This is a follow-up to the post I made 6 months ago. Link to that post.

I wanted to make this follow-up for a couple of reasons. First, because I’ve been frequenting this sub a lot more and what I see over and over again are guys/women/folk who treat themselves pretty terribly internally. I’m not saying it’s every single person here, but even those who aren’t mentally beating themselves up constantly could use some self-compassion training.

Second, I wanted to give credit to Kristin Neff and link to her website. She’s the researcher who spearheaded the idea of switching from thinking in terms of self-esteem to self-compassion, and it’s a good idea to cite the source. In my original post I didn’t mention her or link to any of her stuff. I was hesitant to mention her before because she tends to focus on women and occasionally makes remarks about how women and girls especially are encultured to internally criticize themselves. I really didn’t want to deal with anyone taking issue with this. I don’t want to have a debate about which gender has it worse or whether she’s “too much of a feminist” or anything similar. I know a lot of men here have had really hard lives, I’ve had a fairly hard one myself, but a pissing contest about which gender has it worse and whether that invalidates anyone’s research makes my stomach crawl. If any of that bothers you, sorry that’s not what I'm ere for. The idea is to take her ideas and synthesize them so that we can use them. Basically, I wanted to give you a “trigger warning,” but really it’s to benefit me because I don’t want to deal with you if you get triggered by that.

Please, just set the who has it worse stuff aside and focus on how learning self-compassion can help you personally.

From here forward I’m mostly going to summarize various content from her website. Feel free to read her work and point out if I summarize incorrectly or over simplify. A lot of this information is spread out over different pages or is better presented in videos.

Her website

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What is self-esteem and why should we move to a different model? Self-esteem, more or less, is the sum total of how we feel about ourselves. It’s a personal evaluation of our standing in the world. If that total is more positive than negative, we have high self-esteem. If it’s more negative than positive, we have low self-esteem. This has several problems. Because it’s a subjective evaluation from our own point of view, we can influence it by putting others down. In other words, bullying others or other ways making others seem lower, will make our own sense of self-esteem rise. Also, we can puff up our sense of self worth through narcissism. If we trick ourselves into thinking we are worth more than those around us, we will feel like our self esteem is higher. More objectively, failure in life is common and can be a good learning tool. When we hyper focus on maintaining self-esteem, we train ourselves to avoid failure at all costs. Thus focusing on self-esteem tends to increase bullying, narcissism, hero worship of survivorship bias, and decrease of learning through failure.

My original post mentioned the link between RP and self-esteem. It’s quite common for men who are attracted to RP and similar groups (blackpill, MGTOW, etc.) to have low self-esteem. I think many of you here can attest to that fact quite readily. RP also promotes behaviors that are often classified as bullying and promoting narcissism. The entire Alpha/Beta male ideology is about deeming certain men as less worthy in order to make others feel more worthy. Even more worrying is the number of men, often young, who live in total terror of rejection. There have been many post on this sub over the past 6 months, and I have no doubt there will continue to be more, who readily admit that they have warped their entire life around trying to find a sexual partner, but rarely actually interact with anyone they are interested in because they are so afraid of rejection and emotional trauma that it doesn’t seem worth it. They would rather completely change their lifestyle or try to change societies social norms rather than face rejection.

What is self-compassion, why is it different, and how can it help with these problems?

Compassion is seeing the suffering of others and responding to it with care and lack of judgment. It can mean trying to help, but even if one can’t help it means showing kindness first and foremost. If someone experiences the loss of a loved one, we can’t bring that loved one back to life, but we can sit with them and give them comfort and presence. That is the quintessential example of compassion. It’s being a really good friend who withholds judgment, who may try to help, but is kind first and foremost.

Self-compassion is acting that way toward yourself. When you fail, instead of beating yourself up or putting yourself down, if you are self-compassionate, you respond with kindness. You comfort and care for yourself, instead of trying to tough it out. For example, imagine you are trying to learn something new and you make a big blunder. You might respond by thinking, “I’m terrible at this, I’m such an (idiot, clutz, weakling, etc.) Then you’ll try again, but with anger toward yourself for your failure. If you were self-compassionate you would instead respond with a thought like, “oops, that didn’t work out, but new things are hard for almost everyone, let’s keep trying.”

Most people would treat a friend differently than themself when they fail at something or have a problem. If a friend fails, we tend to give them credit for trying, we tend not to punish them or put them down, we tend to use kinder language. Even people who are using “tough love” with a friend are far more harsh on themselves. Self-compassion is the idea that we should treat ourselves as if we were one of our friends, instead of holding ourselves to a higher, and often impossible standard.

This doesn’t mean one should wallow in self pity or give in to self indulgence. Self-compassion is not about giving into defeat or making excuses to be lazy. A good friend might suggest a break, but they also would suggest getting up off the couch and trying again.

When one treats themself with self-compassion it doesn’t guarantee success. It helps you get through failure without harming yourself. It helps you use failure to learn, and it helps you to avoid all the pitfalls of trying to maintain high self-esteem. At its core it’s about looking at oneself as a human, worthy of compassion because of our humanity, not because of our standing in the world.

It's my belief that practicing self-compassion could help most all of us, but it could be especially useful for the men I often see on this sub complaining that they don't even approach women because they live in fear of rejection. Self-compassion won't make a woman interested in them, but it can help them push through that fear of rejection so that they can interact with women more and learn from their failures instead of living in a state of fear and self-loathing.