Smuggling self-compassion by your inner self-critic
Back in graduate school, a professor warned us that one of the reasons therapists need to be constrained by ethical guidelines and laws is because we are trained at manipulating people. I think his words were “you are master manipulators.” That sounds cringy, right? The truth is that each therapist and client are a team, working together to manipulate the client’s brain into feeling less miserable. Now that sounds a little less scary.
Smuggling is one example of a pro-social manipulation we do to help get important concepts past client defenses. For example, as someone with ADHD, I struggle with finishing one task at a time. Every day, I have to challenge myself to stay in the bathroom to brush my teeth even though I have the impulse to wander around the house, brushing my teeth, while also doing other chores. I have to smuggle the value of doing one thing at a time with full concentration, past the part of me that wants to do multiple things because it’s “efficient,” by telling myself that I’ll be better at concentrating at other things if I can just stand in one place and brush my teeth each day. In this case, I used the “effectiveness” argument to smuggle the idea of staying in one place, past my efficiency/attentional guarding mechanism.
A VERY common reason to employ smuggling in therapy is to get self-compassion past folks’ self-critics. A lot of people have the story, “If I let myself get away with X, I’ll never do Y.” Or “If I’m kind to myself when I mess up, I’ll just keep messing up. I need to put the hammer down on myself!” Everyone’s struggle is slightly different but I know for me, I always thought that talking to myself harshly would somehow motivate me to perform better and get more done. What it really did was start a shame spiral that never made me any better at what I was trying to do.
Shame and overly harsh self-criticism doesn’t lead to learning and improvement. It instead, leads to demoralization, anxiety, low self-worth, and worse performance. But how can you possibly start practicing self-compassion and gentler ways of talking to yourself, if you’re highly self-critical and have a guard that believes only harsh talk will lead to improvement? If you have a lifetime of practice being mean to yourself, how do you start to be nice? The answer is, very slowly and perhaps by practicing your kindness muscles toward others, before you try them on yourself.
Here is a little audio meditation based on the work of Jason Luoma, Jenna LeJeune, and Kristin Neff, targeted at smuggling some self-compassion past harsh self-critics. I hope it’s helpful!