You Know How to Support Everyone Else. What About Yourself?
Most of us know what to do when someone we care about is having a hard time. We listen and give them room to talk. We ask what happened or what they need.
However, we often treat ourselves very differently when we are the ones struggling. We tell ourselves to calm down, stop thinking about it, or pressure ourselves to quickly figure out what to do next. Sometimes we go further and criticize ourselves for being incapable of handling the issue, or we explain the situation away as something we decided should not bother us in the first place.
Pressure makes the difference between how we support others and how we support ourselves easier to recognize. And when things are especially hard, the support we readily give another person can become much harder to offer ourselves. Paying attention to that difference gives us useful information about the relationship we have with ourselves.
Turning Support Inward
Most of us were taught how to respond to our own distress from our parents and other important people in our lives. If you were told to stop crying, you probably learned to suppress your emotions. If you were told to suck it up, you learned to keep your complaints to yourself. If you were told to stay quiet, you may have never learned to fully express yourself. The problem with those teachers is that they likely left you with the message that you were the problem, not that they were incompetent at sitting with you while managing their own emotions when you were distressed.
Internalized peer support offers another way to respond to yourself. We all have parts of ourselves that show up at different times to do different things. If any of the above examples were true for you, then you have a part of yourself that can be harsh when you need to rely on yourself for support. We usually think of peer support as something that happens between people, where someone listens without judgment, stays present during stressful situations, and asks what the other person needs instead of assuming or telling them what to do next. The exact same support you provide to someone else is also available to you in your relationship with yourself.
Applying peer support to your relationship with yourself looks a lot like peer support you offer to others. Internalized peer support shows up as self-soothing. Self-soothing starts with acknowledging what is happening. As Dr. Dan Siegel says, name it to tame it. If you are feeling hurt, overwhelmed, disappointed, or sad, you can name it. Be transparent with yourself about what you are experiencing without attempting to avoid it or explain it away. If you name it clearly and accurately, you have the opportunity to address what is wrong and apply the right self-soothing techniques in the support you give yourself.
Self-Soothing Is More Than a Coping Skill
Coping skills can provide real relief when you are under pressure. A walk, exercise, or music may give your mind and body some room to settle. Coping skills can give you immediate relief from a stressor you are experiencing. But you can also walk three miles while criticizing yourself the entire way. So coping skills do not use the same techniques as self-soothing.
Self-soothing asks you to pay attention to how you are treating yourself while you are distressed. You may still need to apologize, change your behavior, solve a problem, or have a hard conversation with yourself. Self-soothing can also look like metaphorically putting your arm around yourself, literally hugging yourself, or even petting your head. Supporting yourself lets you take responsibility without using shame or criticism to force yourself to do something, while offering yourself the same loving gestures you would offer someone else in distress.
Of course, receiving support from other people is important to your wellbeing. But when you rely on others to fix or be solely responsible for what is happening inside of you, the more likely outcome is that you are taking your distress and putting it in their lap to manage for you. In clinical terms, that looks like handing your self-authority over to someone else to manage the situation for you rather than accepting support from someone else. Internalized peer support—self-soothing—looks like you giving yourself support, which can exist alongside the support you receive from others.
Keep Exploring Your Relationship With Yourself
This article draws from The Trauma-Informed You, where I explore internalized peer support as part of developing a fuller, more meaningful relationship with yourself. The free Trauma-Informed You Journey continues that work through information and practices you can consider in your own life. The book and Renew Your Relationship With Yourself course provide additional ways to explore the work in greater depth.
