Churches Should Teach Self-Compassion, Not Shame

Despite many pastoral proclamations of God’s love, church is not a place I learned to love myself. Instead, I learned to distrust myself, see myself as evil, and feel guilty/responsible for Jesus’ murder. Prayers of confession were meant to assuage this constant guilt, but they couldn’t touch my underlying Calvinist beliefs that I was bad.

At home, I witnessed this shame fuel both my mother’s religiosity and her alcoholism. It makes sense, in a supremely messed up way: if a person truly believes they are evil, then alcohol and drugs are one of the few ways to escape this pervasive shame.

As a younger person, I tried to use shame as fuel to improve myself. It worked like this: I’d berate myself for not being thinner, swear off sugar, deplete my willpower, binge eat Double Stuf Oreos, feel even more shame. Every time the cycle repeated, my shame grew stronger.

Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And in Evangelicalism, almost anything could be a sin—not just your actions, but even your thoughts. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount equates being angry with someone with murder and lustful gazing with adultery. This list of thought crimes includes the stark admonishment, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48)

For many of the Christians I knew growing up, this passage was a big source of not feeling good enough. Get angry with someone? Congrats, you’ve just NAILED Jesus to the cross!

Although I didn’t learn how to love myself in church, I was lucky to have good therapists, dear friends, and books to help me, particularly Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Dr. Kristin Neff.

In it, Neff identifies three main components of self-compassion:

* View your shortcomings with kindness. Try to treat your own pain and problems as you would a friend’s: not by ignoring or judging, but by choosing a generous interpretation.

* Recognize the universality of your experience. Say you’re ruminating over something weird you said at a party. Remind yourself that most people, the world over, have said something equally embarrassing in public. You are not alone.

* Maintain a mindful distance from your suffering. Mindfulness means being able to observe and accept our thoughts without overidentifying with them. (This might look like being able to interrupt a thought spiral with a contradictory idea.)

Not gonna lie, when I first read this book, learning self-compassion felt impossible. Mindfulness was something I’d been struggling to learn for a few years (a journey made more complicated by my C-PTSD). It’s only five years later that I can look back and recognize how much progress I’ve made and marvel that self-compassion is often my first response to negative feelings.

The funny thing is, after taking a long break from Christianity and reading the Bible, when I return to it now, I can see in it a more complicated picture than what I learned as a kid. Those scary “thought crime” verses? They come after the Beatitudes—a list of attributes that Jesus values even when other people don’t.

One of life’s paradoxes is this: every human being is worthy of love. We don’t need to do anything to earn love or justify our existence. That is true, AND it’s also true that it’s better for us, individually and collectively, to strive towards becoming more compassionate and more just, wiser and more generous. It’s acceptance + growth.

And now, when I read the Sermon on the Mount, I see this acceptance + growth paradox. The Beatitudes tell us “You are beloved and worthy, even when others discount you,” while later verses present an enlightened ideal.

I no longer believe in suppressing feelings like anger or lust, nor in feeling guilty for having them, but I can also imagine growing into a mindful state where these responses are not my go-to.

Whether or not you’re a Christian, I think self-compassion is something most of us lack. I wonder how much kinder we would be to others if we could learn to be kinder to ourselves? Is that another meaning of “love your neighbor as yourself”?

Science has proven that self-compassion is good for us. The question is, can the church learn to stop policing people’s behavior through shame, and instead, teach us how to love ourselves?

BONUS MATERIALS

* my old link-saving app is being discontinued, but I discovered this great recipe saving app

* Loved this recommendation from Emily Edlynn that parents should schedule one “vacation day” without kids

* 3 short self-compassion explainer videos

Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Heretic Hereafter at heretichereafter.substack.com/subscribe