“Sometimes we cling to our self-criticism. We think to ourselves: “If I stop beating myself up, I’ll get complacent and lazy, and then I’ll never change!” And then we cling to our self-judgments even more tightly - after all, these are moral issues, involving whether you are a good, decent, worthy person or a bad, disgusting, worthless person. We think: “To accept myself as I am would be to accept that I am a flawed, bad, broken person, and to abandon all hope that I could one day be better, that I could one day deserve love.” Remember that beating yourself up is the emotional One Ring equivalent of treating yourself as your own internal lion, experiencing yourself as a threat that needs to be escaped (which is impossible), conquered (which is literally self-destructive), or avoided through shutdown (which is counterproductive, to say the least). And that’s why we need self-compassion.“
- Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are, 2015


















