A Meditation on Not Being a Dick to Yourself

It’s possible to hold yourself accountable with compassion

Photo: Kohei Hara/Getty Images

A few days ago, I was sitting at the piano. It had been a while. I used to play pretty regularly, but these days I’m not what you’d call a musician. I’ll jam with my husband every once in a while, noodling with things by ear and messing around with chord progressions, but it had been years since I seriously sat down in front of a piece of sheet music to see if I could still sight-read.

Side note: Don’t get the impression I’m some kind of Renaissance woman here, it’s not like I nobly pursue the arts in my spare time because I’m virtuous and well-rounded. I only ended up at the piano because we’re quarantined in a pandemic and my husband and I had run through all 24 seasons of America’s Next Top Model, and now I was bored.

So I pulled out a Bach prelude, prepared to go as slowly as I needed to go, very maturely laying the groundwork for a nonstressful experience by reminding myself to breathe and be patient with myself. I was the very picture of emotional evolution! Pema Chodron herself would’ve been proud, and I made a mental note to tell my husband what a good job I’d done of practicing the shit I preach.

Seven minutes later I was literally sweating. I’d been stuck on the same four fucking measures, repeatedly making the same fucking mistakes, because I was a moron and I couldn’t figure out what the fingering was supposed to be. I kept getting stuck counting ledger lines because I’d been a lazy piece of shit who was wasting her bullshit brain on reality TV, and I couldn’t stop thinking that the last time I heard this fucking prelude was when some nine-year-old asshole played it at a recital. Flawlessly.

Don’t look at me, Pema. I’m hideous.

The tendency to resort to self-abuse when we miss the mark is an instinct. It’s not exactly an instinct that has intelligence to it (by which I mean, we rarely stop to investigate whether it’s useful) but it’s definitely an emotional reflex.

Shame is always promoting the idea that we didn’t just make a mistake, we are a mistake.

For some, that instinct toward self-abuse is an organic attempt at self-motivation which may once have been healthy, but became warped and weaponized over time. For others it’s a direct result of trauma; if we were parented with abuse, abuse will be the tool we reach for when we’re failing, and find ourselves in “survival mode.” My dad (who wasn’t a musician but liked to think of himself as one) had some pretty unrealistic expectations about what my practice technique should look like, and draconian methods of enforcing them. I say this not to blame him for my piano meltdown — I’m a grown-up, I’m capable of finding healthier, more creative methods of holding myself accountable than those my dad resorted to, but on a neurological level this stuff gets embedded in us.

Self-abuse is born of shame, and shame is always promoting the idea that we didn’t just make a mistake, we are a mistake. It’s all about what we should be instead. We should be better by now. We should be in a relationship. We should have tackled our whole to-do list. We should want to make sacrifices for our children. I should be more compassionate with myself given that I coach these issues. These are valid things to want for ourselves, generally speaking, but the shame that’s driving them undermines our ability to actually grow.

Yet, we’re often terrified to surrender the self-abuse. One of the most common fears I hear from my clients is some version of “but if I’m not beating up on myself, I’ll never get any better!” My dear, if self-abuse were an effective strategy for transformation, don’t you think it would’ve worked by now? It’s about time we acknowledge the data; shame-based self-abuse isn’t an effective technique for evolution after all.

So what is?

I hate to say it, but compassion is the most reliable catalyst for healing and lasting behavioral change. I know, I know, it’s a therapy buzzword, and in our rigid, neurotic culture of overachieving black-and-white thinkers it’s even kind of a dirty word. I get it, I grappled with it myself; I too was convinced that the whole self-love/self-compassion thing would make me soft. I envisioned myself being slowly conditioned to mindlessly forgive my own self-destructive patterns, bid my critical thinking adieu, start wearing mood rings, join a commune, take up chanting, and ultimately melt into an underachieving puddle of Pollyanna self-acceptance.

We Westerners seem to have grossly misinterpreted compassion as laziness, or simply letting ourselves off the hook. I frequently hear from clients “If I’m compassionate with myself, I’ll just accept my flaws and never improve, then I’ll really hate myself.” Well, if that’s how you understand compassion I can see why it’s so damn dangerous!

Compassion just asks us to change our relationship to accountability, so that it isn’t one rooted in abuse.

For those of us indoctrinated to believe that being tender with ourselves is a form of indulgent enabling, compassion really is a courageous act! Our brains are telling us compassion risks the slippery slope toward entropy and chaos. It’s crucial that we identify how much fear we have about being kind to ourselves, and stay curious that perhaps compassion isn’t as one-dimensional as we’ve understood it to be. In truth, it’s far more nuanced — compassion includes accountability, it doesn’t absolve us of it.

Sitting at the piano, telling myself “That’s okay honey, you did two and a half minutes of work, that’s enough hardship for today” would not have been a compassionate response, because it ultimately would have created more suffering for me by enabling my laziness. Compassion just asks us to change our relationship to accountability, so that it isn’t one rooted in abuse. It invites us to re-parent ourselves with tenderness. “Take a breath, girl. Slow down the tempo. No, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it means it’s been a while since you used this skill. Give yourself a chance to relearn it.” Compassion needn’t even be overly saccharine, it’s just the truth filtered through kindness, rather than through our shame and our judgment.

We’ve spent years trying to discipline ourselves into being better using the wrong tools. Rather than disciplining ourselves with self-abuse, what would it look like if compassion itself was the discipline?

I haven’t been back to the piano since my mini meltdown. I was hoping that writing this piece would be enough of an amends to myself, but it’s only making me realize that for the sake of my own spiritual and professional integrity, I’m going to have to break that prelude out again. I’ll let you know how it goes. Maybe I need a refresher lesson. If anyone knows a patient nine-year-old who can sight-read, send her my way.