Thought I would share what is on my mind right now (that is what a blog is for, right?) and for a change, it is not stuff that is directly about myself. Like I have said before, I grow tired of navel gazing and trying to predict the future by pawing through my own entrails, and so I have decided the best therapy for now is to get the heck over myself and wander the broader pastures of thought for inspiration instead of trying to get fresh water from that muddy old well inside me.

Right now, I am ruminating on this article about the importance of self-compassion over self-esteem.

I got the link off Facebook, from of all people the Dalai Lama, and I am deeply interested in the subject because I have felt, intuitively, that there was something deeply wrong with our well-intentioned focus on self-esteem in mental health that has been ongoing for forty years or more.

It is not hard to see how it happened. You talk to people with mental health issues, you get a lot of people who do not like themselves very much. It is a very common symptom of society’s ills, and so the immediate response was to treat the symptom directly. Someone has poor self-esteem, give them praise and support. It is as simple as bandaging a wound.

But it was naively shallow, because it was attempting far before we had any deep understand of where self-esteem comes from. As often happens in medicine, treating the symptom does not cure the illness. So simply telling people how great they are does not help. This is mental illness, after all, and the kind of distorted thinking that leads a perfectly normal, competent person to think they are the scum of the Earth is not going to disappear just because you gave the person a pat on the back and reasoned with them.

This brings us to the article, which examines the growing scientific evidence that the self-esteem model is outdated and ineffectual compared to treatment based around self-compassion.

Self-compassion is a simple idea. It simply means being kind and compassionate and forgiving towards oneself. This is something I have been stressing to others for quite some time, and so it is highly gratifying to see that science has come along and proved me right on this.

For a long time, I have been asking my fellow depressives to imagine how they would treat another person who was in the exact same situations as them, with all the same problems, circumstances, weaknesses, strengths, and so on. Invariably, the answer is that they would treat that person with far more kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and support than they have ever given themselves. Somehow, the rules for them are different than the rules for everybody else. For them, the standards are impossibly harsh and brutal and impossible to achieve, thus stacking the deck against themselves and keeping them in a constant state of seemingly justified self-loathing and contempt.

Others, they can view in a more compassionate and balanced way.

In fact, you can get some very interesting and useful results by asking people to take all the horrible things they say and think about themselves, and imagine themselves saying them to someone else. Or even to imagine someone saying all those awful things TO them, and what they would think of that person for saying it. What a horrible person, right? So why is it fine to do to yourself what you would condemn in another?

This internal double-standard is a big part of the cognitive roots of depression, I think, and while merely confronting it might not yield immediate therapeutic results, I think it can begin the process of deep self-examination that yields deep and lasting benefit further down the road.

Back to self-esteem versus self-compassion. I do not quite buy the article’s trite and simplistic dismissal of self-esteem. To wit :

And of course you must be perfectly awesome in order to keep believing that you are—so you live in quiet terror of making mistakes, and feel devastated when you do. Your only defense is to refocus your attention on all the things you do well, mentally stroking your own ego until it has forgotten this horrible episode of unawesomeness and moved on to something more satisfying.

This strikes me as a uniquely American straw man argument. Sure, if you put it like that, it seems absurdly self-defeating. But nobody is putting it like that.

Regardless of that, I think the author, psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, makes some good points about self-compassion. The trick, to me, is to recognize that while positive self-esteem is the goal, approaching it as an issue of self-compassion might well prove to be a superior method.

The question remains the same, however : can this be taught? Can you move someone towards self-compassion directly, or is it, like self-esteem, something which can only come from the long and laborious route of traditional therapy, digging up past traumas and trying to resolve the emotions involved and thus relieve the patient’s mind (and soul?) of the strain of carrying them around.

Psychology is always looking for something faster than that, and who can blame them? But I am increasingly convinced that said quest is quixotic, and that the real solution is that tired old slowpoke workhorse of traditional therapy. If you can unpack the emotional baggage, then other things like self-compassion and self-esteem will recover as a result.

And if you try to skip the therapy and go straight for the self-esteem or self-compassion, you are, as I said earlier, treating the symptom and not the disease, and you will be left scratching your head as to why the person is still sick with pneumonia when you have given them the best cough suppressant around.

When you think about it, this doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for success, does it?

It sucks, but it looks like old fashioned therapy is the only way.

Well, until someone invent a catharsis pill, anyhow.