But the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you are cast into solitude—the solitude that William James admired as the core of religious experience, as if loneliness were a good thing.
I was surprised by the conflation of words solitude and loneliness here.
I’d say solitude is just a state of being alone while loneliness is an interpretation (usually negative) of that state by a person.
It’s not uncommon for people who are serious about their personal growth/thinking for themselves/creating things to seek solitude as a way of connecting with themselves and making time for creative output. Seen this way, it makes sense to me as a deeply spiritual experience, even if no religious thoughts are involved.
It would be much harder to find people who actively seek loneliness, which I would argue is largely an outcome of feeling disconnected—from significant others but more importantly from oneself.
I’d disagree with idea that one can be cast into solitude. I think we often intentionally choose solitude. And equally often (unfortunately) cast ourselves into loneliness.
First of all—thank you for sharing this.
It resonates a lot and I have recently also wrote about my process of developing self-love over the past year. What I found interesting was that the act of loving myself was actually not that hard when I intentionally put my head and heart to it. What was much harder (both intellectually and emotionally) was understanding why I stopped loving myself in the first place—and what role it played in my life until then. Why it felt like such an alien skill, why no one ever talked to me about it before. Current take: hating myself was a good mechanism to push forward and achieve goals, but it runs out as fuel. That’s when self-love emerges as a new strategy. and a source of energy. Also, society does not provide better strategies, so it perpetuates self-hate being the default.
Some very real outcomes I can attribute to my experiments with self-love is feeling more resilient, confident, relaxed and understanding how to work with the feeling of loneliness better (the better the relationship with myself, the less I need others to validate me).
Regarding the initial skepticism, I remember my biggest worry was that it will make me go too easy on myself. I think you did a great job explaining how both that gets a bit true, but also that it does not feel like a drawback within the self-loving frame. What helped me was checking out some studies where they found that increased self-compassion made people more productive, not less. The basic mechanism goes like this: inject self-compassion > reduce cortisol > increase oxytocin> feel safe/comforted > achieve optimal mind state to do your best.
I’ve had a chance to do some peer-to-peer CT sessions last year and it’s pretty amazing the first couple of times. I also found that on its own it has a certain shelf life. I then started doing much more parts work and I discovered these two modalities compliment each other very well.
This might be true, although I think you don’t really need a therapist to get a lot of initial value. I recommend this audiobook which is basically like a guided meditation with mini-lectures. You can basically do self-therapy with it and get familiar with the method. I also recommend people this podcast where Tim Ferriss is guided into a live IFS session by the ‘father’ of the method, Richard Schwartz (around 40th minute). It will give you a sense of the potential of this approach, which is non-pathologising (unlike traditional therapy that assumes you are broken and need help).
Based on my experiences, IFS is great for discovering the landscape of your parts and understanding what role they play for the system, what they fear would happen without them and teaches you how to re-negotiate their roles. It’s also really cool to work on relationships between parts, not just between you and the parts. I found that CT focuses more on going deep into one part and what it wants, ultimately. And then realising that the desired core state (e.g. love, safety, compassion, peace) is already available and trying to just ‘step into it and have it’. In many cases it reduces the sense of ‘trying’ or ‘desperation’ that some agitated parts create in the system.
I found this specifically useful in places where it’s genuinely hard to love myself, i.e. when I think of something stupid I’ve done in the past, was not aware of/did not understand my needs, received negative feedback from people whose opinion I care about, etc. In those places, imagining someone like an ideal older sister (or even just my current, wiser self) supporting myself from the past creates the necessary distance to be able to see more ways in which I was just trying my best and did not know better. It’s like a proxy to be able to experience some compassionate, caring feelings where the first reaction is self-hate or resentment.