Growing up when I made silly mistakes my parents would call me stupid, an imbecile, or thick. Not on a daily basis, but enough.

And to be fair, often I was not being the wisest little spoon in the drawer. Leaving my passport at home, not once but two years in a row. Not my finest hour! Piercing my nose days before I left school which had a strict no facial piercings policy. Can you tell my frontal lobe had not fully developed yet?

Let me be clear, my parents loved me. They were, and are, good parents and good people. They were far harsher to themselves when they made mistakes than anything they ever said to us.

When I had children, I resolved that I would make different choices. (*Laughs in hindsight as I immediately made a lot of new and different mistakes that were distinctly my own*).

I had broken the cycle enough that I don’t use the s-word or call my kids names. Even when I really, really want to. (Yes, I am thinking about the curious incident of the willy trapped in the letterbox. No, I do not want to discuss it further.)

But in my head and sometimes out loud, I would call myself stupid. Not on a daily basis, but enough.

I’ve written before about my long-standing habit of talking to myself like a sergeant major addressing the greenest recruit. It was like I was being harsh as motivational tool. Occasionally, somebody would kindly point out that I was quite hard on myself. Then I would unkindly try and berate myself into being nicer to myself.

In recent years, my attitude towards myself has shifted. Thanks to copious amounts of trauma therapy, internal family systems work and neurofeedback. Instead of berating myself for being self critical, I shifted to a position of curiosity. I began to ask what purpose was this behaviour serving for me? The part of me that was overly harsh was trying in her misguided way to protect me. ‘You cannot be any harder on me than I am’, I was saying. I genuinely believed that for me to be accepted I had to be perfect and not make mistakes.

What made the biggest difference, was instead of trying to stop the unwanted behaviour. I first looked at the purpose it served (self protection). Then I began to implement healthier coping mechanisms that met the same need. What if, revolutionary thought, I could be acceptable just as I was, mistakes and all. Mind blown!

Think of a building covered in scaffolding where the scaffolding is our old coping mechanisms. We cannot just get rid of the scaffolding, even if it irritates us, even if we feel it’s no longer necessary. The scaffolding or old coping mechanism is performing a function. Instead we need to add in some supporting beams (healthier coping mechanisms) and over time the scaffolding (the old unwanted behaviour) is no longer needed.

Even though it took years I am proud to say that I am kinder to myself. I have more realistic expectations of what I can achieve. I recognise that I am a flawed human being who is mostly doing my best in often adverse conditions. But especially when we are stressed out our psyche is restored to factory settings and old defence mechanisms creep back in.

I may not have noticed that I was calling myself ‘s-word’ if it hadn’t been for that time I macerated my finger in the hand blender. 0/10 out of ten, do not recommend.

The first thing I did with my finger spraying blood everywhere was to call myself stupid. I said it to the nurses and doctors in the hospital. And then as I walked around with a bandaged finger for a month and everybody asked me how I’d injured myself, I called myself stupid, again and again.

I was so angry at myself. A moment of distraction had led to a month of pain, discomfort and endless visits to the doctors for wound reviews and antibiotics. I now had a gnarly scar, numbness, and it could have been much worse!

Because of the very visible bandage I had to retell the story whether I wanted to or not. So to hide my embarrassment, I would call myself stupid before anyone else had the chance to.

And so I might have continued obliviously, calling myself stupid if it wasn’t for my five year old. He was playing at the park while I chatted with a mum friend. She asked me about my finger and when I had finished rattling through the familiar routine. When my five year old laid his hand on my arm and said solemnly, ‘Mummy you mustn’t call yourself unkind names. You wouldn’t like it, if I called myself stupid.’

And I took a deep breath felled as I so often am by the wisdom of my children

He had been watching me and noticed that I was saying one thing to them and doing the opposite to myself. Our kids are mirrors and they pay far more attention to what we do, than to what we say.

I have worked so hard in therapy to be kinder to myself but there are kernels of self hatred still buried deep within. Often as therapists we seen change as a spiral or peeling back the layers of an onion. We make a change and then months or sometimes years later, we spiral round again moving into a deeper layer.

So, I was reminded to talk to myself like I talk to my children. That I need to offer myself kindness especially when I feel like least deserve it. I do not have to earn kindness and compassion, it is how I treat myself. To offer myself acceptance even when I’ve made mistakes is to recognise I’m only human after all.

This reminds me how far I’ve come and that the work will always be ongoing. Do you also struggle to be kind with yourself? Sending you love, if this resonates. Let’s hold ourselves as gently as we would cradle a baby chick in our hands. Let’s walk into the world today being ludicrously kind to others and ourselves.