February 21, 2022

Compassionate Letter Writing

Written by Rachel Eddins

compassionate letter writing woman journal

Learning self-compassion is a key skill to overcoming anxiety, depression, negative self-talk, and feelings of shame. This exercise, compassionate letter writing, can help you deal with negative life events and things about yourself that you may be struggling with.

Writing to yourself from your compassionate self can help you realize that you are only human and that everyone has something about themself that they aren’t happy with. It can also help you see more clearly constructive changes that you may be able to make to help you feel happier and healthier and even help you judge yourself less.

Compassionate Letter Writing From the Perspective of a Compassionate Other

The idea of compassionate letter writing is to help you refocus your thoughts and feelings on being supportive, helpful, and caring of yourself. Practicing doing this can help you access an aspect of yourself that can help tone down more negative feelings and thoughts.

Self-compassion can be cultivated in many ways.

Research has shown that writing a letter to yourself from the perspective of a compassionate other can help increase self-compassion and improve well-being.

This tool was adapted from Kristen Neff’s self-compassion exercise called Exploring Self-Compassion Through Writing.

Step 1

Choose an aspect of yourself or your life that you dislike and criticize. It can be something that makes you feel ashamed, unworthy, inadequate, or self-conscious. Examples may include appearance, career, relationships, health, and others.

  • Write in detail about how this perceived inadequacy makes you feel.
  • What thoughts, images, emotions, or stories arise when you think about it?

Step 2

Now, imagine someone who is unconditionally loving, accepting, and supportive.

Gently and lovingly, this friend sees your strengths and opportunities for growth, including the negative aspects of you. The friend accepts and forgives, embracing you kindly just as you are.

  • Now write a letter to yourself from the perspective of this kind friend.
  • What does this friend say to you?
  • How is compassion demonstrated?
  • How does this friend encourage and support you in taking steps to change?

Let the words flow from you: do not think too hard about phrasing or structure. Just write from the perspective of deep kindness, understanding, and non-judgmental acceptance.

Step 3

After fully drafting the letter, put it aside for at least fifteen minutes or more if you wish.

  • When some time has passed, return to the letter and reread it.
  • Let the words fully sink in.
  • Feel the encouragement, support, compassion, and acceptance, and let every positive word rush into you.

Whenever you are feeling down, review the letter about this aspect of yourself that you feel is not favorable. Providing self-acceptance and self-support is the first step to change.

You can also apply this exercise to aspects of your body – writing the letter from your body to yourself. 

Or try this body acceptance exercise.

Compassionate Letter Writing from Your Caring Self

In this exercise, you will focus on using. your own voice to provide care and kindness to yourself. Think again about an aspect of yourself or your life that you dislike and criticize as you did in step 1 above.

Next, try imagining the last time you felt deep kindness and care for someone else.

To start your letter, try to feel that part of you that can be kind and understanding of others; and how you would be if caring for someone you like.

  • Consider your general manner, facial expressions, voice tone, and feelings that come with your caring self.
  • Think about that part of you as the type of self you would like to be.
  • Think about the qualities you would like your compassionate self to have. It does not matter if you feel you are like this – but focus on the ideal you would like to be.
  • Spend a few moments really thinking about this and trying to feel in contact with that ‘kind’ part of you.

As you write your letter, try to allow yourself to have understanding and acceptance for your distress. For example, your letter might start with “I am sad you feel distressed; your distress is understandable because…….”

Note the reasons, realizing your distress makes sense. Then perhaps you could continue your letter with… “I would like you to know that…” (e.g., your letter might point out that as we become depressed, our depression can come with a powerful set of thoughts and feelings – so how you see things right now may be the depression view on things).

Given this, we can try and ‘step to the side of the depression’ and write and focus on how best to cope, and what is helpful.

More Ideas for Compassionate Letter Writing

There are a number of ideas that you might consider in your letter. Do not feel you have to cover them all. In fact, you might want to try different things in different compassionate letters to yourself.

With all of these ideas, although it can be difficult, try to avoid telling yourself what you should or should not think, feel or do. There is no right or wrong, it is the process of trying to think in a different way that is important.

Standing Back:

Once you have acknowledged your distress and not blamed yourself for it, it is useful if your letter can help you stand back from the distress of your situation for a moment. If you could do that, what would be helpful for you to focus on and attend to?

For example, you might think about how you would feel about the situation in a couple of days, weeks, or months, or you might recall that the depression can lift at certain times and remember how you feel then.

How have you coped in the past? 

It can be helpful to recall in your letter and bring to your attention, the times that you have coped with difficulties before; bring those to mind. If there are any tendencies to dismiss them, note them, but try to hold your focus on your letter. Your letter can focus on your efforts and on what you are able to do.

Your compassionate side might gently help you see things in a less black and white way. Your compassionate side is never condemning and will help you reduce self-blaming.

Explore the balanced view through compassion.

Remember your compassionate side will help you with kindness and understanding.

Here are some examples: If someone has shunned you and you are upset by that, your compassionate side will help you recognize your upset but also those thoughts such as ‘the person doesn’t like me, or that I am therefore unlikeable,’ may be very unfair. Perhaps a more balanced view would be the person who shunned you can do this to others and has difficulties of their own; your compassionate side can remind you that you have other friends who don’t treat you this way.

As another example, if you have forgotten to do something or have made a mistake and are very frustrated and you are cross with yourself, your compassionate side will understand your frustration and anger but help you see that the mistake was a genuine mistake and is not evidence of being stupid or useless. It will help you think about what is the most compassionate and helpful thing to do in these circumstances.

Not alone:

When we feel distressed we can often feel that we are different in some way. However, rather than feeling alone and ashamed remember many others can feel depressed with negative thoughts about themselves, the world, or their future. In fact, 1 in 20, or more, of us can be depressed at any one time, so the depression is very sad but is far from uncommon. Your depression is not a personal weakness, inadequacy, badness, or failure.

Self-criticism:

If you are feeling down, disappointed, or are being harsh on yourself, note in your letter that self-criticism is often triggered by disappointment (e.g., making a mistake or not looking like we would like to), loss (e.g., of hoped for love) or fear (e.g., of criticism and/or rejection).

Maybe being self-critical is a way you have learned to cope with these things or take your frustration out on yourself, but this is not a kind or supportive thing to do. Understandable perhaps, but it does not help us deal with the disappointment, loss or fear. So we need to acknowledge and be understanding and compassionate about the disappointment, loss or fear. Allow yourself to be sensitive to those feelings.

Compassionate behavior:

It is useful to think about what might be the compassionate thing to do at this moment or at some time ahead – how might your compassionate part help you do those things? So in your letter, you may want to think about how you can bring compassion into action in your life.

If there are things you are avoiding or finding difficult to do, write down some small steps to move you forward. Try to write down steps and ideas that encourage you and support you to do the things that you might find difficult. If you are unsure what to do, maybe try to brainstorm as many options as you can and think about which ones appeal to you. Could you ask others for help?

Dilemmas:

If you are in a dilemma about something, focus on the gentle compassionate voice inside you and write down the different sides of the dilemma. Note that dilemmas are often difficult, and at times there are hard choices to be made. Therefore, these may take time to work through. Talking through with others might be a helpful thing to do. Acceptance of the benefits and losses of a decision can take time.

Compassion for feelings:

Your compassionate side will have compassion for your feelings. If you are having powerful feelings of frustration, anger or anxiety, then compassionately recognize these. Negative emotions are part of being human and can become more powerful in depression or when we are distressed but they do not make you a bad person – just a human being trying to cope with difficult feelings.

We can learn to work with these feelings as part of our ‘humanness’ without blaming or condemning ourselves for them. Your compassionate mind will remind you that we often don’t choose to feel negatively and these feelings can come quite quickly. In this sense it is ‘not our fault’, although we can learn how to work with these difficult feelings and take responsibility.

Loss of positive feelings:

If you are feeling bad because you have lost positive feelings then we can be compassionate to this loss – it is very sad to lose positive feelings. Sometimes we lose loving feelings because a relationship has run its course, or we are just exhausted, or depression can block positive emotion systems.

As we recover from the depression these positive systems can return. Your compassionate letter can help you see this without self­ blaming.

What is helpful:

Your compassionate letter will be a way of practicing how to really focus on things that you feel help you. If thoughts come to mind that make you feel worse, then notice them, let them go and refocus on what might be helpful – remember there are no ‘I shoulds’.

Warmth:

Now try to focus on the feelings of warmth and genuine wish to help in the letter as you write it. Spend time breathing gently and really try, as best you can, to let feelings of warmth be there for you. When you have written your letter, read it through slowly, with as much warmth as you can muster. If you were writing to somebody else would you feel your letter is kind and helpful?  Could you change anything to make it more warm and helpful?

Find other self-compassion journal exercises and meditations here and here

Continue Practicing Compassionate Letter Writing

Remember that this is an exercise that might seem difficult to do at times but with practice you are exercising a part of your mind that can be developed to be helpful to you. Some people find that they can rework their letters the next day so they can think through things in a different way. The key of compassionate letter writing is the desire and effort of becoming inwardly gentle, compassionate and self-supportive. The benefits of this work may not be immediate but like ‘exercising to get fit’ can emerge over time with continued practice.

Sometimes people find that even though they are depressed they would very much like to develop a sense of self that can be wise and compassionate to both themselves and others. You can practice thinking about how, each day, you can become more and more as you wish to be. As in all things there will be good times and not so good.

Spend time imagining your postures and facial expressions, thoughts and feelings that go with being compassionate and practice creating these inside you. This means being open with our difficulties and distress, rather than just trying to get rid of them.

Source: Professor Paul Gilbert PhD, FBPsS, OBE

For additional help learning self-compassion contact us at 832-559-2622. We will help you get started with one of our Houston, Montrose, or Sugar Land therapists.

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