Why Self-Compassion Isn’t the Same as Self-Care
A Deeper Look at Motivation, Embodiment, and the Longing to Come Home to Ourselves
During my clinical psychology training, I was told - often, and with a slightly patronising smile - that I needed to "do more self-care." So I signed up for a yoga class. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do. A tick in the box. Evidence that I was tending to my wellbeing.
But what does it mean to tend? What does it mean to care? These questions, I would later discover, carry within them the entire architecture of how we inhabit our own lives.
I went every week. I unfurled my mat, moved through the poses, paid for a term upfront. From the outside, it looked like self-care. But at each class my mind was churning - cycling through clinical notes, worrying about whether I'd made the right call in a risk assessment, trying to remember if I'd followed up with that client's GP. By the time I reached savasana, I was so tightly wound it took everything in me not to jump up and check my phone.
What was happening in those moments? I was present, yet absent. Embodied, yet estranged. Moving through the motions of care while fundamentally disconnected from the very self I was supposedly caring for. It was as if I had become a ghost haunting my own life, going through the rituals without ever truly arriving.
It took time for me to realise that what I was doing wasn't really self-care. It was box-ticking. It was performance. And more than that, it was a response to an unspoken fear: if I don't keep myself together, I might not be able to keep going at all.
What I was doing wasn't self-compassion. It was control. A desperate kind of holding-on disguised as care—a way of managing the self rather than meeting it.
The Many Faces of Care: Drive, Threat, and Something Deeper
Psychologically, it's easy to conflate self-compassion with self-care. We're used to assessing wellbeing through action: Did I exercise? Did I rest? Did I say no to that extra client? But this approach treats the self as a machine to be maintained rather than a consciousness to be befriended.
Self-compassion doesn't live in the behaviour itself. It lives in the way we relate to ourselves as we move through it. The tone of that inner relationship - curious or critical, tender or transactional - tells us everything about whether we are truly coming home to ourselves or simply managing our exile.
Paul Gilbert's three-systems model helps illuminate what's actually operating beneath the surface of our attempts at care. His framework outlines three motivational systems that shape our emotional lives:
The threat system, tuned to danger and survival—often expressed through anxiety, shame, or internal attack. This system scans constantly for what might go wrong, what we might have failed to do, who we might have let down.
The drive system, oriented toward goals, achievement, and securing approval. Here, even rest becomes a project, even care becomes something to accomplish, something to get right.
The soothing system, which makes space for safeness, connection, and genuine care. This system knows how to simply be present without agenda, how to offer warmth without expectation.
These systems interact constantly, shaped by personal history, attachment patterns, and cultural conditioning. Many of us - particularly those in the helping professions - learned to navigate life through the lens of threat and drive. We became experts at vigilance, virtuosos of achievement. But somewhere along the way, we forgot how to rest in our own presence.
When self-care becomes colonised by these systems, it transforms into something unrecognisable.
Drive-based care operates from a "means to an end" mentality: I meditate so I can be more productive. I exercise so I can keep going. I rest so I can work harder tomorrow. Here, care becomes transactional - a fuel stop rather than a homecoming.
Threat-based care carries an undercurrent of fear: If I don't look after myself, I won't cope. If I don't manage my stress, people will see I'm inadequate. If I burn out, it means I'm a failure as a therapist, as a person. This kind of care is performative, driven by the desperate need to avoid being found out as somehow not enough.
Both approaches treat the self as a machine to be maintained or a problem to be managed. Rest becomes rationed like a scarce resource. Care becomes something we do to ourselves rather than with ourselves. We treat ourselves as we would never treat a friend - with suspicion, impatience, and relentless demand.
This is care with a catch. And it's compounded by systems that tell us that struggling to cope with ever-increasing workloads, emotional strain, and overexposure to stress is a personal failing. I see it all the time in people who come to me distraught that they haven't managed to self-care their way out of burnout, as if the very depth of their exhaustion is evidence of their inadequacy.
But what if the problem isn't that we're not doing enough self-care? What if the problem is that we've forgotten what care actually feels like?
What self-compassion offers is something else entirely. A softening. A turning toward ourselves not as a problem to solve, but as a being who is deserving of care simply by virtue of being human.
The Inner Relationship That Changes Everything
In Toward a Psychology of Awakening, John Welwood wrote of the spiritual path as a journey not away from our neuroses, but toward them - with tenderness and truthfulness. For him, awakening required intimacy with our own humanness, a willingness to meet what is rather than what should be.
"Psychological work is not about getting rid of the personality or transcending it, but rather making friends with ourselves in the deepest possible way."
From this view, self-compassion isn't about improvement. It's about contact. It's about being willing to sit beside the parts of ourselves that are aching, tired, unsure, or overwhelmed. To meet those places not with solutions, but with presence.
This is radical territory. We live in a culture that has taught us to relate to ourselves as a constellation of inadequecies to be improved, inefficiencies to be optimised, wounds to be quickly healed. But what if our struggles are not obstacles to our wholeness but pathways to it? What if our vulnerabilities are not flaws in our design but invitations to deeper intimacy with life?
The soothing system becomes relevant here not just as an energetic and relational shift, but as a profound physiological one. When we offer ourselves warmth in the midst of struggle, we begin to repair the ground of trust inside us. We stop trying to earn our own care. We remember that we belong to ourselves not because of what we do, but because of who we are.
Nothing about this is performative. There's no clever trick. No five-step program. Just a willingness to stay and remain present with what is, even when what is feels difficult or disappointing or imperfect.
This staying is perhaps the most revolutionary act available to us. In a world that profits from our disconnection from ourselves, choosing to remain in relationship with our own experience - all of it - is a form of quiet rebellion.
Why Therapists Struggle to Receive
Many therapists live inside a quiet loop of overfunctioning. We read the signs of distress in others with exquisite skill, but often override our own. We collapse our value into usefulness. We become experts at seeing but struggle to be seen, masters of holding but reluctant to be held.
And when we do reach for self-care, we often do so with a slightly dissociated hand - disconnected from what we actually feel, what we actually need. We prescribe for ourselves what we think we should want rather than listening for what our being actually longs for.
It's not surprising, then, that the practices meant to restore us often leave us flat. If the internal voice is still cold or transactional, even the warm bath or gentle yoga won't land. The body doesn't feel met. The soul doesn't feel seen.
What restores is not the activity itself. It's the quality of the meeting - the sincerity of the internal offer. It's the difference between doing something for yourself and being with yourself as you do it.
This distinction points to something profound about the nature of healing. We cannot think our way into self-compassion. We cannot strategise our way into wholeness. These are states of being, not states of doing. They require not more knowledge but more presence. Not better techniques but deeper intimacy.
Perhaps this is why the helping professions can be so particularly challenging. We spend our days in service to the healing of others while often remaining strangers to our own inner landscape. We become fluent in the language of psychological theory while losing touch with the simple poetry of our own hearts.
The Return to Embodied Presence
What would it mean to truly come home to ourselves? What would it feel like to inhabit our lives not as observers or managers but as intimate participants?
These questions don't have easy answers. They're not meant to. They're invitations to a different kind of inquiry, a more embodied way of knowing. They ask us to turn our attention inward not with the precision of a diagnostician but with the tenderness of a lover.
When we begin to relate to ourselves with genuine compassion, something shifts in the quality of our presence. We become more curious than judgmental, more spacious than anxious. We discover that we can hold multiple truths simultaneously - that we can be both tired and capable, both struggling and whole, both human and worthy of care.
This is not positive thinking or spiritual bypassing. This is the radical acceptance that allows transformation to occur naturally, organically, without force or manipulation.
