Our brains are incredibly complex. They have evolved over millions and millions of years. It is typically understood as having two main parts: the old brain and the new brain. How does that make sense?
We have an old brain that evolved over a millions years ago and is very similar to that of other animals’ brains. It is the primitive part of our brain that is responsible for our basic survival needs. Like an alarm bell, it overrides all other parts of our brain to direct our attention to threat. These threats can be threats to our own physical safety, other people’s safety, as well as threats to our social identity, such as feeling judged. It activates our nervous system responses of fight, flight or freeze when we are scared.
The new brain has evolved high level cognitive abilities such as imagination, reasoning, consciousness, planning, all in all, our thinking. These are amazing skills, allowing us to progress and evolve as a species. However, it can have a negative impact, it can lead us to ruminate (to think about thoughts over and over again) and it can have a negative inter-play with our old brain.
A common metaphor we use in Compassion Focused Therapy is the story of the zebra and the lion:
A zebra is by a river, all alone. It see’s a lion. The lion is hungry, and sees the zebra as food. This is a very real threat for the zebra, its survival strategies are automatically activated, it will immediately go into its fight, flight or freeze response (for example, prepare to fight the lion, run away from the lion, or to hold itself very still to look as if it is dead). As the lion begins its stalk, the zebra goes into flight and gets away. Hooray! It is safe. Now, once the zebra has reached safety, it will usually take five minutes to fully calm down and proceed like nothing happened. Out of sight is out of mind.
Now imagine if the zebra had a human brain. Imagine if we were chased by a lion, how long would it take us to relax again? Our new evolved brains would go into overdrive! It would be questioning whether the lion would return, whether it will return in the day or night, whether it will return with more lions, whether we were to blame, what if the lion had caught us? Ultimately, we would be stuck in survival mode, worrying and thinking. None of those thoughts are facts, but our old brain will respond to them as if they were real. Our old brain emotional responses of threat, can trigger a whole cascade of new brain thinking, which can then trigger old brain emotional responses. It can go round and round.
Perhaps you are thinking, how great it would be to be a zebra? I hope that you can see that it is not your fault that you have default automatic responses. You do not choose to react by either fight, flight, freeze, fawn or flop (if you want to read more about these, check out my other blog on anxiety). However, just because it is not our fault that we have these default reactions doesn't mean that we are helpless to do something about it. We can take responsibility, without criticism or blame, to facilitate growth away from criticism and towards compassion.
How compassion can help regulate our nervous system and our emotions.
It is understandable if you feel weary of compassion. Sometimes people think that they don't deserve it, that it is weak, or even feel fearful of it. However, we know that shame, which includes self-criticism, encourages and fosters deep beliefs about ourselves as being defective. It is strongly associated with trauma and mental health difficulties. It fosters self-protection and safety strategies, it can prompt a person to withdraw or hide rather than to constructively engage with others. If shame is associated with feelings of humiliation, it can even prompt destructive or defensive behaviours. Perhaps you can see then, that shame is not helpful and can be quite harmful for one's self-esteem and relationships. A lack of self-compassion can stop us from learning, growing and regulating our emotions. It can be detrimental to our relationships.
Compassion can help us to increase our understanding, connection and self-soothing, it can reduce self-criticism and shame. Ultimately, it can help to reduce your overall distress. The qualities of compassion include:
Being motivated to develop compassion.
To make an effort to train our minds to be sensitive to our thoughts, feelings and needs.
Become sympathetic to ours and others suffering.
Begin to tolerate our variety of feelings.
Develop empathy and understanding of our thoughts, feelings and needs.
Non-judgemental of our self and of others.
We can develop these qualities step by step by engaging with compassionate mind training. I will share my top compassionate mind exercises over the course of my blog posts. However, if you have made it here and are wanting to start your journey to developing self-compassion, please take a look at these FREE resources : Self-Compassion Self-Help Resources - Information Sheets & Workbooks (health.wa.gov.au)