Learning to Sway
How silencing the inner critic can help with developing resilience and self-compassion
It may be cliche, but I am a firm believer that things happen in life for a reason. The universe has a way of throwing obstacles in our paths to help us learn lessons that we are meant to learn. Often, we face repeated obstacles until we learn the lesson. This season, life is pushing me to learn how to empathize with myself and practice self-compassion.
When I graduated from my intensive outpatient therapy program (IOP), I learned that the biggest obstacle to healing was my inner critic. I’m sure I am not alone in having an internal voice that is skilled at identifying the many ways I can learn and grow.
The concept of an inner critic wasn’t new to me when I enrolled in IOP. When I started individual therapy in 2011, I mistakenly believed that voice was the secret to my success. I was convinced my desire for continuous improvement pushed me to learn, grow, and improve.
It was necessary for me to identify areas for improvement to ensure I had new opportunities both professionally and personally. If I was able to spot these improvement areas, then somehow I would be more valuable. I would get more assignments at work, hit more benchmarks, and make or maintain key relationships.
Therapy and professional coaching taught me the cost of this thinking pattern. Being hard on myself didn’t push me to grow and improve continuously. My growth mindset and natural ambition did that. Instead, my constant loop of negative thoughts taught me to always be on alert, become numb to my wants and feelings, and act in response to the fear of imposter syndrome.
Long term readers know that this has been an incredibly difficult year for me personally. It seems as if every two or three months there has been a new challenge for me to confront and learn. These trials have also helped a new inner voice to surface, self-compassion.
As an empath, it is easy for me to put myself into another’s shoes and imagine what they need in the moment. It’s difficult for me to do that with myself. The inner critic shows up and questions the reality of my experience and whether I should just be stronger and more resilient. It questions whether my experiences are as difficult as they feel and whether my emotions match reality.
Healing requires an incredible amount of energy. It is also quite messy. I’ve found that it pushes me to isolate and retreat into myself while I process and self-soothe. This was especially the case during the past year given the heaviness of my experiences and emotions.
My self-isolation was necessary because healing while continuing to mother and lawyer left me with limited time or energy for anything or anyone else. I had minimal capacity to pour into others or maintain superficial or non-reciprocal relationships. My attempts to do so only left me feeling even more depleted. These experiences left me in fear of laying a similar burden on someone else, so I only retreated even more.
Sitting with myself during such a difficult time stirred up particularly difficult thought patterns like questioning whether my experiences would be challenging to others. I found myself questioning whether I was just weak or was making a mountain out of a mole hill. Maybe I’m too sensitive? Other people wouldn’t be phased by this.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) helped me to challenge these thought patterns whenever I questioned my reality. I interrogated looping thoughts with a series of questions to identify whether the thought was balanced, factual, or extreme. These questions included the following:
What evidence supports this thought?
Is there evidence that contradicts the thought?
Is the thought based on habit or fact?
Am I including all available information?
Is the thought based on all or nothing thinking?
It the thought extreme or exaggerated?
Am I focused on just one piece of information?
Is the source of the supporting evidence a reliable source?
Am I confusing possible with likely?
Is the thought based on feelings or fact?
Am I focusing on unrelated parts?
Am I jumping to conclusions?
Am I exaggerating or minimizing the facts?
Am I ignoring important parts?
Am I oversimplifying the situation?
Am I overgeneralizing the facts?
Am I attempting to read someone else’s mind?
Am I engaging in emotional reasoning?
What is another way I can think of this issue?
Analyzing these questions over time while experiencing the ups and downs of life, illuminated the fact that I experienced a lot of difficult events in rapid succession. Not only was I in need of radical acceptance of the fact that I cannot stop or change the events, but I was also in need of self-compassion.
These experiences were and are hard. Maybe it wasn’t necessary for me to continuously change. It wasn’t necessary to speed up the healing process. It’s okay to sit in these negative emotions. I can acknowledge my hardships, the demand they impose on me, the pain I feel in response, and find ways to create ease while the feelings subside.
The lesson in all of this is that life will continue to drum up new events that will shake my foundation. My anxious inner voice has been telling me on loop that difficult change is a part of life and it is something I need to get used to if I’m going to find any semblance of resilience. That voice may be right. However, it is also true that this moment in time is hard.
I took a break from my Substack the past couple weeks while I licked my wounds, grieved my mentor, and enjoyed the special moments of life with my children like spring break and the Easter holiday. After getting difficult news this morning, I’m glad I did this. Self-compassion has taught me the importance of hitting the pause button and dropping the weary load that is too heavy to keep carrying. It’s not always necessary to keep grinding, keep pushing forward, or keep digging deep. Sometimes, it is okay to just float.
As I stand still and float while healing from the latest challenges that life has thrown my way, I have been returning to Kasey Musgraves to get me through. Her music is inspiring during recovery. This month, she is teaching me the importance of swaying. My favorite line of her song Sway particularly captures my takeaway lesson from recent curve balls:
Maybe one day
I'll learn how to sway
Like a palm tree in the wind
I won't break, I'll just bend
And I'll sway
The ability to sway helps to build resilience. Self-compassion teaches me to accept the reality of my emotions. They are real and based on fact and available information. Swaying requires acceptance of what is hard, identifying the emotions that the difficult experience is stirring up, and identifying actions I can take to meet my needs in response to those emotions.
This month, I swayed by recognizing that I need extra TLC like rest, time away from extraneous “to dos”, implementation of boundaries, joy through solo artist dates, pampering, deep healing breaths, gentle movement through restorative yoga, journaling, individual and group therapy, deep conversation and 1:1s with close friends, and meditation. What about you? How do you support yourself so that you can support yourself and practice self-compassion so that you can sway and not break?
What a beautiful post. Love that song too, let’s sway.