Stripping the Forest from the Rotten Trees: Compassionate Self-Responding Is a Way of Coping, but Reduced Uncompassionate Self-Responding Mainly Reflects Psychopathology

Excerpt

Self-compassion is regarded as a cognitive coping strategy that reflects a positive way of relating to oneself when experiencing personal failure, inadequacy, or general problems in life. It entails being kind and understanding to oneself, recognizing that suffering is a common and normal aspect in life shared by all humans, and holding a balanced perspective on one’s difficulties, which constitute the three compassionate characteristics of self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness (Neff 2003b). The construct of self-compassion is typically assessed with the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS), a self-report scale containing 26 items, of which half measure the three abovementioned positive ways of self-responding, while the other half intend to measure their precise counterparts, the uncompassionate features of self-judgment, isolation, and over-identification (Neff 2003a). The SCS yields a total score of self-compassion (that includes the reversely scored uncompassionate features) and has been widely employed to demonstrate its potential as a protective factor against mental health problems. Most of this research has been focused on the relationship of self-compassion with anxiety, depression, and stress, and the corpus of work demonstrates that self-compassion is negatively associated with symptom levels of these types of internalizing psychopathology (MacBeth and Gumley 2012). …