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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Shame
If you go blank when your partner cries, or answer hurt with logic, ask who ever showed you anything better. Probably nobody did. A gap like that can be filled at any age, and it is a far more accurate description than selfish or hopeless. Words like those send people back into hiding, which is the one place the learning cannot happen.
'Did He not find you lost and guide you' (Quran 93:7). Being lost is met with instruction rather than blame.
الضحى
وَوَجَدَكَ ضَآلࣰّ ا فَهَدَىٰ
Did He not find you lost and guide you
Qur’an 93:7read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta analysis pooling randomised and pilot trials of compassion focused therapy in clinical populations found improvements in self compassion alongside reductions in self criticism and symptoms. The authors noted that many of the samples were small, so the size of the effect is less certain than its direction.
Millard LA, Wan MW, Smith DM, Wittkowski A. (2023). The effectiveness of compassion focused therapy with clinical populations: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Journal of affective disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A missing skill can be practised and a bad character cannot, so the kinder description is also the more useful one.
You were the child. They were the adults. Say it as often as you need to, because shame will keep quietly filing it the other way round.
Change the sentence from 'I am bad' to 'I am feeling bad right now'. It is a small grammatical move and it changes what you are actually dealing with.
A child facing a frightening parent often reaches for the safer story: I am the bad one and they are fine. It costs the child their sense of worth and buys them a world that still makes sense.