Client pauses. “Well, it’s different with me. I am stupid. Plus, I’m an adult so it’s different.”

I take a deep breath. 

“It’s not, actually. It’s not different. You’re not stupid and it’s your job as an adult to treat yourself with the same kindness that you give to your actual child. With the same patience, and love, and compassion as you would have ideally been shown when you were a child. And I think if you could give yourself even one fraction of what you give to your child, if you could turn that love back on yourself even a tiny bit, you’d experience powerful shifts in your self-esteem and confidence.”

Why actively speaking kindly to yourself matters.

Over the last ten years of clinical psychotherapy work, I must have had a conversation like the one in this blog’s opening at least 300 times.

I never fail to be amazed at how many of my clients are wonderful, loving, instinctually compassionate, and supportive parents to their own children despite coming from adverse and outright tragically abusive backgrounds where almost no one showed them even a modicum of the care they show their own children. They do not like speaking kindly to themselves. 

It brings me to tears to think about how good my clients are at parenting their children despite the lack of “good enough parenting” they received.

But it also makes me so sad to see that, despite how wonderful they are with their own children, they still deeply struggle to speak and treat themselves well. 

It seems ironic and disconnected, doesn’t it? 

You can be a wonderful parent to your flesh and blood children but a terrible inner parent to yourself.

But I see this all the time.

That’s why one of my very favorite therapy tools to use when I’m dealing with a particularly self-critical client and I know that they’re a wonderful parent, is to invite them to start speaking kindly to themselves as they would to their own child(ren).

Why does this matter?

In a word: neuroscience. 

To elaborate, I’m sure you, like so many of us, have heard the term “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

This phrase and contribution to the field of neuropsychology were first used in 1949 by Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist.

Effectively, Hebb’s rule teaches us that each thought (spoken or unspoken), every habit, every feeling, and physical sensation we experience triggers the firing of neurons which, in time, creates a neural network in your brain. 

Associated channels of memory and habit as it were.

And when you repeat something again and again – consciously or unconsciously – you reify (meaning, strengthen) that neural network.