Marianne Ingheim - Out of Love: Finding Your Way Back to Self-Compassion

Copyright 2020 Marianne Ingheim

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-63152-695-4 pbk

ISBN: 978-1-63152-696-1 ebk

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019919060

For information, address:

She Writes Press

1569 Solano Ave #546

Berkeley, CA 94707

Cover and interior design by Tabitha Lahr

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

Disclaimer: This book is intended to provide information of a general nature to an audience interested in self-compassion and personal growth. It is not a substitute for medical or psychological treatment. In the event these services are neededi.e. if you are experiencing anxiety, depression, or other symptoms of a potentially serious conditionplease seek professional help.

The stories that appear in this book are based on the authors experience of certain events. The intent is not to prescribe behaviors but to demonstrate what was valuable to the author in managing these events.

In memory of Tamara,
who passed too soon. Fuck cancer.

I THOUGHT I HAD TO BE self-critical. If I wasnt, who knew what would happen, what bad things Id do, what a loser Id be?

I didnt know any other way.

Like most of us, I learned to be self-critical from family, church, school, and other elements of my environment. I learned to tell myself critical and dis-empowering stories, which, at their core, were rooted in a single fearthat Id never be good enough.

I grew up in a strict Seventh-day Adventist home, believing that I was deeply flawed. My parents did their best, as all parents do, but they had learned to be self-critical, and they passed that on to my sister and me. My Danish grandmother was a highly critical person, and although I loved her dearly, I never felt I could live up to her expectations. My mother was depressed throughout my childhoodher marriage to my father was falling apart (and eventually did)and as a symptom of the dysfunction, our little family moved continuously from one place to the other, mostly back and forth between Denmark and America.

As an adult, I perpetuated this pattern, moving constantly, and escaping in other ways, too: alcohol, achieving, and codependent romantic relationships. I was sure uncertainty was the thing to avoid, so I tried to control my environment with endless list making, worrying disguised as planning, and performing disguised as high achievement. I struggled to make sense of a critical God and church that seemed misaligned with who I wanted to be, until I finally left the Seventh-day Adventist church in 2013. Doing so was part of a gradual paradigm shift, a move away from the critical stories that had surrounded me throughout my childhood.

I hadnt always been so self-critical. My mother tells me that at the age of two, when asked how old I was, I would reply, Two years wonderful!and then I would hug myself and flash my biggest smile, because I knew I was wonderful.

Self-criticism is learned. The good thing about that is we can unlearn it!

For me, the game changer was the practice of self-compassion. I first heard about this in a Sounds True interview with Dr. Kristin Neff. After listening to that conversation, I read Dr. Neffs book, Self-Compassionand it changed my life. In Dr. Neffs definition of self-compassion, there are three elements: self-kindness (instead of self-judgment), mindfulness (instead of overidentification), and common humanity (instead of isolation). In the pages to come, I will present stories that illustrate each of these elements.

We all tell ourselves stories about who we are. Many of these stories are self-critical and disempowering. However, we can choose to tell new stories that are empowering. We can stake our claim as heroes in our own lives. We can practice self-compassionate storytelling that heals our core wound of unworthiness and returns us to our courageous hearts, which were never really lost, just buried underneath conditioned thinking. Through the practice of self-compassion, we can become more authentic and powerful versions of ourselves, transforming not only our own lives but also the lives of those around us.

What stories do you tell yourself about who you are?

Does your story help you live a courageous life?

If not, why do you tell yourself that story?

Sometimes life stops you in your tracks and forces you to take a good look at who youve become.

My wake-up call came in August of 2016 when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a double mastectomy and a lot of soul searching, I realized I had not been happy for many years, and I needed to make some big changes in order to live a more meaningful life. One of these changes was to leave my husband of almost ten years.

In my marriage, I had perpetuated the pattern of surrounding myself with critical people. My husband did the best he could, considering the challenges he faced, but I found myself stifled in our relationship, unable to grow into the person I wanted to be. For months I agonized about how to tell him I was leaving. I knew it would break his heart, and I desperately wanted not to do that. Finally, on a February day in 2017, with the help of a counselor, I told him.

Later that night, I received a call from the sheriffs department: Thered been a car crash in West Oakland. A concrete pillar. Hed died instantly.

When I returned to our apartment, I found a suicide note and two Google map printouts of the crash site. The counselor, our friends, our family, mewe were all in shock. Thered been no signs. That must have meant it was my fault.

It had all happened in rapid succession within the course of six monthsthe breast cancer diagnosis and double mastectomy, the difficult decision to leave my husband, his subsequent suicide. How was I ever going to make sense of all this? How was I ever going to live without blaming myself every day for my husbands death?

In the fall of 2017, I went back to school for my PhD, determined to study how self-compassion can help us move through transitions. Because thats what self-compassion has been doing for me, day by day.

Change isnt easy. It can be a slow and arduous process, very much like the process of metamorphosis that changes a caterpillar into a butterfly. In one of the four stages, the soon-to-be butterfly turns itself into mush, dissolving all the old to make room for the new. Likewise, Ive had to let go of the past in order to embrace the new and accept feeling like mush sometimes. As we allow the process of transformation to move through us, we must be gentle with ourselves. We cant control what happens, but we can choose what story to tell about it, and that makes all the difference.