The Chair Beside You

There is a question I have asked hundreds of times in my office, and I still cannot predict who will light up when I ask it.

Are you hard on yourself?

The people who say yes usually say it with a strange kind of enthusiasm. It is often the first animated thing they have said in weeks. They sit up. They start listing. I’m stupid. I’m ugly. I’m behind everyone. Nobody actually likes me, they just tolerate me. I ruin everything I touch. They can recite it fluently, because they have been rehearsing it for years.

And then I ask them to do something small and slightly odd. I ask them to imagine an eight-year-old version of themselves sitting in the empty chair beside them. Not a metaphor — an actual child, with a specific haircut and a specific pair of sneakers. If there is a childhood photo on their phone, I ask them to pull it up.

Then I ask them to say it to that kid.

I have never once had someone do it. Not once. What happens instead is that they stop, and their face changes, and very often they cry — sometimes for the first time in a long while. No. Never. I would never say that to him.

Why not?

That’s the real question, and it is worth sitting with instead of rushing past.

Ask most people why they wouldn’t speak that way to a child and they say something like: because it would crush him. Right. And then: because it wouldn’t help. Also right, and this is the part most of us skip. Harshness is not a stern-but-effective motivational strategy that we happen to find unpleasant. It is simply ineffective. A good parent does not shame or humiliate a child, not because shaming is impolite, but because it does not work. It makes the child more miserable and less capable, and it does nothing whatsoever to improve tomorrow’s behavior.

The same is true of you. Every single time.

Here is the mechanism I keep coming back to. There is a part of you that decides, plans, judges, and talks — call it your inner parent. And there is a part of you that gets talked to — the part that feels, wants, and watches. Call it your inner child. That second part reacts to the first part exactly the way a real child reacts to a real parent. Tell it that it’s an idiot and it will feel sad, alone, and worthless. And a person who feels sad, alone, and worthless has very little energy left over for fixing anything.

That’s the trap. We are harsh with ourselves in order to improve, and the harshness removes the fuel that improvement runs on.

Guilt is useful. Shame is not.

I want to draw a line here, because I am not arguing that you should never look squarely at what you’ve done.

Guilt is an emotion doing its job. It says: pay attention, you did something that hurt someone. That’s information, and it points somewhere — toward an apology, an amends, a correction, a decision not to do it again. If you make a mistake, welcome to the human race. Now you have work to do.

Shame is different. Shame says you didn’t just do something wrong, you are wrong, at the root. And once you believe you are essentially flawed, something perverse happens: you begin behaving according to that belief. Why bother correcting a mistake if you are the mistake? Why treat your body well if the body belongs to someone contemptible? People act out their beliefs about themselves with remarkable consistency. The harsher you are with yourself about your shortcomings, the less likely you are to learn a thing from experience.

So: acknowledge the error, forgive yourself, see what amends are possible, and then stop. Do not add to the mistake by spending your emotional energy on believing you are the mistake.

But I don’t feel compassionate toward myself

You probably don’t, and I want to be clear that this does not matter as much as you think.

Self-compassion, in the way I mean it, is not a warm feeling that descends on you one day. It is a decision, followed by actions, followed — eventually, and often much later — by the feeling. You choose to see yourself as a good person who made a bad choice. You do not wake up believing it. You say it first. Then you begin acting the way you think a person who believed it would act. Only after that does it start to feel true.

This order matters enormously, because the lag is where people quit. Two days of eating well does not make you feel healthy. Two weeks of talking to yourself decently does not make you feel worthy. People give up in exactly that gap, conclude the whole thing was nonsense, and go back to the old voice — which at least has the comfort of being familiar.

Real parents understand this instinctively. They believe in a child’s inherent worth long before the child has produced any evidence for it. That’s not delusion, it’s parenting. Do the same for yourself.

A practice for this week

This is the exercise I give people, and it is more powerful than it looks on paper.

Find ten minutes. Sit or lie down somewhere comfortable and close your eyes. Picture yourself as a child, as clearly as you can — a photograph helps. Then talk to that child, out loud if you can manage it, and say these things:

You are loved.
I care about you.
You have a right to be here, just like any other living being.
You are perfect exactly as you are.
I only want you to be well, and I hope you are not suffering.
I will always be on your side, no matter what.
What can I do to help?

Do it daily for a week. It will feel ridiculous on day one. Somewhere around day three or four, for most people, it stops feeling ridiculous.

One caution, and I mean it. If this brings up hostility toward that child, or distressing memories, stop and do it with a therapist. If you have a history of trauma, do it with support from the beginning. Some doors are better opened with someone in the room.

The audience that never leaves

The reason any of this works is that you have a permanent witness. That child part of you is watching everything — every promise kept, every promise broken, every time you speak to yourself like garbage and every time you don’t. It doesn’t judge you. It just feels, and what it feels accumulates into the thing we call self-worth.

You cannot fire that audience member. You cannot impress it with achievements it knows you didn’t earn honestly. But you can, starting today, stop saying things to it that you would never say to a child sitting in the chair beside you.

That is not a small change. In my experience it’s the whole ballgame.

Lori A. Strayer, M.Ed., LPC, is a licensed professional counselor and the author of Solid Inside: Cultivating Authentic Self-Worth and Lasting Inner Peace. Nothing here is a substitute for care from a licensed professional. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.