My girlfriend broke up with my in January, but that’s not what this post is about. I was on an emotional roller coaster for many weeks afterward, so I joined a support group on Yahoo for people like me who had gone through a breakup. One woman in the group – I’ll call her Ann – described going through a breakup that was a lot more painful than mine. I wanted to help her, so what I suggested was that she read what she had written as if someone else had written it. I thought doing that would help her to see in a different way how much pain the writer of the post (who of course was Ann herself) was in, and as a result, give herself a lot more compassion. Ann did what I suggested and wrote to say that she did start giving herself more compassion after reading what she wrote in the way I suggested.
From years of my own experience and observing others, I’ve known for a long time that compassion promotes physical and emotional healing, so I was very glad that Ann had followed my suggestion. You too can do what Ann did. Write down your illness story. You don’t need to post it here, but you can as a comment here if you want to. Wait a day, and then read it while imagining that someone else wrote it. Let yourself feel the same compassion you would for that other person, then give all that compassion to yourself.
