Inauthenticity is an attachment wound...an injury that says we can't be who we truly are without risking rejection or abandonment. This wound threatens to overwhelm us with feelings of fear and shame whenever we're faced with a choice of true expression. Our needs for authenticity and attachment are frequently in competition with each other, and we may very often have had to compromise one of them for the other. Attachment injuries teach us that when we FEEL bad, we ARE bad, and that we need to change who we are or hide aspects of ourselves, our true needs or feelings in order to prevent our badness from causing a rejection or abandonment. Self-Compassion, which is the internal presence of Mindfulness, Self-Kindness, and a recognition of our Common Humanity, teaches us that when we feel bad, we are simply encountering the very human experience of suffering - and that, just as when any human being is in the midst of suffering, we need our pain to be seen, cared for, and offered kindness. We can bring these qualities of Self-Compassion to the feelings of shame, fear, and self-doubt that were created by our attachment wounds. In this way, Self-Compassion offers a pathway to healing the pain of our attachment wounds, and a new way of meeting the struggles that arise as we begin navigating our lives with more authenticity. Meditation teachers Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield tell about a hospice worker who shared observations on being with dying people. The worker said that the number one regret that people have when they are dying is that they had not lived more true to themselves...more authentically. This anecdote always fills me with great pause. If we don't work through this struggle to be our authentic selves, there are big implications for the peace we find in this life. Nonetheless, this struggle is so deeply human. Dr. Gabor Maté, an expert in the field of trauma and childhood development explains that, as human beings, we have two strong, yet often competing, instinctual needs – the need to be an authentic self and the need to establish and maintain attachment bonds with our caregivers. Dr. Maté states, "When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity". It is often during our early childhood years that we learn to give up aspects of our authentic selves in order to protect our attachment relationships. Why do we choose attachment over authenticity? As human beings, we are born into this world dependent on our caregivers for survival, and from day one, our instincts know it. If we cannot maintain an attachment to our caregivers, we will quite literally die. In this way, we are hard wired to secure an attachment to our caregivers at any cost, and we adapt in a variety of ways to assure that we do so. These adaptations involve making adjustments to any expressions of our authentic needs or emotions which threaten to jeopardize our attachment bonds. For instance, if our caregiver is regularly unable to tend to us because they are highly anxious or overwhelmed, we might adapt by suppressing needs or emotions which could potentially place added stress on them, making them less accessible to us. We may make ourselves "easy", or not "too much trouble", increasing the chances that our caregiver will at least be able to stay in proximity to us. We learn to suppress the expression of needs that may put our connection to our caregiver at risk. Or we may develop particular tendencies, such as being super helpful, which our caregivers find pleasing or easy to be around. Of course, adaptations such as these occur instinctually, through the felt experience - not through our rational deduction skills. This is why insecure attachment patterns often cannot be fully healed through simply recognizing cognitively that our needs or emotions are valid. Our primary attachment relationships and the way we adapted in order to maintain them in childhood sets the stage for how we navigate relationships in adulthood. We internalize habitual attachment responses, in which particular sensations, impulses, emotions, behaviors, and thoughts/beliefs become interwoven. Our tendency as human beings is to interpret all experience through a “self-referential” lens - in other words, as we encounter experiences in life, we take away beliefs about ourselves or what the experience says about us. Once these self-referential beliefs are formed, they are easily reinforced as each new experience gets filtered through the lens of this belief. New experiences become additional evidence or proof that the pre-existing belief is true. When our caregivers regularly leave or cannot offer the care that we long for when we express our needs, we may interpret that we are bad for needing or for expressing our needs...or that we are not helpful or good enough to get what we need. We may develop a core negative belief that it is not safe to need anyone too much or that abandonments happen because we are too needy, or not good enough. These beliefs may be experienced as conscious thoughts, or they may be experienced as sensations, for instance, a constriction in the chest and belly that tells us to "back off", "stay quiet" or make ourselves more helpful and pleasing. No matter how well things go for us in our early lives, there will inevitably have been some ways in which we sensed that we needed to adjust or hide aspects of ourselves in order to protect our primary attachment relationships. Of course, the more regulated our caregivers are, the more likely we are to develop secure attachment patterns, or to internalize the sense that it is safe to express our authentic needs without risking abandonment or rejection. To the degree that we did internalize adaptive reflexes to suppress aspects of our authentic selves, we carry these self-protective patterns forward with us, into our lives, and into our relationships, particularly with those we love, depend on, or need…aka, those we most fear losing. So how does Self-Compassion help to restore the ability to be an authentic self? Dr. Janina Fisher, psychotherapist and trauma expert puts it this way, "Self-Compassion mimics the experience of secure attachment in childhood." Self Compassion begins when we turn towards our true emotions and needs with Mindfulness: Mindfulness is the practice of purposefully attending to our present moment experience non-judgmentally, with qualities of curiosity and interest. Mindfulness allows us to slow down and “press pause” on our auto-pilot or habitual inclinations. We have a tendency to over-identify with our thoughts and emotions, which makes it very difficult to bear witness to our own suffering. Mindfulness inserts a little bit of space or distance between the phenomena of our internal worlds (i.e. thoughts, emotions, sensations, moods) and the seat of awareness from which we witness it. Bringing mindfulness to our true emotions and needs, we have the opportunity to offer non-judgmental and interested attention to parts of ourselves that have been pushed away or hidden for many years. When we do this, it is like saying to those parts of ourselves, “I see you. I see you are suffering. I’m here. I’m willing to stay, listen, and be with you. You are allowed to be exactly as you are”. When the parts of ourselves that have been hurting in hiding for so long are finally seen and acknowledged in this way, they feel the deep relief that “someone is finally listening!”. Staying present to our inner truths with Self-Kindness and Common Humanity: It can be very difficult to sustain our mindful presence toward the parts of ourselves that are hurting – the parts that hold feelings of shame, guilt, fear, anger, and doubt. This is because we tend to strongly dislike or fear these parts of ourselves. Of course, these parts were never “bad". They were simply aspects of ourselves that we learned to reject or disallow in order to maintain our attachment relationships. In order to safely extend our attention to these parts of ourselves, it helps to cultivate the two other qualities of Self-Compassion – Common Humanity and Self-Kindness. These qualities soothe feelings of shame and isolation, allowing us to sincerely investigate how to meaningfully care for our difficult emotions or unmet needs. Self-kindness allows us to sincerely inquire within, “What do I need?...What do I really need?" Self-Kindness offers a nurturing tone and a non-condemning orientation towards our difficult emotions and unmet needs. With Self-Kindness, we bring an attitude that sincerely cares about the suffering that is happening, and we provide warmth, acceptance and encouragement to ourselves. One way to sense into these qualities is to ask yourself the question, "How would I be with a good friend who was feeling this way?" Take a moment here to sense into the posture, facial expressions, tone of voice, the way your heart feels, and the intentions you hold toward a good friend who is suffering. Self-Kindness happens when we orient towards ourselves in that way, in the midst of our own suffering. These accepting, non-condemning qualities may not have been consistently available to us from our caregivers. But we can give them to ourselves now. Pausing for a moment, you might consider, "What might it be like to have my vulnerable feelings held with kindness?"..."With the support of a non-judgmental, and benevolent presence, whose sole intention is to lessen suffering, what needs might I be willing to acknowledge and become curious about how to meet?" As you may have imagined, the impulse to hide one's self progressively lessens, when qualities of warmth and kindness are present. Likewise, the inclination to understand and care for what hurts authentically grows. As we learn to bring these qualities of kindness to ourselves, we develop our tolerance for unpleasant emotions and unmet needs. This allows us to stay mindfully present to them, and to truly discern what we need and how to meaningfully offer it to ourselves. As we grow to authentically know ourselves more and more, and as we witness more parts of ourselves with kindness, we can then begin to share ourselves more authentically with others. When we have an internal sense of acceptance, being ourselves in the world does not feel so risky anymore. In fact, we are likely to be less tolerant when others are unwilling to accept us as we are, and we are more likely to set firm boundaries, in that, we no longer expect ourselves to become inauthentic or uncomfortable in order to maintain a relationship. The final ingredient of Self-Compassion which supports living authentically is the quality of Common Humanity. As we turn toward and bring kindness to difficult aspects of our internal experience, we can cultivate the awareness that these are parts that exist within all human beings – in other words, we are not alone…not fundamentally flawed for having these needs or emotions. In fact, we are simply human for having them. We can know this cognitively but again, our attachment wounds exist on a felt level, and even when we may rationally recognize that “we are human”, we may not have absorbed this truth on an embodied level. In order to do so, we need to have the opportunity to witness this truth through our own direct experience. Witnessing our Common Humanity means witnessing that we are all subject to pain and suffering. In Buddhist Psychology there is a distinction made between pain and suffering. As psychologist and meditation teacher, Jack Kornfield puts it, "Pain is an unavoidable aspect of the natural world. It is physical, biological, and social, woven into our existence as night is with day, as inevitable as hard and soft, as hot and cold." It is painful to experience something that is unpleasant and it is painful to lose something that is pleasant. It is human nature to resist that which we find painful. However, it is also our resistance to pain that creates suffering. The Mindful Self-Compassion Program offers the following formula to illustrate this point: "Pain × Resistance = Suffering". Suffering unfolds out of our reactions to, or our strategies for avoiding inevitable pain...aka, our resistance...aka, our strategies for holding onto that which is pleasing and pushing away that which is displeasing. We all do it. It is human nature to suffer. This nature to secure pleasant experience and avoid unpleasant experience drove us intuitively to develop our strategies of self-protection when we were young. Patterns of inauthenticity...of accentuating certain parts of ourselves (i.e. "I'm such a good helper") while hiding other parts of ourselves (i.e. "I'm too needy"), developed in order to hold onto, or avoid the pain of losing the care of our attachment figures (care that may have had inevitable limits given our caregiver's particular capacities). Though we become identified with our self-protective strategies, often seeing them as being "who we are", we can step back with mindfulness and begin to recognize that they arose, and continue to arise, out of our suffering...as a function of our human nature, in an effort to protect us. We may also begin to witness how the self-protective patterns in others arise out of their own suffering too. The more we recognize and witness our common humanity, the more easily we can access feelings of sincere compassion for ourselves. The more compassion we have for ourselves, the more inclined we are to do whatever we can to lessen our own suffering. It is out of this deep inclination or commitment to move in the direction of less suffering, that meaningful action and change can often unfold. When it comes to the suffering of inauthenticity, meaningful action or change may take the form of saying what we really feel in our relationships, setting boundaries, speaking up when we see injustice, taking up space, asking for what we need, or voicing our opinions...even when doing so may be displeasing to others. This doesn't mean that we stop caring about how others feel or what they need. It simply means that we allow what we feel and need to be held within our own care too. When we can authentically express what we feel and need within our relationships, we experience a deeper sense of connection and trust within them. When we know that we are sharing ourselves fully with another person, we know that we are being loved and accepted for who we authentically are, not for being who someone else wanted or needed us to be. If we find that others are unable to meet our authentic feelings or needs with the care that we long for, we may need to turn towards the truth of what they can and cannot offer us. There may likely be some inevitable pain or grief that arises when we do this. Rather than adding to our suffering by resisting the truth of how things are, we can simply hold this grief with Self-Compassion. It may sound counterintuitive, but when we are willing to accept painful realities, such as that a person who we love cannot care for us in the way we long for...when we are willing to feel painful emotions, such as grief...we suffer less. When we allow reality to be how it is, we are free to be exactly as we are.

Steadying ourselves in the midst of discomfort, we can turn toward and work through our toughest internal challenges. Self-doubt is among the most difficult internal struggles, because it calls into question our very right to be doing the work that we are doing. This blog recounts the story of the Buddha's enlightenment, in which he encountered these challenges in the form of "Mara", and explores how we can recognize when internal challenges are present, ground in their midst, and release self-doubt.

Cultivating Common Humanity, one of the main components of Self-Compassion, helps us to access and express the true self.

Mindfulness and Compassion are often referred to as Two Wings of a bird. As the wing of Compassion balances with the wing of Mindfulness, we begin to stabilize our hearts and minds. We can steady ourselves on these two wings as we move through the turbulence of our lives and the world.