Interview with
Dr. Steven Hickman
Steven Hickman, PsyD
Dr. Steven Hickman is the Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Mindful Self-Compassion. He is a Clinical Psychologist and Retired Associate Clinical Professor in the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine, as well as the Founding Director of the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness. Steve co-developed the Mindful Self-Compassion Teacher Training program and has participated in the training of over 1800 MSC teachers around the world. Steve has co-taught the 8-week and intensive MSC program many times around the globe and is also a Certified teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and trains teachers of that program. He is married and has three young adult children, affording him ample opportunity to practice what he teaches!
Parts of the interview have been edited for clarity and length.
How would you define self-compassion? Why is it important to practice it?
I think the simplest way to describe self-compassion is the capacity to treat yourself the same way you would treat a dear friend when they struggle, suffer, fail, or fall short. We’re often quite good at being kind to other people’s suffering. When your friend fails a test or has a hard time with a work situation, we tend to be warm, kind, and supportive, and provide whatever is needed. But when we have the same experiences, somehow our inner dialogue towards ourselves tends to be just the opposite and we tend to beat ourselves up. We feel that something is uniquely wrong, or we demand perfection of ourselves.
In other words, self-compassion is cultivating and expressing the care and kindness that we normally have for others but directing it towards ourselves. This sounds logical but it’s actually quite challenging to do for most of us. There’s a growing body of research that suggests self-compassion is associated with resilience. Resilience and a number of other positive qualities seem to be related to this quality of self-compassion.
Do you think that there’s a greater need for self-compassion during this pandemic?
I think that the need for self-compassion hasn’t changed but the awareness of where it could be helpful has become a little more obvious. We feel more alone. We may perhaps find ourselves noticing how hard we are on ourselves, how demanding we are, and maybe a little more distracted by our inner dialogue. More and more folks are discovering this to be true for themselves because of the isolation. They’re starting to notice the tone and tenor of their inner critic. There is a whole range of explanations for why this is, but the more we become aware of our inner critic, the better understanding we will have of the ways our inner dialogue can cause suffering in our lives and limits us. The pandemic certainly magnified that.
The other piece of this is the interaction and synergy between mindfulness and self-compassion. The qualities of mindfulness and self-compassion are really interrelated. The capacity to be present to our own experience and the willingness to be kind to ourselves in difficult moments requires us to be truly present with our difficult experiences. In other words, mindfulness and self-compassion actually equip us take on the difficulties that we face, whether it’s difficult emotions, relationships, thoughts, moods, and all sorts of things.
The synergistic effects between mindfulness and self-compassion allows us to confront and manage our difficulties more effectively. Our natural tendency is to push away difficulties or try to avoid pain, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but often becomes the very thing that causes us to wall ourselves off from our experiences. Our ability to navigate difficult experiences is compromised when we’re not accustomed to fully encountering them. Our habitual reaction patterns tend to be to avoid them or try to control them. Mindfulness and self-compassion practices can empower us to be present to our full experience, make better choices, take better care of ourselves, and move in more valued directions. We can become skilled at tolerating our own inner experience- good, bad, or indifferent.
“Self-compassion actually allows us to sustain our compassion for others because we’re being compassionate to ourselves as well.”
What is the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion and what is its mission?
Its best to begin with the founders of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion (CMSC), Drs. Chris Germer and Kristin Neff. Dr. Chris Germer is an expert clinician who has seen the value and of mindfulness and self-compassion for many years. Dr. Kristin Neff is a world-renowned researcher and pioneer of self-compassion. She’s a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and has studied self-compassion her whole career. Through her single-handed hard work and line of research, she has made self-compassion a prominent area of study in psychology.
The two of them came together and created a program called Mindful Self-Compassion. They basically looked at each other and said, “Wow we’ve really seen the value of self-compassion, we should not just study what self-compassion is, but actually teach people to be more self-compassionate.” And the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) course was born.
Dr. Neff and Dr. Germer taught the program in various forms and gained popularity so fast that they realized they needed to have a way to get this program out into the world and train other people to teach self-compassion. They then formed the nonprofit Center for Mindful Self-Compassion ten years ago. The mission of this nonprofit was to disseminate the practice of self-compassion to create a more self-compassionate world, partially through disseminating the Mindful Self-Compassion program which meant training people to teach it, and to educate people about self-compassion. Somewhere along the way, they brought me into the mix to help them run this nonprofit center.
There are close to 3000 teachers of the Mindful Self-Compassion program around the globe and it’s being taught in roughly 40 different languages. We have a staff of around 20 people, and because we’re a virtual center we don’t have a physical centralized location. We have grown substantially over time, all while maintaining service to this vision of a more self-compassionate world.
Can self-compassion be learned independently, or do you need formal training?
It’s an interesting thing because it’s a capacity, much like mindfulness, that we all have to a degree. It’s not like teaching someone how to paint with watercolors, where there is no natural capacity. Self-compassion is a quality we have as humans because we all inherently want to be happy and free from suffering. We also have the capacity to be aware and to be present, and also to tend to ourselves when we struggle and have difficulty, just like when we tend to others. When others are having difficulty, compassion is hardwired into us. It’s really about developing a capacity we already have and it can be done in a variety of ways.
We already know from experience that just reading about self-compassion can actually help some people become more self-compassionate. In the first randomized-controlled trial of the Mindful Self-Compassion program that Drs. Germer and Neff taught, results indicated that people in the self-compassion group showed greater increases in self-compassion, quality of life, resilience, and overall compared with the control group. Interestingly, although the results between the two groups clearly showed that the self-compassion course was effective, they noticed that even people in the control group who never participated in the course somehow showed significant improvements in their levels of self-compassion. When they looked further into this, they discovered that people knew that the study was about self-compassion, and when they were assigned to be in the control group which was a waitlist-control they started reading up on self-compassion. So quite a number of participants did a bit of study on their own about self-compassion and apparently became more self-compassionate as a result. We like to joke that just reading the books is clinically proven to improve self-compassion! People can read the wonderful books written by Dr. Neff, such as The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook. It’s very much a self-help, self-guided course on self-compassion. My own book Self-Compassion for Dummies is also self-guided and designed to help people develop self-compassion.
Conversely, there are a lot of us that really need the structure and format of a course, something that has sort of regular expectations. A little social support, guidance, and personalized attention allows people to really tap into their capacity to be more self-compassionate. This is where a course like Mindful Self-Compassion could be really beneficial for people and up to this point, the research backs it up.
“We often say we give ourselves compassion not to feel better, but because we feel bad.”
As the founding director of UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness, how do you see academic medicine embracing self-compassion?
As I was establishing the center, I saw how mindfulness was starting to become accepted by academic medicine, which in the early years it was kind of viewed as a weird thing. Once colleagues learned I was running the Center for Mindfulness, they would come up to me after faculty meetings and say things like, “You’re that guy that does mindfulness, right? Well, don’t tell anyone but I meditate too.” It was like this dirty little secret that people were practicing mindfulness and they didn’t want their colleagues to know they were doing anything too far out.
We have since come a long way. When I left UC San Diego, mindfulness was integrated into the medical school curriculum for all of the medical students coming through. There was quite an embrace of mindfulness and compassion across the university- as well as many other universities. There are a lot of great programs out there with physicians that incorporate mindfulness into the training. They’ve been supportive of the wonderful work being done.
Self-compassion is newer in the healthcare realm, but I was recently reading about burnout in the health care profession and learned that approximately one in three physicians are experiencing burnout at any given time. This was a study published in 2020, I imagine given the pandemic that the number is probably higher now as a result. Mindfulness can help to some degree in terms of reducing burnout, but I think self-compassion, the capacity to meet ourselves when we’re struggling and having difficulty, and recognizing that we’re having a hard time, is quite powerful. It allows us to transcend those kinds of difficulties and ultimately develop that resilience and the ability to bounce back from difficult circumstances
Over time self-compassion will become more woven into medical training and good medical care, largely because I think people in the medical profession are generally in their field because they’re compassionate people. The individuals who go into healthcare appreciate the value of compassion. What they may not realize is that they need to include themselves in the circle of compassion. Sometimes you hear these statements that you can’t be compassionate to other people unless you’re compassionate to yourself. That sort of sounds good on the surface at first, but if you if you poke at it a little bit, you realize it’s essentially not always true. There are a lot of people who are amazing at being compassionate to other people but treat themselves terribly. In other words, we can be kind to other people while simultaneously beating ourselves up for a while.
The difference is that self-compassion allows you to continue to care for other people because you’ve included yourself in that circle. Self-compassion actually allows us to sustain our compassion for others because we’re being compassionate to ourselves as well. We’re putting gas in our own tank so that we can help put the gas in other people’s tank.
Do you think self-compassion could ever be a frontline treatment for mental health conditions?
I don’t tend to think of either mindfulness or self-compassion as a treatment, per se. It’s sort of like physical fitness; you can’t treat something with physical fitness. The more self-compassionate, mindful, and resilient we become, the more we’re able to ameliorate difficulties that become depression, anxiety, PTSD, and related disorders.
It’s an active ingredient more than it is a treatment. You can’t practice self-compassion to get depressed. You can practice self-compassion to ultimately help you move through depression and come out of it, but it’s not intended to be a treatment. It’s more like a prevention or a wellbeing approach that strengthens your capacity to navigate challenges as opposed to fixing a problem. When you start to practice mindfulness or self-compassion to get an outcome, you’re stuck right from the beginning. It’s about cultivating a different relationship with difficult experiences rather than changing them.
We often say we give ourselves compassion not to feel better, but because we feel bad. If your kid has the flu, you might bring them a cold cloth, give them a hug, or say sweet things to them to comfort them in some way, but not because you’re actually treating the flu. You’re not an antiviral treatment. You are doing this because the child is suffering. Compassion and mindfulness are really the same in that they allow us to navigate that territory with greater ease, effectiveness, and resilience in the midst suffering.
What is your ultimate vision for the field of self-compassion?
I have to go back to this physical fitness analogy. If you talk to a random person on the street, they will know that there is a connection between being physically fit and good health or longevity. Everybody understands that at some level, yet we don’t have that level of understanding yet for mindfulness and compassion, but we’re getting there. My vision is that self-compassion becomes second nature, that it’s embedded in the way we raise our kids, the way we build our society, the things we ask of people in their professions- everything! So, it’s a lofty goal and is probably not going to happen in the next year or two, but we’ll be working on it.
New Book
by Dr. Steven Hickman
Being kind to yourself might sound simple, but self-compassion can change your life dramatically (and most of us are WAY kinder to others than to ourselves) Self-Compassion For Dummies will help you discover self-critical thoughts and self-defeating behaviors that are holding you back from fulfilling your potential and explore how you can learn to work around these things to find your way to more joy and satisfaction. We often think being hard on ourselves will help motivate us to be better people, but Dr. Steven Hickman’s review of the research finds that just the opposite is true. When you learn to love and appreciate yourself completely (as an imperfect human with messy feelings and uncomfortable thoughts), you free yourself up to achieve great things. This book will show you how!
Enjoy? Share with your friends
Michael Juberg
Michael is the Founder & Chief Editor of the Science of Mindfulness.
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