Are you friends with you?
Think about the people in your life you consider as friends. They’re the ones you do life with, connect with, and grow with. At some point you found common ground with them, and that became the connective tissue that pulled you together.
If you haven’t talked to them for a while, there’s something inside that makes you want to reach out. When you’ve been together, you usually walk away feeling stronger than before.
Sure, you have disagreements and times of frustration. But you value them enough to work through those things. When they’re discouraged and facing unusual challenges, you don’t berate them or come down on them. You encourage them in any way you can because you care about them. They’re feeling bad, so you tip the scale toward truth so they see themselves more accurately—and feel better in the process.
And they do the same with you.
There are exceptions, but true friends help each other through the tough times. When one says, “I’m so stupid for doing that,” or “I can’t do anything right,” the other person doesn’t respond with, “Yep. You’re right. You’re stupid and incompetent. In fact, you’re also ugly and nobody likes you.”
A true friend challenges those negative thoughts, describes how their thinking is inaccurate, and points out the positive things that are true that the other person is ignoring.
They challenge the lies with truth.
Then why we can’t do that with ourselves?
Think of the things we often say to ourselves:
Everybody is more confident than I am.
I can’t think fast enough in a conversation. I’m too quiet, so I’ll never be successful.
I can’t overcome my habits. It’s too late for me to change.
I can’t overcome the baggage from my past. Nobody cares what I think.
If you heard one of your good friends say any of these things, you’d acknowledge what they’re feeling but then focus on what’s true. You wouldn’t try to talk them out of their feelings but would empathize and guide them toward a gentler reality. Right?
What happens when we say those negative things to ourselves? If there’s nobody around to give us perspective, we believe those thoughts. It never occurs to us that they might not be true, so we don’t challenge them—and those thoughts become our reality.
We’re compassionate to others; why is it so hard to be compassionate to ourselves?
Psychologist Marina Krakovsky describes the most basic level of self-compassion to mean “treating yourself with the same kindness and understanding that you would a friend.” She says that “people who struggle with self-compassion don’t necessarily lack compassion toward others; they just hold themselves to higher standards than they would expect of anyone else.”
Why do we tend to believe all our negative thoughts about ourselves, but we can immediately see the problem with someone else who’s doing the same thing?
Someone said, “Never go scuba diving alone.” When you’re deep in the ocean, that makes perfect sense. If something goes wrong, there’s another person to help.
Likewise, when we go diving alone into the thoughts that swirl around in our heads, it’s easy to end up in a toxic mess with no one to give perspective. Maybe it’s time to stop accepting every thought we have about ourselves as true.
Maybe it’s time to challenge those thoughts.
Maybe it’s time to become our own friend again.