Hopefully other people will be kind to you when you have cancer, but being kinder to yourself is also important. But what does this mean and how do you go about it?

The movement to encourage self-compassion has grown considerably since I began to access it as a way of managing my own self-care. I explain in The Feeling of Cancer that the concept of self-compassion was introduced to me quite early on in my treatment, at a point where I was really suffering emotionally. 

The practice of self-compassion is a process which encourages you to have a healthier relationship with the way you see yourself and your painful feelings. Self-judgment is replaced with self-understanding and then feelings of compassion. This can help you know what you need and so treat yourself better and ask for the help you need. Overall, being connected to yourself in this way makes you more emotionally resilient as you learn about your deeper needs during difficult times.

Self-compassion is about not being hard on yourself and not an exercise in being self-indulgent as some people think. You might, like me, not even realise how hard you are on yourself at as matter of habit, as it is ingrained in your feeling and thinking.

Having been brought up to be independent, self-reliant and used to solving my own problems, finding myself in such a helpless and vulnerable position as I did when I was struggling with my cancer diagnosis and treatment, made me feel like I was failing. In fact I felt like a failure. It may have made no real sense, but that was how I felt inside and it’s understandable when you consider my usual ways of seeing myself and operating in the world. This is why I have tried to understand my own processes of self-criticism and be more compassionate towards myself. It’s not always easy but I’ve found it to be worthwhile.A recognized expert in this area, Dr Kristin Neff, who has researched self-compassion extensively, has excellent free online resources here.  

These are short, simple exercises you can do and also some other ideas to help you, such as keeping a journal.

In an excellent TED Talk, Neff explains the importance of self-compassion for self-esteem.

If you want to develop a practice of self-compassion for yourself and look further into the thinking behind this, I highly recommend Neff’s book The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook: a proven way to accept yourself, build inner strength and thrive, written with Christopher Germer (2018 Guilford Press). The book takes you through a process which would be difficult to do on your own and I found that working through it helped me to identify some of my feeling and thinking patterns and see them in a different light.  For example, rather than feeling self-pity, which could make me feel wretched at times, I was able to think “well of course I’m feeling sorry for myself – this is awful” which is a very different way of thinking. Seeing yourself more clearly might be confronting but it can loosen up unhelpful attitudes to your own well-being that may have been well hidden until the crisis of cancer came along.