144. God Loves Me, But I Don’t: 5 Ways to Increase Self-Compassion

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing, and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.

Happy October. I hope that you are enjoying all the fun things that fall has to bring. Here on the podcast, we are doing a very special giveaway in October. We are going to be giving away a 100 gift card to Amazon for anyone who is an email subscriber to the list and who rates and reviews our show on iTunes.

There will be full instructions for entering the giveaway in our show notes, because I don’t want to take up too much time here. You can always reach us for further information at karybach. com slash podcast. Hey, if we’re going to develop more self compassion, first, let’s define what self compassion is.

I believe that’s responding to ourselves in a way that Jesus would respond to us. Jesus knows there are going to be times where we mess things up, where we make mistakes, where we sin, where we have areas of our life where we need to grow, that we have things we need to work through in our relationships.

And we need to be able to connect with that love that God has towards us and be able to point that towards ourself in our own flaws. Otherwise, we get stuck. We get paralyzed. We end up not doing things for the kingdom of God. We end up not taking risks because we say, God can’t use me. We disqualify ourselves from ministry and putting ourselves down can also keep us from connecting authentically in Christian community.

As Christ wants us to do when we look at the greatest commandment of love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And also love your neighbor as yourself. If you do not like yourself, it’s going to be really hard to put yourself in situations where you’re around other people trying to authentically connect in community, because you’re going to say, nobody wants to be my friend, or I’m unworthy, or I’m not enough to be in this particular circle.

They don’t know what I’ve done in the past. I want to be really clear that we’re not talking about some kind of woo woo, I love myself and I’m giving myself all kinds of positive affirmations about how wonderful I am. We’re not trying to bend towards this direction of pride. We’re trying to say, how can I have a balanced.

View of myself, love myself and others the way that the Lord loves me. Speak kindly to myself as Jesus would speak kindly to me. Even if it was in correction, I can still speak kindly to myself. So if you have a lot of self criticism in your life, and you’re trying to grow self compassion, step one, let’s be curious and find the function of this self criticism.

It didn’t just show up there out of nowhere. There’s some reason it got built into your system. And I find that we often criticize ourselves. To avoid criticism from others, so just take a moment for yourself and reflect on where did I start doing that? Where did I start holding back and saying, Oh, no, I can’t do that here.

That’s too much to avoid other people from criticizing me. When did I pour over what I was doing? In an unhealthy way, just so that in an effort to keep someone else from putting me down, whether that was a friend, mentor, a teacher, a parent, pastor, whoever that was. Usually we internalize a critical spirit from someone else who was constantly critical of us.

That’s not always the case. I have had clients that have just always been critical of themselves, and I think it can come somewhat from personality subtypes that are harder on themselves, and maybe their parents weren’t necessarily harder on them or weren’t particularly strict, but you can think about this even in terms of if you were raised in a very strict religious environment, you were that you may have felt the need to be perfect or be a certain way in order to please God.

So finding the function of that self criticism and then realizing that the function is actually working against what you’re trying to accomplish. People say, well, if I wasn’t so hard on myself, then I wouldn’t be pushing myself to do certain things. But then you find out that they’re so critical of themselves, they don’t end up doing the things that they want to do.

I want you to think about this. You’ve all had different types of employers. If you’ve been in the working world, now which boss would you rather work for? Boss A is always pointing out everything that you do wrong. He or she doesn’t see anything that you do well. Just says, okay, you need to go and you need to fix that.

Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t say that. You look stupid over there. What are you thinking? Would you rather work for that boss or would you rather work for boss B who says, Hey, you did a great job on this area over here. You’ve got some needs improvements in these areas. How can I support you in that?

Let’s work together. Let’s develop a plan to help you get to a different place in your work. But hey, I just want to also say that area C over here, you’re doing amazing with that. You’ve got great working relationships with your co workers, always supportive, always encouraging. How can I help you? How can I come alongside you?

Of course you would want to work for Boss B. I don’t know that I’ve ever met anybody who said, Oh yeah, sign me up for that horribly critical micromanaging boss that points out everything I do wrong. You may have had a boss like that. It’s not very comfortable working for them. Why do we do this with ourselves then?

Why do we think that having boss A with ourselves and pointing out everything we do wrong? Why do we think that that’s helpful for us? It’s not. Instead, we can take a much more balanced approach when we’re evaluating our own behavior and say, Okay, here are some things that seem to be going well in my life.

I have set aside time with God in the mornings. I have developed a healthy rhythm. I have made changes to pray for specific people or at specific times of my day, but I know I’m lacking in this area of my life. I know that I have some forgiveness prayers that I need to pray and work through and some resentments I need to let go of.

I have too quick to anger at times. Whatever the situation is in your life that you’re dealing with, it’s healthy for us to examine ourselves. There are, self examination is scriptural. Search me, oh God, and know my heart. I think it was Paul that said, test yourself to see if you’re in the faith. So this sense of self examination is not bad.

Now you can overdo it if you have OCD, so don’t go down a huge rabbit hole where you’re self examining forever. Step two is to expect imperfection. One thing I used to do to myself all the time was I would create these really long to do lists and I never sat down and thought Actually, how long are these tasks going to take me?

I would just think okay I need to get all of this stuff done today because these are important things and they need to be done And I’m sure I would get distracted in the process, whatever But then I would just beat myself up if I didn’t accomplish enough things off the list And I’ve had to realize that I have to have more realistic expectations for myself, that I can plan out my day, but that life happens, crises occur, unexpected things happen.

My husband woke up sick one day and that meant that I had to get my daughter ready and it meant that there was a lot more TV time in the morning because things were just shuffled around. And it’s okay because it’s life, but I also know too that I can be really hard on myself if I feel like I didn’t make a good decision about something and maybe you struggle with this too.

We have to be able to not only expect the unexpected, but to expect that we’re not always going to get it right. And that can be very difficult if you have perfectionistic tendencies because you would like to get it right every time and you would like to make good decisions and you would like to make sure that things work out well for you because you’ve made a good decision.

All very good goals, excellent goals, however sometimes we make the decisions based off of the information that we have and when we have later information, we go, oh man, now that I have later information, I would never have made that decision back there. This happened to me so recently, guys, I know I will tell you about it more in detail on the podcast sometime, but I was sitting in shame for days about a business decision that I had made and a group of people I had decided to work with.

And I told myself I should have known better than to get involved in this situation with these people. That was a really unfair judgment on myself because there was a lot of information that I didn’t know and I was acting on the information that I did know. The positive reviews this company had, how many years they had been in business, the information, the meeting that I had with the head of the organization.

All of these different pieces, but then later on down the road, other things transpired and other information was received and other things happened without going into all the details or throwing anybody under the bus. And I sat there and I was so upset that I had made the decision to work with these individuals.

That was It’s really, really hard for me to sit with and acknowledge. And what I came to a place of peace about today is that God knew that this was going to happen, number one, and that I can use this as a learning experience. I’ve had a lot of hard learning experiences, which happen when you do new things in your business that you’ve never done before.

New things in your life, you learn, you grow, sometimes you learn by making mistakes, and even though those decisions were made cautiously, prayerfully, with consideration, I did not see the outcome coming out the way that it did, and there was no way for me to predict that. So I can’t judge the present information that I know and that I have right now.

I can’t judge my past self based on that information that I know now. This is point three that I wanted to give to you. I’ll have clients that are processing through trauma, things that they did when they were in active addiction, things that they did when they were far from God. They may have been a Christian, but they ran away from God.

Things that they did before they were Christian and they’re like, man, I cannot believe that I did that. And I’m like, okay, but where are you now? Bring yourself back into the present. Would you do those things now? Well, no, of course not. You’ve grown and you’ve learned from them and you’re in a different place spiritually.

So you can’t judge your past self based on your present self of where you are today. If you are stuck in a place of shame, and I was just stuck in some recently, so I know how bad that feels, stop judging your past self on your present self. You’re not doing those things anymore. And you have different information, and you’ve grown, and you’ve learned from your experiences.

Transcribed As far as the east is from the west is how far God has removed our transgressions from us. Scripture says there’s a reason for that. God is not living in the past bringing up your past. The only ones that do that are us and our enemy. Those are the only ones that bring up the past and hold it against us.

Your past is under the blood of Jesus Christ if you are a Christian. My fourth tip is to picture your inner child. Now this may sound a little far fetched for some of you who have never done this type of work, but if you’re having a really hard time speaking kindly to yourself, if you’re overly critical, would you imagine saying some of the things that you say to yourself to a child?

The dialogue that goes, you’re stupid, or you’re worthless, anything negative. How would you kindly guide and direct a child as they’re going through life? You know, we are to come to God as children. And we need to learn to retrain our inner self talk, to be kinder and to speak to ourself in a way that’s more patient, and to be kinder and to speak to ourselves in a way that’s more patient.

and gentle in that process. So if you can picture your inner child, if you’re struggling with having self compassion towards yourself, can you love on that inner child who is lost, Wounded, sometimes lonely and broken, and hurting at times. Can you love on that inner child? Can you sit with some sense of care or reassurance?

If you can’t think of your inner child or that seems a little weird for you, you can also think about, would I talk to my best friend like this? Would I put someone else down this harshly? No, you probably wouldn’t. You’d probably have a lot more grace or compassion for your best friend. My fifth tip is to meditate on a time where you felt a positive, healthy connection with God.

If you can bring that up from a sensory level experience, where were you, what were you doing, or what was going on around you? What were you feeling? What was that sense of being connected with God like in a healthy way? And from there, really looking at what does the Bible say about God’s love for you?

Maybe you take some of those verses and meditate on those. You can also meditate on verses that talk about God being a good father that may be hard for you to connect with, but allowing God to restore this view of who you are in a healthy and balanced way so that you can respond to yourself in the way that God would respond to you.

What I’ve seen time and time again is that many people have difficulties with self compassion due to past trauma and wounding relationships in their life, broken attachment relationships with parents or other caregivers. If that’s something you’re dealing with, I do therapeutic retreats or multi day intensive sessions with individuals who have a lot of trauma and OCD symptoms or lots of trauma and anxiety symptoms.

I would love to sit down with you over a consultation when you talk about those options further for you. Know that there is hope and healing on the other side of what you’re dealing with right now. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple podcasts App on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review.

This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show. Christian Faith in OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.