Compassion at Christmas
It’s the season to shop, eat, and indulge and this year, more than ever, Christmas marketing is associating indulgence with kindness. It’s been such a terrible year, the advertisers remind us, so go ahead, have an extra mince pie, open that third bottle of wine, buy another streaming service and stay rooted to your sofa. Relax! Be kind to yourself! This year there is no naughty list!
Being kind to ourselves and each other is most certainly an antidote to the pressures and demands of modern life. However, many of us confuse kindness with indulgence, which is not surprising, or our fault, given our constant exposure to images and narratives which insist that consuming, owning and accumulating is the way to become secure, loved, admired and happy. That we still believe these messages is worrying given the mounting evidence to show the counterproductive effects of consumerist values and behaviours.
Self-indulgence means doing whatever we want, whenever we want without thought or concern for the potentially harmful effects of that indulgence. Often we indulge because a part of us – usually an unconscious part - is deeply hurt and doesn’t care about or recognise the harm our behaviour may cause. In contrast, being kind to ourselves starts with the premise that we are capable, loveable, and good enough. Yet such kindness is not easy if have learned early on that we are not worthy of unconditional love and have grown up believing that we do not deserve happiness, success, love or friendship.
Deserving - an unhelpful concept - is linked to reward and punishment, and our early socialization is full of evaluative and competitive messages that remind us how we should feel, think and behave if we want to be successful and accepted in society. ‘Good’ people, we learn, are those that live up to these Should’s, and ‘good’ people are the ones who deserve happiness, wealth, and health. Yet the idea of who 'deserves' what creates highly polarised, moralistic ways of viewing each other. Pause for a moment and consider your own beliefs about who is deserving and who is not, and then consider how these beliefs might generate feelings of entitlement, shame or judgment. When we are kind, we are concerned not about what we or they ‘deserve’ but about what we or they need and what would be helpful to our mutual growth.
Kindness towards others grows out of our capacity to feel kindness towards ourselves. However, many of us fear being kind to ourselves because we have mistaken it for self-indulgence – and so we view self-kindness with all the qualities of indulgence such as weak, lazy, non-achieving, selfish, permissive, excessive, pampering, spoiling, or undisciplined. When, on the contrary, research shows that people who are kind to themselves are more motivated, healthy, realistic, generous and productive than those who are not.
At this time of year many of us are doing the things we think we should be doing. We must, we think, be kind, generous and cheerful, and, if we believe the media messages, that means extravagant buying, consuming and entertaining. However, kindness, generosity and good cheer of this sort often leaves us feeling unappreciated, resentful, exhausted and unable to truly connect with the meaning of it all. That’s because until we have learned to be kind to ourselves, it is impossible to extend genuine kindness to others.
When we do not love or like ourselves, our relationships become motivated by the fear, anxiety and shame that accompany the belief that we are not good enough. And whilst pleasing others, in order to feel better about ourselves, can work for a while, such motivation will eventually turn against us. Our unresolved inner conflicts will leak or erupt when we least want them to - perhaps around the Christmas table when our efforts of kindness seem to go unnoticed, or when our desperate need to make others happy fail.
Being kind to ourselves involves paying attention to and learning how to understand the deeper yearnings and needs within us that are often ignored, denied or dismissed. These feelings arise from the person we are, not the person we think we should be, and discovering that person - our 'original self' - is not easy because there are so many layers of 'should-be' selves we have to get through to meet it. However giving ourselves permission to be who we are, and responding to what we need, are acts of self-kindness. When we learn to do this, then what we do with and for others becomes unconditional, brings us deep and lasting pleasure, and requires little praise, adulation or reward.
When we know and feel our own worth, and can disentangle it from what we are told is worthy, we will discover vast reservoirs of kindness, generosity and cheer that last all year round, and that don't require advertisers to tell us when, why and how to express them.