Learning to Be Kind to Myself: What Self-Compassion Really Means

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about self-compassion. It’s something I thought I understood - until I realized how often I tried to fight my own feelings instead of actually feeling them. 

For a long time, I believed that the answer to negative thoughts was to replace them with positive ones. That if I could just “think happy,” I’d somehow erase the sadness, the anger, the doubt. But I’ve learned that’s not how healing works. You can’t force light into a room by pretending the dark doesn’t exist.

The truth is, emotions aren’t meant to be canceled out. They're meant to be understood. When we try to skip over the pain, it only hides deeper inside of us. Real growth happens when we let both truths exist at once - the hurt and the hope, the fear and the faith, the sadness and the softness that follows. 

That’s what self-compassion really is. It’s not pretending everything’s fine. It’s saying, “This hurts, and that’s okay.” It’s allowing space for your pain without judgement - and then slowly learning to meet it with understanding instead of shame. 

Reading Self-Compassion by Dr. Kristin Neff has been a reminder that healing doesn’t mean eliminating negative emotions; it means creating balance between them. It’s pairing the hard moments with gentle ones. It’s knowing you can hold both - the part of you that’s struggling and the part of you that still believes in better days. 

When I started seeing my emotions as visitors instead of enemies, I stopped trying to fix them and started listening to them. And that changed everything. Because once you learn to make peace with what you feel, you open space for peace itself. 

So if you’ve been fighting your feelings lately, try softening instead. You don’t have to push the negative away to invite in the positive - you can hold both, and still move forward. That’s where real compassion begins.