Bridget Donegan, Oregon Attorney Assistance Program
There is a specific sense of relief that comes when a friend, after hearing us confide an uncomfortable truth about our inner lives, responds with ease: “Well, of course!” “Of course you’re having a hard time sleeping with all that pressure on you!” “Of course you’ve lost your confidence after what they said to you!” “Of course you’re overwhelmed!” When our distress is met with total, untroubled acceptance, a layer of our own trouble melts away. Our friend’s connection and compassion interrupt our inner turmoil and get us back on track, grounded in reality. Yes, the uncomfortable truth is still true and still uncomfortable. But a compassionate, connected perspective gives us a toehold from which we can choose our next step. We can move forward responsibly.
Compassion is a wonderful way we support each other. Directed inward, it is a powerful way we can support ourselves. In a flood of studies over the last twenty years, researchers are confirming what ancient wisdom traditions have long taught: self-compassion does not weaken our resolve or dim our ambitions. Instead, practicing self-compassion helps build resilience, reduce our distress, and increase our motivation. Amid the many demands of our professional lives, self-compassion is a way to relieve some of the internal pressures we may not even realize we add on top of all the stressors we cannot control.
Of course you are stressed!
Some stress is unavoidable, and the varied stressors of law practice are often outside of our control and can sometimes continue day after day without much relief. Depending on the lawyer, work stressors can include short deadlines, unpredictable client needs, high-stakes projects, billable hours pressure, uncertain outcomes, financial or job insecurity, competition for work or clients, office bullying or conflict, and more. We all experience potential stressors differently—you may enjoy being energized by a tight deadline, while your colleagues will find it distressing, and on another day your roles may switch. Given our high expectations for ourselves, the prevalence of potential stressors, and the fact we can always identify someone in a similar role who seems to be thriving, when we experience distress, we tend to believe that we are the problem. In other words, we think we ought to feel fine. We may think, “This is what lawyering is, so I need to be able to handle it without letting it get to me.”
I want to highlight two of the problems with that very common line of thinking. First, once we are feeling the irritability, exhaustion, overwhelm, tension, lack of motivation, etc., the stress response is already happening. We can wish that it was not, but it is irrational to believe we “should” feel differently than we do. We can aspire not to think about work when it is time to sleep, for example, but that is altogether different from thinking it is wrong that the thoughts keep coming.
Second, and relatedly, our intolerance of our stress response is self-defeating. Telling ourselves that we should not feel the way we do only puts more pressure on us: it is stressful to keep thinking that the way we are is wrong.
The upside here, though, is that our stress about our stress is something we can control. The amount of external pressure lawyers are under is real, even if someone else feels it differently than you. Your experience of that pressure is legitimate; it is the way your body knows how to muster ongoing attention and energy for things in your life that matter. Remembering that is a way to interrupt the cycle of feeling unhappy about the way things make us feel. We can offer ourselves a moment of kind acceptance that our stress response (that is, our frustration, tension, worrying, etc.) is an indication not of our weakness, but of our liveliness amid the dynamic pressures of our lives.
The elements of self-compassion
Self-compassion can feel threatening, especially for high performing individuals, because it calls on us, in the words of researcher Dr. Kristin Neff, to “stop judging and evaluating ourselves altogether.” That does not mean lowering our standards. It means accepting ourselves as we are. And studies consistently show that self-compassion improves our resilience through a variety of life challenges.
In her research, Dr. Neff has identified three elements of self-compassion: mindfulness, a balanced awareness of our difficulties, rather than over-identifying with problems; self-kindness, rather than criticism or judgment; and common humanity, understanding our predicament as part of being human, rather than feeling isolated or alienated by our pain. Any time we notice some distress, practicing a bit of compassion toward ourselves can be a helpful relief and reality check.
Mindful attention to your predicament
Compassion is, by definition, responsive. It is a discerning, motivated way of interacting with another upon noticing their suffering. Self-compassion similarly is responsive, but to our own suffering—we must be willing to turn toward our suffering, and not be absorbed into it, to practice self-compassion. Mindfully acknowledging our own suffering means holding a kind of balanced awareness without avoiding or exaggerating our present-moment discomfort. With practice, compassion allows us to see that we can choose the meaning we make of our experience, rather than being carried along or defined by the emotional force of the situation.
As we trend away from balanced awareness, we trend more toward being swept up in our distressful thoughts and feelings. Instead of saying, “I dread going to work,” we say, “I’m an anxious person” or “I can’t hack this.” When a client meeting goes terribly, we start to think, “I’m terrible.” Rather than experiencing our distress from a broader contextual perspective, our discomfort takes on outsized authority, and we begin to believe it indicates a truth about who we are. Sometimes our habit of letting our failings define us prevents us from looking truthfully at our shortcomings; the internal consequences are hard to bear. A more mindful approach notices how terrible we feel, and maybe also notices that we think “I’m terrible,” while also keeping some awareness that those feelings and thoughts will change in time.
Balanced awareness, according to Dr. Neff, “is the pillar on which self-compassion rests,” because it provides the perspective needed to bring caring responsiveness to ourselves when things are not going well. When you notice some stress without grabbing on to it or shoving it down—just seeing it, even for a moment—you are practicing this core component of self-compassion.
Kindness: Being emotionally available when life becomes difficult
Treating ourselves kindly is probably what most immediately comes to mind when we think of self-compassion. If self-criticism and shaming are at one end of a continuum, kindness is on the other. Self-kindness can sound like a simple acknowledgement with a kind tone: “This is hard right now.” “I want this so badly.” “I do not know what to do.” “This hurts.” And also, “What do I need?” “What is there I can do for myself right now?”
The kindness of self-compassion is not self-indulgence; it does not mean “anything goes.” It means moving away from self-condemnation. A lot of us have been conditioned to feel a certain amount of self-protection in being harsh with ourselves, like there is some morality there, or we are proving to ourselves that we know how one ought to behave. Experimenting with kindness toward ourselves reveals, however, that accepting the simple reality of our immediate condition is different from encouraging it in the future. Like the power in naming something, when we kindly acknowledge our distress with a willingness to help, we gain some leverage for dealing with it.
Understanding your common humanity
Finally, when we practice self-compassion, we shift away from our tendency to see our pains and hassles as unique flaws that set us apart from others. That isolating tendency might sound something like, “Everyone else is handling this fine.” “Nobody else is struggling like I am.” “I am too broken to belong here.” “I should be fine.” That feeling of being abnormal leads to feeling disconnected and lonely, exacerbating our suffering. When we practice self-compassion, we remember that life’s challenges, big and small, are inherent to being human, as are our physiological, emotional, and cognitive stress responses.
My experience is that most of us intellectually grasp that nobody is perfect. Everybody fails. But that abstract understanding often feels irrelevant when we are in our own struggles, which are decidedly not “everybody’s”; my struggles are mine and nobody else’s. When I fail, it feels highly specific and textured; it hurts in a particular way, seems to hold a truth personal to me, and is not a tidy, static thing. How could something that specific to me be universal?
The way I understand this component of self-compassion is on two levels. Although there is truth to the deep specificity of our individual experiences, the more we share with and listen to other people, the more we can directly experience our essential similarities; we do relate to each other’s pain. For many of us, that is a lesson we learn over and over again, every time we dare to confide in a trusted, caring person. We are simply more similar, and more deeply so, than we tend to remember.
At the same time, the specific details, histories, and contours of our personal experiences are unique. We cannot know another person’s inner life. But that precisely is the universality of our predicament. That experience of being not perfectly the same is shared by us all. The specificities of my struggle, those edges of my experience that do not quite line up with yours, do not mean that I am alone; those are the essence of our common humanity.
Choosing a path forward
I spent many months as a practicing lawyer living with a hum of vigilance. It felt absolutely essential to maintain a constant background level of tension so I did not miss something important, or so I could catch and fix anything that was missed. To do otherwise felt dangerous.
In my experience in law practice and at the OAAP, such periods of vigilance are not uncommon for lawyers. A small experiment in self-compassion might be worth a try for those of us feeling that anxious hum now. We can notice the hum and the tension. And then notice whatever comes next. Perhaps consider what help you might offer yourself, including talking to someone else or asking for help.
One of the greatest benefits of practicing self-compassion is more ready access to mental freedom and flexibility. Constricted thought and rigidness, on the other hand, are some of the risks of holding tight to our vigilance. When we stop straining against our own experiences, we tend to find that the pressure releases. Dropping that struggle, seeing our natural responses as the ongoing unfolding of life that they are, opens up a significant amount of space for choice. How do you want to approach your day? ♦
