#217: The Missing Piece in Your Healing Journey
I recorded this episode of On Attachment the morning after arriving back in Australia from three months in Europe—jet lagged, wide awake at 4 a.m., and running entirely on adrenaline and love for this work. In other words, peak human.
But maybe that’s fitting, because today’s topic is one that lands deeply in the human experience:
Self-compassion as the often-ignored, often-resisted missing piece in our healing.
Whether you struggle with anxious attachment, people-pleasing, perfectionism, overfunctioning, or that familiar internal voice whispering just do better, this one’s for you.
Why Self-Compassion Feels So Counterintuitive
If you grew up with high expectations or learned early on that love and belonging were tied to performance, chances are you developed a harsh internal dialogue:
Why can’t I stop being so anxious?
Why am I still insecure?
Why do I keep ending up in the same relationship patterns?
Why can’t I just get over it and move on?
We think this self-criticism is helpful—motivating, even.
We fear that being kind to ourselves means letting ourselves off the hook.
But here’s the truth:
Self-criticism doesn’t create growth. It creates shame.
And shame paralyzes us. It shuts down our capacity to change.
Self-compassion isn’t “soft.” It’s not indulgent. It’s not a free pass.
It’s the foundation that allows for meaningful self-responsibility and real transformation.
Your Anxiety Isn’t the Enemy—It’s a Scared Part of You
I often tell my students:
Your anxiety is like a smoke alarm.
It might be overly sensitive at times…but it’s always going off for a reason.
When we shame ourselves for feeling anxious, we aren’t silencing the alarm—we’re ignoring it. And ignored alarms don’t get quieter; they get louder.
Think of it this way:
If you were in a building and smelled smoke, and everyone around you said, “Don’t be ridiculous, stop being paranoid,” would that calm you down?
Of course not.
Your body would escalate because it believes something is wrong—and no amount of shaming yourself would override that.
The same is true internally.
When we tell ourselves stop being so anxious, stop being so needy, stop overreacting, we disconnect from the part of us that most needs our care.
Self-compassion sounds like this:
“This is scary. This is hard. And it makes sense that I’m feeling this way.”
This validation is not enabling.
It’s soothing.
It’s integrative.
It’s the first step toward safety.
And we cannot grow from a place where we don’t feel safe.
Why Shame Blocks Healing
Many people believe that if they stop beating themselves up, they’ll never change.
So the logic becomes:
“Be harder on yourself so you don’t repeat the same mistakes.”
But here’s the problem:
Shame doesn’t create accountability—it creates avoidance.
When you’re drowning in something is wrong with me, there is no spaciousness for curiosity, reflection, or empowered decision-making.
Shame contracts you.
Self-compassion opens you.
Growth requires openness.
Which means…
Self-compassion isn’t the opposite of self-responsibility.
Self-compassion is what makes self-responsibility possible.
Self-Compassion + Self-Responsibility = Real Growth
This is the beautiful feedback loop:
Self-compassion gives you inner safety.
You stop shaming yourself for struggling.
You stop believing your feelings are wrong.
Inner safety allows for self-responsibility.
You can look honestly at your patterns.
You can take ownership without collapsing into blame.
Self-responsibility leads to meaningful change.
You can make different choices.
Seek support.
Set boundaries.
Shift your relational templates.
But without the first step of compassion, the rest simply cannot unfold.
It’s not enough to intellectually understand your triggers or patterns.
If the relationship you have with yourself is still harsh, punitive, or dismissive, the healing work won’t stick.
The Most Common Missing Piece
In thousands of conversations with clients and students, I have found this to be universally true:
Most people come into healing work expecting to “fix” themselves, not to soften toward themselves.
But lasting healing doesn’t come from fixing.
It comes from relating to yourself differently.
Especially if you have insecure attachment patterns, where invalidation may have been a core wound—learning to validate yourself is deeply reparative.
You become your own secure base.
You become someone you can trust.
And that changes everything.
A Final Reminder (Especially for the Self-Compassion Skeptics)
Self-compassion does not mean:
excusing harmful behavior
bypassing responsibility
giving up on growth
wallowing in self-pity
Self-compassion does mean:
acknowledging that your reactions make sense
understanding your history instead of shaming it
staying curious instead of critical
creating inner safety so you can make better choices next time
This is the missing piece for so many people—not because they’re incapable of healing, but because they’ve been approaching healing from the wrong place:
Self-punishment instead of self-connection.
If you want change, start by changing the way you relate to yourself.
That’s where everything begins.
If You’re Ready to Deepen This Work
The Secure Self Challenge is opening again in January, and the presale is currently live at a very reduced rate.
This round will be completely refreshed with brand-new content designed to help you:
rebuild your sense of self-worth
develop a more secure inner relationship
interrupt old attachment patterns
and move into the new year with intention
It’s the fourth time I’m running the challenge, and it’s one of the most transformative programmes I offer in a short, structured format.
If you struggle with insecure attachment, low self-worth, or harsh self-criticism, this challenge is a beautiful place to begin.
You might also like…
[00:00:00]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. Today's episode is the first episode that I'm recording since arriving back in Australia. Some of you might know I've been travelling in Europe for the last three months and I literally landed back in Sydney last night, drove home from the airport, which is a couple of hours for us. We got in at about 9pm we are heavily jet lagged, so I slept from maybe 1am till 4am and I am here recording this episode. So full disclaimer. It could be entirely incoherent and I apologise in advance, but we are going to be talking today about the missing piece in a lot of people's healing journey and that is our mindset, the way that we relate to ourselves, the way we relate to the things that we struggle with and really the importance of self compassion in amongst all of that. Now if you are someone who has spent a lot of your life pushing, hustling, striving, maybe you're a perfectionist, maybe you're of the over functioning type and you have an inner dialogue that tells you to just try harder and do better.
[00:01:03]:
Self compassion can be really, really counterintuitive and it can feel almost a little bit soft, right? We can have a lot of resistance to this idea of being kind to ourselves or being less self critical or less punitive. It can feel like we're almost letting ourselves off the hook. But as we're going to talk about today, it's not true at all to say that self compassion and starting with self compassion in our healing journey is tantamount to giving ourselves a free pass. The way I see it, it's almost a prerequisite to being able to meaningfully engage with our patterns and take responsibility and ultimately grow. So I want to share some thoughts on that today. It's going to be a short and sweet episode on account of my sleep deprivation, but it is actually a very, very important one. If you have been in any of my programmes, my communities, you would know that so much of the advice that I give people when they come to me with all manner of questions and queries and what do I do in situation and how do I stop being so anxious and how can I stop myself from getting triggered and all of these things so much of the time my advice comes down to something that is fundamentally about changing the way we relate to ourselves in those moments that we struggle. So going to be sharing some thoughts on that today.
[00:02:20]:
If you are someone who's a self compassion sceptic, please stay with me because I too am someone who leans more towards like just do better as a baseline. And I am so big on self responsibility. That is an absolute pillar of my work and my personal orientation in life is really to take ownership of what we can control and what we can change. But as we'll talk about today, self compassion is a really big part of that. Okay, before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to let you all know that my Secure Self Challenge is going to be kicking off again in January. There are already about 25 people signed up who joined. There was a pre sale option with Black Friday sale and for the next week I'm going to be offering a really reduced pre sale rate just for the Secure Self Challenge. So if you're interested, I haven't finalised all of the details yet, but it will be the fourth time that I'm running the challenge and I'm actually going to be totally overhauling it and re recording brand new content.
[00:03:21]:
I'm really, really excited about it and I think January is a really great time to do it. Obviously we get that new year energy and I think it's a really beautiful time of year to both reflect, take stock and set intention as well as come up with a bit of a game plan for okay, if things need to shift in my life, how am I going to get myself there? And so having a bit of structure around that in the month of January I think is a really beautiful thing. So if you're someone who struggles with insecure attachment patterns, if you struggle in your relationship with yourself, as I always say, self worth is where so much of it stems from and where so much of the work begins. So the Secure Self Challenge is a really great little programme to kind of reset on your inner relationship and allow that to trickle out into all areas of life. And if you'd like to sign up at that very discounted pre sale rate, you can do so via my website. The link to that page is in the show notes. So the missing piece in so many people's healing journey. Now, as I foreshadowed in the introduction, it is so, so common in people that I work with.
[00:04:23]:
I literally hear it every day. People who say, how can I stop being so whatever. Anxious, insecure and needy. Why do I struggle with low self worth? How can I just feel unworthy? Why do I struggle with boundaries? Why can't I just be more confident? I don't know what's wrong with me. Why can't I just let go? Why do I struggle with loneliness? So many things that we judge ourselves really harshly for, and that seems to be our starting point, is to assume that there's something wrong with what we're experiencing and how we're feeling. And of course, that makes a lot of sense if the thing that we're experiencing and the feelings we're feeling are hard, uncomfortable or at odds with what we really want for ourselves. So if we've had a string of. Of relationships that haven't worked out and we've faced disappointments and maybe we've been really hopeful, and then we've actually ended up in a repeat of the same old pattern, and that's felt not only disheartening, but we maybe carry shame around that.
[00:05:23]:
And this deep belief of, like, there must just be something wrong with me, that I keep experiencing this, that people keep leaving me, or I keep pushing them away or whatever the storey is, right? We've all got these storeys. And as I said, if your template is to internalise other people's behaviour or situations or things that you're struggling with as meaning that you're just not doing a good enough job, or you just need to be better or try harder or be different, that there is something inherently wrong with your experience or the way you're experiencing it, so the feelings that you're having about your experience, then it's probably very familiar to you that you would end up in these loops of, there's just something wrong with me. Why can't I just stop being so anxious? Why can't I just stop being so insecure? Why can't I just stop being so needy? Why can't I just stop overthinking? It is, for many of us, much more comfortable to make ourselves the problem and just try and push away the thing that we deem to be wrong about ourselves and kind of put a lid on it, bury it away. But as you would know if you've tried that approach, it doesn't tend to work very well. And the way that I always explain this to my students is like, your anxiety is a scared part of you, right? And it's a very real part of you that really, deeply believes that it is helping you by warning you of all of the things that could go wrong, or all of the things that are maybe already going wrong, that are imperfect, that are potential red flags, or things that don't feel quite right. And by assuming that our anxiety is just delusion or paranoid paranoia, and trying to hit the mute button on that, that part of us that is carrying those fears, those Beliefs doesn't just go away because we're trying to turn away from it, right? That's still with us. And much like if you were in a building and you could smell smoke and you started trying to warn the people around you, I think the building's on fire, I can smell smoke. And everyone just told you that you were crazy and to stop being so paranoid.
[00:07:28]:
If you can smell smoke, that's not going to be much comfort to you, right? That's not going to suddenly calm you down and you're going to go back to what you were doing. You're probably going to escalate in your attempts to get the attention of people who you think might be able to help you or who you need to mobilise to deal with the situation. And the exact same thing is true within us, right? That these parts of us that are trying so hard to keep us safe and so hard to protect us from hurt, pain, disappointment, betrayal, loss, really deeply believe that there's something wrong. And so when those familiar feelings come up in our body, whether it's like gut clenching or heart racing or heat tingling, all of those things that then send those messages to our brain, saying, something's wrong, you need to do something. Just making ourselves wrong for that and shaming ourselves for that, whether in the moment or in the aftermath of it, is really, really unhelpful, because it totally misses the fact that what we're experiencing is absolutely real, even if it's not true in the sense of grounded reality. Like, even if the fear storey didn't come to fruition, even if it turns out we were catastrophizing, what we're experiencing in that moment was very real. And there's a part of us that really needs our care and attention. And so just telling ourselves to stop being so anxious is not the medicine that we need there.
[00:08:49]:
And this kind of brings me to the key point here, which is when we are trying to grow and we are doing it from an energy of there is something wrong with me that I need to fix, which is overwhelmingly the kind of belief in the storey that people are carrying when they come to my work, will you be able to fix me? Because I have this terrible thing wrong with me and I struggle in these ways that make me unworthy unlovable, and I need to fix myself urgently, right? And I will always say to people that that energy of trying to fix yourself and assuming that you are broken, that is actually going to be the thing that stops you from heal. And so I will always guide people to the starting point of cultivating self compassion. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to love and embrace every part of yourself and all of the ways in which you struggle, but what it does require is that you can soften some of that shame and grip and self criticism and punishment and instead turn towards yourself with curiosity and a starting assumption that what you're experiencing makes sense. Right? Because it always does. Like I said, there's so many times to students in my programmes like you could not tell me something about yourself that with enough context I would not be able to say to you. Well, of course that makes perfect sense. Anyone in your situation would feel that way and it's totally natural and understandable. And I think the more that we can learn to respond to ourselves with that same energy of like, yeah, this is really hard and it makes sense that this is scary, that really, really soothes our anxious parts, right? It allows us to say like, oh, you, you, you smell smoke, that must be really scary.
[00:10:33]:
Like let's, let's do something about that so that you can feel more comfortable with the situation rather than just telling that part of us to shut up and get over it or stop ruining everything. So learning to validate ourselves, to show up in this way for ourselves is so essential. And particularly so if you're someone who struggles with anxious attachment patterns because almost always there is a wound around feeling invalidated. And whether that comes from our family system, whether we've intern the message that we are too much, too sensitive, too needy, that our emotions are unwelcome, we sort of take that on and we become our own worst enemy in terms of giving ourselves that feedback. So every time we have a feeling, we then doubt whether we're allowed to have the feeling. And oftentimes we then end up in relationships where that gets mirrored back to us and it all kind of swirls around. So one of the most healing things that you can do as someone with that background and with that storey and that template in relationships is learn to show up for yourself, turn towards yourself with curiosity, curiosity, compassion and validation and say like, yes, I hear you. I see that this is scary.
[00:11:38]:
I see that you're overwhelmed, I see that you're nervous, I see that you're anxious. That makes sense. It's going to be okay. Becoming that secure attachment figure to yourself is such an essential starting point in this journey of healing. Now, the other piece before we wrap up, that I want to emphasise that I know I mentioned earlier, was around self responsibility and for a lot of people I actually asked people in my healing anxious attachment course a little while ago what they struggled with when it came to self compassion. And a lot of the responses had this common thread of it feels self indulgent, it feels like letting myself off the hook. It feels like I'm being soft on myself when really I need to be hard on myself. Because look at my life, I'm so far from where I want to be.
[00:12:24]:
If I just start wrapping myself up in warm and fuzzy kind of language, isn't that just to enable me in doing more of the same? It's almost like I take away the motivation to change if I'm being too kind to myself rather than reminding myself of all of the ways that I mess up and all of the ways that I'm not good enough. And of course we live in a society that is big on punishment and reward. So it makes sense that for a lot of us that's what we reach for. If I've done the wrong thing or I've messed up, I need to punish myself so that I can do better. But really all that does is perpetuate shame. It comes from shame and it creates more shame. And when our system is bogged down in shame, I always say that it's like poisoning the soil and then expecting things to grow. It's not going to work because shame leads us into contraction.
[00:13:16]:
It leads us into a really closed, internally stressed, fear driven state. It's a very shutdown energy and it's really hard to grow from that place. It just doesn't tend to work very well. We grow when we feel safe and shame is not safe. So really in being self compassionate, it's not just a nice idea, it's actually very much facilitative of growth and self responsibility, which is this idea of being able to look honestly and engage meaningfully with our contribution to our patterns, the ways in which we may be acting out of alignment or not showing up as our best self, not exerting agency. Maybe we're stuck in storeys of victimhood and blame. It's only when we can be self compassionate and not make ourselves wrong, not shame ourselves, that there's enough safety for us to also take self responsibility, right? And say, okay, it makes perfect sense that I'm struggling with this and what do I need to do? What hard decisions do I need to make? What support do I need to surround myself with or invest in in order to get myself out of this pattern, to really dial in like what is within my control here and what am I going to do about it. I think that there's this really beautiful feedback loop almost between self compassion and self responsibility.
[00:14:33]:
And it's really hard to be genuinely self response in a non toxic way, in a non self blaming, self shaming way if we don't have self compassion there as a starting point. If we don't have that inner safety of knowing that like I'm not going to beat myself up, I'm not going to self flagellate if I make a mistake, but I am going to remain accountable to myself, to the standards that I set for who and how I want to show up, being able to find that sweet spot which is really where growth happens, that's where growth is possible, that requires that have self compassion in place. And that is really the missing piece in the vast majority of people who come to my work have that in common that they really struggle with self compassion, that they are so accustomed to self blame and shame. And it's when we shift that and we really work the muscle of self compassion because it takes practise, it's not natural for most people. That's when things really start to shift and it's a very, very positive ripple effect once you get, get that piece in place. Okay, I'm going to leave it there. I really hope that this has been a helpful reminder for you again for the self compassion sceptics. I know that the resistance to that is so real, but I hope you're comforted by the fact that this is not about enabling ourselves.
[00:15:53]:
It's not about excusing behaviour. It's actually about recognising that our behaviour, our emotions, our responses make sense and that it's our job to engage meaningfully in. Okay, what was going on for me there and what might a healthier solution look like? It's only when we have a really safe and healthy inner relationship that there's enough space for us to do that and to ultimately choose differently next time. So it's so, so important for our growth, for our healing, for our evolution that we can have that kind of relationship with ourselves. Okay, if you do want to join the Secure Self Challenge at a very reduced rate, make sure that you cheque out the link in the show notes or head straight to my website. I'd love to see as many of you as possible in the challenge come January, but otherwise I hope you have a great week and I'll see you next time.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
self compassion, healing journey, mindset, self criticism, inner dialogue, perfectionism, self worth, Secure Self Challenge, insecure attachment, self responsibility, anxiety, anxious attachment patterns, relationships, low self worth, boundaries, emotional validation, shame, growth, self blame, self shaming, self acceptance, self punishment, overthinking, self growth, personal development, inner relationship, self improvement, emotional regulation, attachment styles, mindset shifts