In contrast to weakness, compassion is the connection to a place of openness and vulnerability. It is not just a connection from a place of softness and not stiffness similar to the concept of martial arts such as judo and aikido, but mainly resulting from the understanding that men deserve love and compassion like everyone else in the universe and especially directed and offered by and to ourselves. The extreme lack of compassion for men and boys is the result of what is referred to as the compassion gap. This Western Misandrist conditioning is so strong that it surpasses everything and requires tremendous effort to work it out. Bottom line is that taking the red pill and the awakening associated with it is not the end of our journey; it's barely even getting started with it! Compassion and wisdom is the beginning and the end of it; it's the secret door to our freedom!
What is self-compassion?
In terms of modern psychology, self-compassion is a quite new model or theory derived from ancient spiritual traditions based on the practice of mind such as Buddhism, Buddhist psychology and Buddhist mind training. In a wider sense it is a part of the mindfulness based cognitive behavioral therapy (MBCT) like mindfulness based Schema Therapy (MBST) or mindfulness stress reduction (MBSR). Neff (2003), a developmental psychologist and practitioner of Buddhist meditation and mind training, first defined this concept and developed the self-compassion scale used in most studies in the field of psychological research! Self-compassion has three main components: (1) loving kindness (2) a sense of common humanity, (3) awareness. Loving kindness is understood here in the sense that we accept ourselves as we are and involves a tolerant, open-minded and lenient approach towards ourselves and especially when things go wrong in our lives! The common and mutually shared humanity recognizes the common and shared nature of suffering when difficult situations arise in life instead of feeling the separate loneliness and despair. Awareness here refers to the ability to open up to a painful experience ("It hurts!") with uncritical, indiscriminating and a nonjudgmental awareness of ourselves and others! Altogether, self-compassion is the exact opposite of our typical response to an internally perceived threat - usually self-criticism, isolation, and self-centered attitude. The big advantage for men is that these old disciplines partially derived from Samurai practices do not incorporate a feminized mindset as well as offering a path for men to concentrate on themselves while choosing to go their own path without having to open to an enemy that will abuse the openness.
So, fortunately, and as we've seen, we have as human beings a deep capacity that enables an adaptive and calming response to our suffering, self-healing and compassion. Therefore, compassion can be defined as openness to suffering with the desire to alleviate it and hence compassion as such a kind of self-directed approach. This may seem impossible or too high of a threshold for an individual that has been abused or neglected in childhood or even have been later experiencing trauma yet this is exactly what is required and is associated with a high level of happiness, well-being and mental health including strong emotional resilience in the light of dire situations and negative events in the present and future. In addition, although psychosocial therapists regardless of their therapeutic model – cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic, humanistic, familial, etc. - can help their clients to cultivate self compassion, yet the problem for us is that most of these therapists have a strong feminist inclination and indoctrination. Thus they are unable to help men in cultivating such kind of loving awareness and compassion and as is in all of those ancient tradition it is better suited for us men, either MGTOW's or Red Pill, to follow in our own footsteps in cultivating it. This essay examines the current understanding of self compassionate healing and liberation and offers practical suggestions to help men affected on the whole feminist Gynocentric spectrum, including men who have been affected by violence as well as DV by women so that they can treat themselves with greater understanding, containment, acceptance, compassion, and self-respect.
The value of self-compassion and why it is Important for men rejecting feminist brainwashing!
The value of a compassionate and nonjudgmental attitude has been described in at least two different perspectives in the context of psychotherapy and interpersonal and intimate relationships and has been incorporated into psychological interventions from psychoanalysis (eg Epstein, 2008, Bobrow, 2010) to cognitive- behavioral therapy (Hays, Follette, Linehan, 2004, Staff, Williams, & Teasdale, 2002). In addition, compassion can also be defined as nonjudgmental and indiscriminating awareness as well as a kind and gentle approach to the distress and suffering of others (and of ourselves) based or stemming of a strong desire to alleviate suffering and increase the individual's well-being, happiness and mental health. Although compassion, empathy, and loving kindness involve understanding and appreciation of the experience and its difficulties, compassion also comprises a positive emotional state, involving unconditional caring, kindness, acceptance, and warmth directed toward others and ourselves, regardless of the person's true or presumed qualities. When we embrace and implement these approaches into Western psychotherapy, compassion is always anchored in attention or mindfulness: it is the ability to maintain momentarily focused awareness of the inner openness and vulnerability of the person and his immediate environment, without judgment and full containment of our experience. This attentive awareness helps us to better understand the subjective nature of our thoughts, emotions, memories and reactions to them. This does not mean inaction, passivity or simply doing nothing, but rather an act of acceptance based on the insight that it is not possible to completely prevent harm or suffering in our lives and that the correction or happiness achieved through it or in any other way represents a sort or a type of happiness that is not free from suffering but is all inclusive. In other words and as we shall see in the discussion below, it is the insight that our happiness must contain the trauma whose consequences partly will remain forever and not try to exclude it from our lives. Instead of fighting it we learn from it and improve our lives. Not the trauma, but it is us who sit in the driver's seat and navigate our lives.
Self compassion as an antidote to lack of compassion - overcoming the compassion gap
One of the most critical elements of this research field, which I mentioned above, shows that people without self-compassion usually come from a nuclear family in which mothers were very critical. First, this is perhaps the first and most important empirical evidence of the very fact that our human society is Gynocentric and heavily women-centered, especially in terms of the empathy and compassion gap for boys and men. It is also possible to conclude that men seemingly cannot open up, express their feelings or seem to have a tendency to pull away as feminists claim, not because these traits are derived from their masculinity or the norms of a patriarchal society but rather it is distinctive derivative of a feminine concept, matriarchal norms and Gynocentric codes- whether through social or familial engineering, female indoctrination through education and even female unconscious conditioning thorough male and female role models. Moreover, people who come from dysfunctional families and exhibit non-adaptive attachment patterns (Neff & McGeehee, 2010, Wei, Liao, Ku, & Shaffer, 2011) are also related to those who lack self-compassion. Hence, most childhood abuse is related to mothers (about 70 percent of children are abusive by their mothers), while boys are the main target or recipients of this form of abuse, these men face devastating consequences in the sense of the compassion gap as grown up adults whether it is based solely on this fact and even more strongly as a result of the compassion gap in the context of emotional distress, lower self-esteem, alcohol and drug abuse as well as crime and suicide (Tanaka, Karla, Faglia-Wak and MAP's 2011 research team, Vettese, Dyer, Li & Wekerle, 2011 are the discussing those effect in the context of the lack of self compassion).
This is one of the reasons and perhaps the main one why suicide rates among men skyrocket from the seventies and eighties upon the official adaptation of Misandrist policies and mindset in the legal system of the modern and industrialized Western countries. The study also suggests that self-compassion heals the negative circumstances between childhood abuse and later emotional distress. In other words, abused men in childhood with higher levels of self-compassion are better able to cope with current traumas and disturbing events (Vettese et al., 2011). This context is true and valid even when we weigh the history of abuse, the current level of distress or drug use, suggesting that self-compassion is an important factor of resistance and coping mechanism or skill with those who have suffered trauma as boys and men. In addition, early trauma, such as childhood neglect or abuse by the mother, as well as the internalization of male hatred at the level of misandry in popular discourse and culture, may lead to self-criticism and shame because based on the compassion gap these men did not receive enough warmth in their childhood (Gilbert and Proctor, 2006). Gilbert (2009b, 2010) notes that childhood abuse survivors can easily identify their own patterns of thinking ("I'm unbearable") and provide alternative statements ("Some people love me"), but they do not necessarily find a soothing cognitive and emotional response. And so, because girls and women receive much more compassion both from men and women, while men and boys receive almost nothing based on the infamous compassion gap, the problematic is that the problem itself has now doubled, tripled or quadrupled by such a reality. In fact, most social illnesses, such as crime, higher prison rates for men, higher crime rates among men, drug addiction and higher rates of suicides among men can all be traced back to one single cause namely to this Gynocentric gap of compassion for boys and men
In a pilot study in the field of psychological and mental training (CMT, a structured program based on compassionate care, Gilbert & Irons, 2005), clients who came to day care at the hospital and faced shame and self-criticism showed a significant decline in depression, self-criticism and aggression (Gilbert & Procter, 2006). From all of this it is quite obvious that self-compassion seems to be a mechanism of action that can be adapted to different forms of therapy (Baer, 2010). For example, as a result of short-term psychodynamic therapy, anxiety, shame and guilt decreased and increased willingness to be present and experience sadness, anger. All these were associated with high levels of self-compassion (Shanesh, Styles, McCallow, Severberg, Nielsen, 2011). In the same study, increased self-compassion was also an indicator of a significant reduction in psychiatric symptoms and interpersonal problems. In other words, since self-compassion is based on a connection with difficult feelings without self-judgment, it seems to lead to healthier psychological functioning. Although compassion has positive effects on everyone, all the data and evidence attests to the fact that its impact on trauma victims is particularly high. Trauma, especially those exposed to intimate violence, often leads to alienation from others and from yourself, to expectations of further abuse of the trauma victim and to other ongoing injuries to normal relationships and intimacy between people. Because such compassionate awareness encourages the rejuvenation and rearrangement of these relationships (especially with oneself and the personal aspect), it may be very helpful, although sometimes it is difficult for the victim to accept it (Gilbert, 2009a). As noted above, trauma victims experienced one or more events that changed their experience of the self, life, the world, others, and indeed all of the reality altogether. Such events usually produce anxiety, terror and helplessness at a level that most people will never experience (American Psychiatric Association, 2004). These are not only characteristics of the classic abuse as expressed in men who are victims of violence by women but on the basis of lack of compassion they are much more potent than the traumatic injury in women. The nightmare associated with such traumatic experiences can dramatically change the experience of the trauma victim in the context of perception of reality and push him into a state of consciousness characterized by extreme fear, pain, uncontrollable memories and extreme changes in expectations for people and the future. The distress and pain associated with such extreme trauma may be fixed over time, but they are usually re-experienced as intrusive triggers in the victim when the survivor is reminded of trauma by various phenomena in his immediate environment or sometimes as part of his mental and cognitive processes. In this way, difficult memories and triggers mean, as Faulkner (1951/1975) points out in another context that for the abused victim "the past never dies, it has not even passed" (p. 80).
Many survivors of interpersonal traumas have been humiliated, rejected, or ashamed in the context of their injury and as a result they have begun to believe that they really do not deserve a fair treatment such as the offender or worse they deserving the abuse (Briere, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1990). In men, it is a classic of internalized misandry and is typical of many abused men, victims of intimate partner violence and even those with the cultural internalized misandry. The reactions related to the trauma of the victim (for example post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or problems with personal and intimate relationships) as well as their coping strategies (for example drug abuse or dissociation) were also usually stigmatized or otherwise based on prejudices anchored in the dominant female Gynocentric society whereas the result is that these men begin to internalize this self-hatred, namely that they are basically ill natured, bad and in fact even inherently and in a pathological way actually evil by their very nature! Fortunately, getting and receiving support with the trauma, the victim can significantly improve the healing of these difficulties. Self-compassion enables and gives the victim an opportunity to deal more effectively with different experiences of trauma, which gradually reduce the negative conclusions about him-self that in themselves are related to this type of injury. Shame, self-esteem, and self-hatred in this context are the result of misandry as well as the continuous and daily incitement against men and therefore involve their internalization into the personality of the man who now sees himself in the light of such negative emotions. Moreover, since these traits serve as feminist assumptions about the inherent evil and wickedness of men, which requires extreme measures to be taken against them even in the form of exclusion, self-compassion is not only a tool to reduce the destructive influence of misandry for men but also a powerful tool through which the male re-learns to see himself in a positive light and not through the eyes of feminism, Gynocentrism and misandry, and thus he is able to shake off false and anti-masculine assumptions about himself. When the history and the post-traumatic reactions of the victims are expressed, recognized and normalcy has been established, the man's judgment of himself as a dangerous and evil man who must fight himself, his essence and his natural masculine qualities that have to be eliminated or kept secret in a certain way are eliminated and replaced by positive awareness and image of himself.