About this episode
Despite many pastoral proclamations of God’s love, church is not a place I learned to love myself. Instead, I learned to distrust myself, see myself as evil, and feel guilty/responsible for Jesus’ murder. Prayers of confession were meant to assuage this constant guilt, but they couldn’t touch my underlying Calvinist beliefs that I was bad.At home, I witnessed this shame fuel both my mother’s religiosity and her alcoholism. It makes sense, in a supremely messed up way: if a person truly believes they are evil, then alcohol and drugs are one of the few ways to escape this pervasive shame.As a younger person, I tried to use shame as fuel to improve myself. It worked like this: I’d berate myself for not being thinner, swear off sugar, deplete my willpower, binge eat Double Stuf Oreos, feel even more shame. Every time the cycle repeated, my shame grew stronger.Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.And in Evangelicalism, almost anything could be a sin—not just your actions, but even your thoughts. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount equates being angry with someone with murder and lustful gazing with adultery. This list of thought crimes includes the stark admonishment, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48)For many of the Christians I knew growing up, this passage was a big source of not feeling good enough. Get angry with someone? Congrats, you’ve just NAILED Jesus to the cross!Although I didn’t learn how to love myself in church, I was lucky to have good therapists, dear friends, and books to help me, particularly Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Dr. Kristin Neff.In it, Neff identifies three main components of self-compassion:* View your shortcomings with kindness. Try to treat your own pain and problems as you would a friend’s: not by ignoring or judging, but by choosing a generous interpretation.* Recognize the universality of your experience. Say you’re ruminating over something weird you said at a party. Remind yourself that most people, the world over, have said something equally embarrassing in public. You are not alone.* Maintain a mindful distance from your suffering. Mindfulness means being able to observe and accept our thoughts without overidentifying with them. (This might look like being able to interrupt a thought spiral with a contradictory idea.)Not gonna lie, when I first read this book, learning self-compassion felt impossible. Mindfulness was something I’d been struggling to learn for a few years
