and self-uncompassion for one week with smartphones, taking measurements roughly six times each day as people went about their lives.
The results showed that how people treated themselves at one moment tended to suggest they’d treat themselves similarly later. Basically, if a person was being compassionate to themselves at one point, they were apt to be compassionate to themselves down the line. Likewise, a person who is being self-uncompassionate at the time is also probably going to be uncompassionate later on.
However, the researchers also discovered that, in general, a person’s level of self-compassion at one moment doesn’t reflect how much self-uncompassion that same individual is going to give themselves later. The reverse was also true; as a whole, the self-uncompassion a person shows themselves at one point doesn’t indicate how much self-compassion a person will give themselves at another time. Having said all this, when we zoom in on each specific person, the study also showed that folks were different in terms of whether their self-compassion (or self-uncompassion) at a certain time indicated how much self-compassion and self-uncompassion they’d show later.
The investigators did find that people who tended to engage in more self-uncompassion overall were more likely to get stuck there rather than being just as able to move into a positive, self-reinforcing cycle of self-compassion. But again, people across the study differed.
It’s worth pointing out that only people without any psychological conditions were in the study, so it’s not clear yet how much these results apply more broadly. Also, the results couldn’t illuminate what influenced the differences across people regarding their pattern of self-compassion and self-uncompassion.
But why is what we’re talking about important? The results revealed that self-compassion and self-uncompassion don’t inevitably influence one another, suggesting that these two concepts deserve to be treated as distinct. This knowledge opens the door to adapting approaches to people’s specific patterns and needs. It also invites us all to check in with ourselves and consider both the compassion and the uncompassion we extend to ourselves as time goes by.
