Turning our compassion inwards

Something that vaguely bothers me about NoFap clicked yesterday. I had a particularly productive therapy session and one of the things that came from it was that I have a tendency to do the right things for the wrong reasons - an example being exercising, which while there is no doubt it is good for me, is often not done as a way of supporting or promoting myself, but to try and fix or perfect myself. On a lot of the forums I see so much talk of 'success', 'excellence', 'no more excuses' and 'I've only got myself to blame'; strategies tend to be 'productivity', 'hard workout', I know because I contribute to it myself - the title of my journal is 'time to stop f*cking around.' These aren't inherently bad things, but I wonder if they can be a little too hard at times, without a gentler but nonetheless positive and growth oriented counterpart to balance them out.

Much less common is people speaking about themselves with compassion and understanding. Addiction doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from suffering - so many of us are, or have been, in some really difficult places and it seems so strange that we would then take a whip to ourselves. If a child was distressed would you hug them, or tell them to sort themselves out, stop whining and start achieving their goals? I suppose part of the issue is that in our culture (and possibly others, I can't say that with any confidence though) the latter is often the reaction and so we internalise it.

I'm not saying that compassion isn't present on NoFap (or, indeed, that there is no place for discipline), it is - in buckets. But interestingly it often seems to be given to others rather to oneself. Which is wonderful, but perhaps the culture would benefit from an increase of self-compassion in addition. For me I know that that is my particular growing point, my journey. We're not fucked up, we're not crazy, we're not weak or foolish or just indulging ourselves. We're human and taking on our suffering in a very raw, very real way, and need to take that on with as much love for ourselves and those around us as we can. In one way or another we're all doing our best, and trying very hard to do something very difficult. We are, ultimately, OK.​