Do You Need to Love Yourself Before You Love Others?

To be truly compassionate toward others, do we first have to be compassionate toward ourselves?

Some researchers have suggested that these two types of compassion are linked, although this might not always seem intuitive. After all, we can all probably think of individuals who are selfless and giving to other people, but who have trouble extending that same kindness to themselves.

This question matters because people who are struggling with self-compassion may wonder if this could impair their compassion for others. Additionally, we may be reluctant to set aside more time for self-compassion because we worry that doing so is selfish or self-centered when others are struggling, too.

However, if self-compassion and compassion for others are related to each other — as opposed to being competing forces — it might actually be the case that cultivating one type of compassion also feeds the other. If this is true, then practicing self-compassion could help us show up more effectively when others need help, too.

Overall, the evidence suggests that there’s a lot of variation in whether people’s compassion for themselves and others are aligned. That is, some people do treat themselves with the same type of compassion that they would extend to a friend, yet others struggle to do so. In recent years, psychologists have begun to investigate why our compassion for ourselves and for others can sometimes become out of sync—and pinpoint ways of increasing both types of compassion in tandem.

Do people treat themselves and others with similar compassion?
Self-compassion, originally studied by researcher Kristin Neff, involves three components: treating ourselves with kindness, seeing our mistakes and shortcomings as part of the common human experience, and approaching challenges and difficulties with mindful awareness.

According to Neff and her colleague Elizabeth Pommier, there’s good reason to think that compassion for the self and for others may be linked. After all, they write, “Self-compassion involves turning compassion inward, taking a compassionate perspective toward oneself in the same way that compassion is typically offered to others.”

As an initial test of this idea, the two researchers asked three groups of people — college students, American adults, and people with experience in mindfulness meditation — to fill out surveys of self-compassion, compassion for others, empathy, altruism, and forgiveness. The researchers found that adults and trained meditators who were more self-compassionate were also more compassionate toward others. On the other hand, self-compassionate college students weren’t more altruistic or compassionate toward humanity, but they were more willing to take others’ perspectives and more forgiving.

Why might self-compassion relate to our compassion for others? In a 2023 study published in the journal Mindfulness, approximately 700 people reported on their compassion for themselves and others, and also indicated how important different values were to them.

The researchers found that self-compassion and other-directed compassion were related to each other, and this was partly explained by the fact that people with higher self-compassion also gravitated more strongly to self-transcendent values: feeling benevolent toward others, valuing creativity and open-mindedness, and seeing the worth in all people.

In other words, one possible link from self-compassion to compassion for others is that being compassionate toward ourselves may relate to the values we uphold, and these values in turn affect how we treat others. However, other research has not found a link between how we treat ourselves and how we treat others.

Why do some people experience a disconnect between compassion for self and other?
Two new papers might help resolve these conflicting studies.

In a recently published study in the journal Assessment, researchers asked over 800 Spanish speakers from Spain to complete surveys of self-compassion, compassion for others, distress, and wellbeing. The researchers found that self-compassion and compassion for others were linked more strongly in people with higher well-being than in people with lower well-being. In fact, for people with lower well-being, these two types of compassion were not meaningfully linked.

The researchers found a similar pattern of results when looking at depression, anxiety, and stress: For less distressed participants, their compassion for self and others were linked, but for distressed participants, those links were smaller or nonexistent.

In other words, when people are doing well, they tend to treat themselves with the same kindness that they extend to others — but when they are experiencing distress, they may struggle to do so.

Other research suggests that how authentic we are may also help explain the link between the compassion we have for ourselves and for others. In this study, published in the journal Current Psychology, researchers asked 530 Turkish-speaking participants to report on their self-compassion, their compassion for other people, and their feelings of authenticity (as measured by their agreement with statements such as “I am true to myself in most situations”).

The researchers found that, for some of the facets of compassion, people’s compassion could be best explained by a combination of both their self-compassion and their authenticity. In other words, people who had higher self-compassion tended to be kinder to others if they also felt relatively authentic.

Taken as a whole, these studies seem to suggest that, when people are at their best — when they feel most authentic and have higher wellbeing — their compassion for themselves and for others seem to be in sync. However, when people may be dealing with stress or difficulty in their lives, that appears to be when they experience a disconnect between how kind they are to themselves and to others.

What happens when our compassion for self and others isn’t aligned
Interestingly, it often appears that when this disconnect occurs, people are still compassionate toward others but have trouble extending that same compassion toward themselves. For example, in one the Neff study, the researchers review data suggesting that “individuals who were high in self-compassion reported being equally kind to themselves and others, but that people low in self-compassion reported being kinder to others than themselves.”

It’s possible that, when we’re struggling, it’s easier to maintain our compassion for others than our compassion for ourselves. Individuals who grow up in households where they receive inconsistent messages from their primary caretakers can go on to develop a “preoccupied” attachment style later in life, where they view others positively and try to seek the approval of others, but they may have negative views of themselves. These individuals may end up feeling compassion toward others, but have difficulty extending this same compassion to themselves.

Does increasing one type of compassion also increase the other?
If the two types of compassion go together, it’s possible that increasing one type could also impact the other. A study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology sought to test this idea.

In one of the experiments, 240 college students were asked to complete either a neutral activity or one of three trainings focused on self-compassion, other-focused compassion, or loving-kindness meditation (which incorporated both types of compassion, as it involved practicing kindness toward themselves, others they know, and all of humanity). Here, people first watched a 15-minute educational video introducing the topic they would be meditating on, and then completed a 15-minute meditation. The researchers found that all of the three trainings increased self-compassion and also increased compassion toward other people.

This study bolsters the idea that self-compassion and compassion for others are linked, since training people on just one of these skills may also increase the other type of compassion.

Although compassion for the self and for others aren’t always the same, the concepts seem to be two sides of the same coin in some ways. When people are feeling their best, their compassion for themselves and others seem to be in harmony, and data suggests that boosting one type of compassion can potentially impact the other.

When working toward a more compassionate society, it may be especially important to make sure that we emphasize both types of compassion, without losing focus on one or the other. Additionally, for those of us who might be hesitant to make time for self-compassion, it’s important to note that self-compassion allows us to be more resilient, meaning we can ward off burnout and support others more effectively. As Neff explains, “The compassion we cultivate for ourselves directly transmits itself to others.”