Writing as a Path to Self Compassion

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If you’re like many people, accessing self-compassion can be a bit like searching your desk for reading glasses that are dangling over your chest. You didn’t lose your lenses, you just needed to know where to look.

Several years ago, I published a book of writing exercises that offered people a new set of lenses, so to speak, to view themselves through more compassionate eyes. Step Out of Your Story: Writing Exercises to Reframe and Transform Your Life invited readers to see challenging life chapters as a personal growth adventures by writing about the obstacles they faced in the more expansive third-person narrative; in other words, referring to themselves as he,” “she,” and “they” instead of the more natural “I,” “me” and “my.” I also asked them to dialogue with desired character strengths – for example, courage or compassion – to evoke these voices within.

Because we may often be kinder towards our friends than towards ourselves—consider the cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) question “What would you say to a friend in the same situation?"—my assumption was that writing about difficulties in your life as if they were happening to someone else would facilitate a similar compassionate stance. My hope was that, by creating some psychological distance through the third person voice, readers could bypass the critic, access latent internal strengths, become more curious about their unfolding story, and feel more empathetic towards themselves and the tensions in their storyline.

This was not some clever gimmick. During my college years as an English major and later in book groups, I had an easier time talking about and feeling compassionate towards protagonists with whom I identified. By contrast, speaking about my own personal struggles in the first person felt more vulnerable, more evocative of my ego, and therefore likely to trigger my inner critics.

Research on the Third Person Narrative

Apparently, I wasn't alone. A growing body of research shows that people tend to be gentler with themselves when reflecting on their lives in the third person.

When University of California and University of Michigan researchers asked participants to reflect on negative memories in the third person narrative, they reported less emotional pain, less rumination, improved problem solving, and greater life satisfaction. They also gained new insights into those memories without feeling as emotionally overwhelmed.

In an Ohio State University study, students who recalled humiliating moments in high school in the third-person narrative were more likely to describe themselves as having overcome obstacles than those who recalled similarly embarrassing moments from a first-person perspective. The study concluded that feeling like you’ve changed gives you the confidence and momentum to act in ways that support a perceived new and improved self.

Similarly improved outlooks have been described by students in my writing workshops over the years. When invited to view their life as a personal growth adventure from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, participants described an unexpected sense of liberation from their victim stories, greater compassion toward their circumstances, and a growing sense of curiosity and hope about the direction of their unfolding journey. Many reported an increased sense of self-respect and appreciation for the grace with which they faced challenges.

Writing as a Portal to "Self Energy"

It wasn’t until I got trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS), that I began to suspect that my writing techniques had tapped into what I now know as “self energy.“ Self energy is the phrase coined by IFS founder Richard Schwartz to describe inborn benevolent qualities that every person possesses—compassion, curiosity, creativity, calm, courageousness, clarity, confidence, and connectedness, also known as “the 8 C’s.”

IFS posits that, while that everyone is born with self energy, people lose touch with those qualities along the road to survival when we develop protective parts—angry, addictive, anxious parts, for example—to protect ourselves from deeper pain. This deeper pain is the result of ingrained beliefs about ourselves and the world—known as “burdens”—that develop in childhood when our little sponge-like selves experience neglect, criticism, abuse, and other boundary violations, and we assume it’s our fault. Some examples of burdens are "I am unloveable," "I am not enough," and "I don't matter."

Compassionate, curious witnessing of the different parts, and the stories they hold, is an essential part of the IFS healing process. Healing ultimately happens when the client can empathize with the motivations of the protective system and freshly observe the inner child’s wounding story from an open, heart-centered place so that burdens can be released, and self energy restored.

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Initially, I had thought of IFS as a departure from my narrative approach, especially because its more cognitive and directive framework of viewing life as a personal growth adventure doesn’t align with IFS’ looser somatic map of self and parts, and its emphasis on childhood wounding. I also almost exclusively use speech, not writing, to help clients get to know their parts.

However, I can’t help but notice that when my IFS clients dialogue with different parts of themselves, they refer to these parts in the third person. “She’s telling me that she feels lonely,” “He’s sharing that if he doesn’t stand up for me by getting angry, people will take advantage of me and I’ll feel like a doormat.” By witnessing their parts this way, clients often become more compassionate and curious about themselves in ways that had not been previously accessible. Just like my third-person writing exercises.

This leaves me excited about the possibility that writing in the third person, and other parts writing exercises could present another portal to self energy, in the way that art, dance, music, and other forms of creative expression help facilitate access self energy for those who struggle to get there through talk therapy. After all, creativity is a quality of self energy.

My hope is that, as people become more accustomed to journaling in this fashion, they will remember, in moments of self-judgment, where to find the tools to write their way back to their hearts.