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Self-compassion for the “inherently sinful”

And why it sometimes triggers a threat response

The RHR Digest | Publication Date: December 26th, 2025

Key Points:

  • Self-compassion is a essential piece of religious harm recovery because it counters internalized beliefs that continue to foster self-loathing.
  • Challenges to self-compassion include confusion about feelings, fear of carelessness, and/or a general distrust of spiritual practices.
  • Engaging with small experiments can help cultivate self-compassion, such as acknowledging self-judgment and pausing when feeling exhausted.

One thing I often encourage my clients and those in my Religious Harm Recovery community to cultivate is self-compassion.

At the same time, I know that this encouragement often triggers an internal eye roll and the thought, “easier said than done.”

In these situations, difficulty accessing self-compassion may actually be self-protective.

You see, when you’re indoctrinated into a high-control religion that conditioned you to believe in your inherent worthlessness through fear- and shame-based messaging, even a small amount of kindness directed toward yourself can set off alarm bells in your nervous system.

Because this is such a common experience for people recovering from religious indoctrination, today’s Religious Harm Recovery Digest focuses on the development of self-compassion as an important part of the recovery process.

To help us get there, we will also explore why self-compassion’s opposite, self-loathing, can feel like the more natural or even safer default setting in your nervous system.

And at the end, we will briefly touch on a few ways you might begin shifting that default setting toward something closer to self-compassion.

But first, let’s make sure we are on the same page about what the term “self-compassion” actually means.

Defining self-compassion

Self‑compassion is the practice of relating to yourself with the same kindness, care, and understanding you would offer a close friend when they are suffering or struggling.

In contemporary psychology, Kristin Neff’s work defines self‑compassion as involving three intertwined elements:

  • Self‑kindness instead of self‑judgment
  • Recognizing common humanity instead of isolation
  • Staying mindful of pain instead of getting swept away by it

Even though the practice of self-compassion can feel difficult, threatening, or simply inaccessible for those of us recovering from a high-control religion, research has found that those who are able to cultivate self-compassion in their day-to-day lives have lower overall anxiety and depression and greater resilience and life satisfaction.

So even though it may be a challenge at first, learning to orient towards yourself with more more self-compassion could be a game-changer in your healing journey.

Why self-loathing becomes the default

If you grew up in a system that rewarded self-denial and self-criticism, self-loathing probably feels like a natural default.

And if not self-loathing, then at least constant self‑judgment, self‑monitoring, and a pattern of sidelining your own needs.

For a lot of people who have left a high-control religion, these default states will often feel safer than being kind to yourself.

From a nervous system perspective, this makes sense.

If you were taught that god, leaders, or community members were always watching and ready to call you out, staying one step ahead of that criticism becomes protective.

If you criticize yourself first, maybe no one else will.

Self-loathing can also feel like a way to maintain connection.

If a community communicates—directly or indirectly—that you are acceptable only when you are repentant, small, or constantly improving, then harshness toward yourself becomes the gateway to belonging within that system (this can include your family system).

In these contexts, your nervous system learned that being kind to yourself risks disapproval, abandonment, or punishment.

How this shows up in everyday life

If this is sounding familiar, consider some of the subtle ways this nervous system conditioning that defaults more towards self-judgement or self-loathing can show up in day-to-day life:

  • Automatically replaying conversations and cataloging everything you did “wrong”
  • Assuming any difficult feeling is a sign of personal failure, not a normal human response
  • Feeling an inability to engage in rest, pleasure, or ease even when you technically have the space or time to do so
  • Struggling to receive reassurance or kindness from others without immediately doubting or minimizing it

You might notice that your inner world still runs on old rules: “If I’m hard enough on myself, maybe I can avoid hurting people,” or “If I stay small and self-critical, maybe I’ll stay safe.”

It’s important to keep in mind that these default beliefs and thought process often get reinforced not just by religious messaging, but also by broader systems like patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism that reward self‑erasure and over‑functioning.

Common challenges with accessing self-compassion

By the time self-compassion is introduced, many people have already internalized self-judgment as a survival strategy for all the reasons outlined above.

So even if you want to be gentler with yourself, a few predictable sticking points often show up:

  • Confusion about what it should feel like.
  • If you associate compassion with warm, fuzzy feelings, you might assume you are “doing it wrong” if all you feel is numbness, irritation, or suspicion.
  • In reality, early self-compassion often feels more like less self-attack than like overflowing tenderness.
  • Fear of becoming careless or harmful.
  • If your religious background framed strict self-monitoring as the only thing standing between you and disaster, it can feel risky to loosen your grip even slightly.
  • Your nervous system may equate self-compassion with lowering your guard.
  • Distrust of anything that sounds spiritual.
  • Practices like guided meditations, loving-kindness phrases, or breathwork can resemble the prayer or worship environments you worked hard to leave.
  • Even if the content is different, your body may still respond as if you are re-entering a coercive space.
  • Difficulty locating your own needs.
  • If you spent years overriding hunger, fatigue, desire, or anger in the name of obedience or service, it can be hard to know what you actually need in a given moment.
  • Self-compassion can feel abstract when you are not yet sure how to turn toward yourself.

Identifying some of these challenges is meant to normalize the gap between understanding self-compassion as a helpful concept and actually feeling able to access it in real time.

That gap is often where the real recovery work lives.

Reframing self-compassion to support recovery

If your only exposure to the language of compassion came through sermons, devotional books, or spiritual leaders, you may understandably have a reaction to the word itself.

Lots of times in those systems, compassion can actually become weaponized.

So now, you might associate it with:

  • Pressure to forgive before you were ready
  • Instructions to “turn the other cheek” or “bless those who persecute you”
  • Expectations to stay in harmful situations in the name of grace or sacrifice

When I talk about self-compassion here, please know I’m not talking about:

  • Forcing yourself to feel warm, tender feelings toward yourself
  • Excusing harmful behavior or avoiding accountability
  • Spiritually bypassing anger, grief, or the need for boundaries

In the context of religious harm recovery, I’m really talking about something more subtle: a gradual shift from internal threat to internal care.

Instead of asking you to feel a certain way about yourself, self-compassion is more about how you respond when something already hurts.

In practice, that might look like:

  • Speaking to yourself in a way that does not add more harm when something is already painful
  • Allowing your feelings to exist without immediately policing, explaining, or spiritualizing them
  • Letting your nervous system register safety in small, imperfect moments (a pause, a breath, a boundary)

In this context, self-compassion becomes less about being “good” or “getting it right” and more about creating conditions where healing is actually possible.

Beginning with small experiments

I want to recognize that some people in religious harm recovery feel turned-off by anything that resembles a spiritual practice.

If that’s you, it may be more helpful to think of self-compassion as a series of small experiments rather than a spiritual discipline you have to master.

A few places you might begin:

  • When you notice self-judgement:
  • If you catch yourself thinking, “I’m such a mess,” see if you can add one simple acknowledgment without cancelling out the frustration: “Of course this is hard, given what I’ve been through.”
  • When you feel the urge to push through:
  • If you notice yourself powering past exhaustion, experiment with a brief pause. You do not have to enjoy it. Just notice what stories or sensations show up when you stop.
  • When you are tempted to over-spiritualize pain:
  • Instead of immediately asking, “What is this trying to teach me?” you might start with, “What hurts right now?” and let that question be enough for the moment.

Also, it makes complete sense that self-compassion as a concept may still feel theoretical, flat, or even irritating.

That’s because for many of us, compassion toward self was never modeled in a way that felt safe, so it’s going to feel unnatural, and potentially even dysregulating as your nervous system learns how to interact with your environment in a different way.

For today, it is enough to recognize that your nervous system learned self-loathing for very understandable reasons and to consider that it is capable of learning something new over time.

Going Deeper

Here are a couple questions to journal about or to unpack during your next therapy session:

  • What are some specific moments in your life where self-judgment has become your default response, and how might you begin to shift that narrative towards self-compassion?
  • Reflect on a time when you felt overwhelmed by emotions. How did you respond to yourself in that moment, and what could you try differently moving forward to practice self-compassion?
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