Wina Gen Sotto SAS 1 - C

BSCS IV MTh 1:30 - 3:00

Self-compassion and Psychological Resilience

Among Adolescents and Young Adults
Kristin D. Neff & Pittman McGehee

In this day and age, more and more people are becoming more aware of the
existence of mental illnesses and its effects. There have also been several efforts on
preventing them and identifying its causes. A lot of today’s youth are very motivated and
ready to pursue their goals and ideals, but there are also others who are opposite of them.
Those who stress over and struggle with their academic responsibilities and feel like they
need to fit in with others and the ongoing trend. At some point in our lives, we may have
experienced such depressing situations and have gotten over it or maybe not. The second
group’s report, which is about self-compassion and psychological resilience among
adolescents and young adults, teaches us the different factors affecting one’s self-
compassion and how self-compassion could possibly help our problems with one’s
negative self-evaluation.
Neff proposed three major components of self-compassion: self-kindness,
common humanity, and mindfulness. Self-kindness refers to the ability to treat oneself
with care and understanding rather than self-judgment. A sense of common humanity is
where one recognizes that one’s imperfection is a shared aspect of the human experience
rather than feeling isolated by one’s failures. Lastly, mindfulness involves holding one’s
present-moment experience in balanced perspective rather than exaggerating the
dramatic storyline of one’s suffering. These three components combine and mutually
interact to create a self-compassionate frame of mind which then help us when external
circumstances prove to be difficult for us to bear whether it be our own fault or not.
It has been found through research that self-compassion is highly linked to one’s
well-being and focusing on improving it could greatly help in having stable feelings on
one’s self-worth. Self-compassion was also found to be associated with internal working
models of attachment. There are four different types of attachment which vary according
to levels of avoidance and anxiety. Avoidance relates to expectations about others as
trustworthy and supportive while anxiety relates to the individual’s beliefs about self-
worth. These four types of attachment are: secure, preoccupied, fearful, and dismissing.
A secure attachment is characterized by trust and comfort with intimacy, which
corresponds to low avoidance and low anxiety. The preoccupied attachment is
characterized by jealousy and clinging, corresponds low avoidance and high anxiety.
Fearful attachment is characterized by distrust of others and feelings of inadequacy and
corresponds to high avoidance and high anxiety. And lastly, the dismissing attachment is
characterized by downplaying the importance of relationships and inflating self-worth,
which corresponds to high avoidance and low anxiety.
 These different attachments could be applied to different types of relationships like
friendship or romantic ones. These different types of attachment could also yield different
kinds of results on various relationships, whether the relationship will be satisfactory or
not. They could also affect the length of the relationship whether it’ll be a long-lasting one
or short-lived.
Several family factors also affect self-compassion and personal well-being namely:
maternal support, good family functioning, and attachment security. One’s family
condition could greatly affect how one would relate and view themselves. A person who
grew within a functional family with a supportive mother are more likely to have more self-
compassion compared to those who grew in a problematic family environment. As they
say, everything starts in the family considering that they’re the group of people you
interact with most of the time and ahead of others. Mental health problems like depression
could start as early as childhood which could be due to one’s family environment. How
one interacts with others could be modeled on how interactions with family members go.
I find this research on improving one’s self-compassion tremendously helpful for
people who badly need help and have a hard time improving their self-esteem, myself
included. Viewing one’s self as someone worthy of being where you are right now could
be the first step in helping alleviate one’s problems. The finding that these family factors
could help improve self-compassion which then improves one’s well being could help us
be aware of how we treat other people especially our family. Taking care of one’s well-
being isn’t limited to taking care physically. Taking care of ourselves mentally is as
important and not doing so could have tremendous consequences. Undergoing
depression and/or anxiety isn’t easy and others wouldn’t notice it immediately. We all
have our own battles where we fight everyday, each of us may be differing in scale but
that doesn’t change the fact that we fight no matter how small or big it may be. Basically,
it is important that we remember all the time to treat and others and especially ourselves
nicely.