Self-Compassion: Changing How You Relate to Yourself

Regina Giannetti's episode 94 of the Autoconsciente podcast, "Changing Our Relationship with Ourselves," takes self-compassion out of the realm of greeting-card sentiment and gives it working parts. Drawing on Kristin Neff's books on mindfulness and self-compassion, Giannetti describes two complementary movements: a yin side that receives and soothes, validating feelings, offering comfort and calming the body, and a yang side that acts, setting boundaries, providing for unmet needs and motivating change. She argues that most people lean hard toward one side and neglect the other, and that resisting painful emotion manufactures a second, avoidable layer of suffering. The episode closes with a short practice of placing a hand over the chest and naming what hurts. It is a follow-up to the previous episode's science, and this time the subject is the heart rather than the head.

Giannetti begins with a confession, not a theory. She describes the familiar loop: someone has been hurt, often unintentionally, and the mind keeps returning to the scene. Then the guilt arrives and gets heavier. Mistakes, impulsive reactions, careless judgments, and a stream of worry and pessimism each produced the same inner monologue. "How can I be so afraid? Why can't I stop worrying? I should have more faith, I should be more positive." She names the trap precisely: "thinking like that only added another layer of negative feeling on top of the original negative feeling." The pain was the first wound. The self-judgment was the second.

Why does self-criticism make painful feelings worse?

The mechanism Giannetti describes is simple and uncomfortable. When a feeling shows up, she says, she first did not allow herself to feel bad, and then judged herself for having the feeling at all. That judgment produced a fresh wave of shame, so the original sadness or fear became one item in a larger pile. Most people will recognize the pattern: the hurt is ordinary, but the commentary about the hurt is what keeps it alive.

Giannetti came to a name for the alternative only in 2015, during her training as a mindfulness instructor. She had been raised, as she puts it, to have compassion for others, but "I never even considered that possibility for myself." Her framing is useful because it treats self-compassion as a skill rather than a temperament. You do not have to feel kind to yourself before you start. You only have to admit that it is worth a try. In her words, "If they're saying it's valid, why not, right?"

What are the yin and yang of self-compassion?

The central idea of the episode is that self-compassion is not only gentle. Giannetti, following Neff, separates it into two aspects that are borrowed from Chinese philosophy, where yin is receptive and turned inward while yang is active and turned outward. Neither is better. Together they describe the full range of what caring for yourself can look like.

The yin aspect is about being with yourself in a loving way. It has three parts. The first is validating: recognizing a feeling as legitimate, with something like "This is a sad moment, it's really painful to go through this." The second is comforting, offering support in the form of "I'm here with you, you're not alone." The third is calming, doing something physical or verbal to settle the body. Giannetti links this calming to the release of oxytocin, which she had discussed in the previous episode, and notes that it can happen through a gentle physical touch or simply through words that say the moment will pass.

"A common trait in all these practices is a friendly and loving attitude; sometimes compassionate care takes the form of consolation, a gentle inclination towards difficult emotions, comforting, and sometimes involves a no and avoiding danger, protecting."

The yang aspect is about doing something about the painful situation. It has three parts of its own. Protecting can mean saying no to people or circumstances that hurt you. Giannetti gives the example of abuse: stepping away from the person causing harm is, in her framing, an act of self-compassion, a way of saying enough is enough. Providing means giving yourself what you need when a need is going unmet. Motivating means mobilizing yourself toward change, whether that is giving yourself a second chance after a bad outcome or deliberately developing a skill so the next outcome is better.

Read together, the two halves stop sounding like a list of soft gestures. Yin is the posture that lets you feel the feeling without being swallowed by it. Yang is the posture that turns that steadiness into a decision. The episode's underlying claim is that self-compassion is complete only when both are present.

Why does one side of self-compassion tend to dominate?

Giannetti says that for her, the most important thing was learning that the two aspects are not evenly distributed in people. "Normally one aspect predominates in us to the detriment of the other," she says, and the imbalance tends to show up in predictable ways. Someone whose yin is stronger may calm down and validate themselves easily, but find it hard to act, and so remain stuck in the pain. Someone whose yang is stronger has a problem-solving style and moves straight into action, perhaps without stopping to recognize how important it is to validate their own pain first.

Giannetti is candid that her own profile leans yang. When she is in a painful situation, she thinks only about how to solve it and what she has to do next. She tends to ignore her feelings and does not comfort herself. For her, developing self-compassion means paying more attention to the yin side. She has also learned to recognize the thought her mind produces in hard moments, something like "These things happen, it's nothing, that's just life." That phrasing, she notes, can sound reasonable while quietly dismissing what she actually feels.

The practical point is that the yin pause is not a detour from action. Giannetti argues that when you are calmer, your actions are more conscious and more thoughtful. Taking a moment to validate and settle is what makes the yang decisions better.

What happens when we resist painful emotions?

The episode returns several times to the difference between feeling a feeling and fighting it. Giannetti's argument is that self-compassion is not the same as liking your pain or pretending it is not there. It begins with acceptance. When we resist unpleasant emotions, she says, we tend to push them away, sometimes through overeating, anger, or other escape routes, and in doing so we "simply add fuel" to what is already difficult. That additional pain is what she calls suffering, distinct from the original experience.

This is a subtle distinction and worth holding onto. Pain is the event of feeling hurt, sad, or afraid. Suffering is the extra layer produced by believing you should not feel that way, or by trying to make the feeling disappear. Giannetti notes that resistance can also appear in hidden forms, such as reassuring yourself with the thought that you should not be bothered by something. Those disguised versions can be just as effective at keeping pain running.

How can you practice self-compassion when you are in pain?

The closing section moves from concept to instruction. Giannetti suggests that the next time you face a difficult situation, you bring an attitude of self-compassion to it, starting with awareness of your suffering. Then you acknowledge the painful emotion, and you place a hand over your chest, the way many people do when they want to feel steadied. Silently, you offer yourself a phrase of kindness. She gives examples in the spirit of "accept this situation" and "may I be patient," and invites listeners to use their own words.

She also talks about the usefulness of writing these phrases down so they are available in the moment you need them, since the hardest times are often the ones when you forget to be kind to yourself. The aim is not a perfect ritual. It is to build a habit of turning, even slightly, toward yourself at the moment you would ordinarily turn against yourself. Giannetti frames the episode's goal in her own terms: that by the end you feel the self-judgment losing ground, and that you can become, in her phrase, the compassionate gaze that watches your own experience without condemning it.

Where to go from here

If this framework is new to you, the most useful next step is to listen to the episode itself, which Giannetti recorded as a sequel to her earlier discussion of the science of self-compassion. The practical core is the two-sided model: notice whether you tend toward validation and calm, or toward action and problem-solving, and deliberately give the neglected side some attention. Begin small. Name one feeling you are currently trying to push away, place a hand over your chest, and offer yourself one honest, gentle sentence. The episode argues that this single move, repeated, is where self-compassion starts to change how you relate to yourself. For a deeper treatment, Giannetti points to Kristin Neff's two books: Autocompaixão - Pare de se torturar e deixe a insegurança para trás and Manual de mindfulness e autocompaixão.