Ditching Dread

How self-compassion helps us overcome negative thoughts and create space for ourselves.

I'll have moments of self-reflection that have me screaming into my pillow and vowing to wear a bag over my head for the rest of my life. I know to unlock a better version of myself, I need to be face to face with my demons. But I want nothing more than shove them in and slam the door closed. However, I can’t keep peeking through the cracks, hoping they’ve gone away, I have to let them out. How do I do that without getting consumed by their shadows?

I've been struggling with overcoming negative thoughts for a while. While self-reflection helps me identify my pain points, I can’t quite move past the feelings that are holding me back. I was tired of feeling like a broken record, playing the same thoughts over and over in my head. So after sagging with frustration I took my sorrows vent to DeepSeekAI and was actually introduced to be a plausible solution!

I got an intro to self-compassion and how it could remove the shackles of negative thoughts and allow me to work on myself. Compassion is the idea of recognizing other people's pain with a desire to alleviate it. It's easy enough for us to offer words of encouragement to others, but are we able to do that with ourselves? Self-compassion allows us to become our own best friend.

When we're all up in our heads, ruminating on our every flaw, we start to feel isolated in our suffering. Everyone else is doing better than me. Why am I the only one that messes up. But the reality is, everyone is just as flawed and struggle just as we do. When we recognize that our experiences are part of the larger human experience and that life is imperfect, we find a sense of common humanity. Common humanity removes the me vs them mentality and replaces it with us. We are all struggling in our own ways and trying to find our path. Others that have come before me have also struggled with and overcome what I'm going through.

I remember how validated I felt the first time I learned about the lives of prophets in detail. It was like a light bulb went off. I stopped perceiving them as fictional stories and started recognizing them as people with struggles like my own. I found comfort in knowing how their story ends and found tools to cope with the hardships that Allah had guided them with.

As much as feeling seen and heard is part of self-compassion, it goes hand in hand with kindness. I have to be understanding and caring with myself, not self-rebuking. Just as I wouldn't judge a friend during their time of vulnerability, self-kindness comes from a desire to alleviate suffering. This gives me a safe space for making mistakes and allowing myself to get back up.

The story of Adam and Eve highlights how the nature of humans is to fall into sin, and the best of us are simply those who repent. (Quran, 2:35-37). A hadith of the Prophet (pbuh) says "if you were not to commit sin, Allah would sweep you out of existence and He would replace (you by) those people who would commit sin and seek forgiveness from Allah, and He would have pardoned them." (Sahih Muslim, 2749). This hadith reflects that Allah doesn’t want perfection from me. He's allowing me to make mistakes and guiding me to recover from them through His forgiveness.

Ultimately, I cannot hold space for myself without mindfulness. Mindfulness requires us to be present with our negative thoughts without letting them overwhelm us. This helps to disarm the crippling effect negative self-thoughts have that are fueled by avoidance. Mindfulness mediation is a practice that can help us reflect on our suffering and reassure ourselves that our negative thoughts and feeling are not as potent as they appear. Muraqaba is the Islamic practice of self-awareness that emphasizes reflecting on Allah's role in our lives. It reassures us that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and by remembering our purpose, we're able to find meaning in our suffering.

Common humanity, kindness, and mindfulness are components of self-compassion that enable us to validate our feelings and push past their discomfort to continue to pursue meaningful goals. Self-compassion is associated with increased motivation. It makes us less afraid of failure making us more likely to try again and again. It reduces performance anxiety and self-indulgent behaviours. It increases self-accountability and allows us to build healthier relationships with other people.

I mentioned mediation as a tool for enhancing self-awareness. But writing is also a valuable tool to reflect on our negative thoughts, change critical self-talks, and build self-compassion. This can involve honest, raw journaling of our negative experiences coupled with reassurance using self-compassion. This journaling activity is similar to a thought record worksheet (I did these in therapy) that help us create balanced thoughts. I've also been writing affirmations on and off for the past year and found balanced affirmations such as "I'm still learning, so it’s ok to make mistakes" to be more useful than positive affirmations (ex. everything works in my favour). The central theme of self-compassion is to acknowledge our suffering, not simply overwrite it with positive visualizations.

This exploration has restrengthened my resolve to use affirmations with a greater emphasis on balanced affirmations. I hope this gave you some food for thought and tools to cope with negative thoughts and experiences as they come up.

I'd love to know, do you keep a journal and what's your favourite way to use it? As much as I wanted to be an artsy bullet journal girly, I found that simply writing was the easiest way for me to keep up with it.