Self-Compassion Feels Impossible After Trauma — Here’s Why (From an Oshawa trauma therapist)

By Stephanie Campoli, MSW, RSW | Psychotherapist in Oshawa, Ontario

She looked at me like I’d suggested she try flapping her arms and flying home.

I’d just gently floated the idea of being a little kinder to herself — nothing dramatic, no journaling prompts with bubble baths involved — and her response was immediate. Almost allergic. “That feels fake.” Then, quieter: “I don’t think I can do that.”

I’ve had some version of this conversation more times than I can count. And every single time, I want to push back on the cultural script that says self-compassion is simple — that it’s just a mindset shift, a decision to be nicer to yourself, something you can learn from a five-minute meditation app. Because for a lot of the women I work with, self-compassion doesn’t feel like a warm hug. It feels like a threat.

That’s not weakness. That’s not resistance. That is actually a completely logical response to what trauma does to a person’s sense of self. And I want to explain why — because understanding it changes everything about how you approach it.

When Kindness Was Followed by Something Bad

One of the things I’ve come to understand working with people who’ve survived chronic or relational trauma is that self-compassion isn’t just emotionally uncomfortable — it can feel genuinely dangerous.

Think about what many of these experiences have in common: they happened in relationships. With caregivers, partners, people who were supposed to be safe. And in a lot of those environments, moments of softness — letting your guard down, feeling okay, trusting that things were fine — often preceded something painful. The calm before the storm. The good day before the bad night.

So the nervous system learns. It starts to associate feeling safe, feeling good, feeling at peace with what came next. And then you sit down to try self-compassion — which is essentially asking yourself to soften, to let your guard down, to feel something gentle — and your whole system goes: absolutely not.

That’s not you being difficult. That’s your brain doing exactly what it was trained to do.

The Shame Layer

Here’s where it gets more complicated, because for a lot of people with complex trauma or BPD, there’s a second thing happening underneath the fear — and that’s shame.

Not guilt, which is I did something bad. Shame, which is I am bad. Toxic, pervasive, identity-level shame that got built over years of being treated like you were too much, not enough, wrong for existing the way you do.

Shame and self-compassion are basically incompatible. You cannot genuinely offer kindness to a self you fundamentally believe doesn’t deserve it — or worse, a self you’ve been taught is the problem. It’s like trying to water a plant while simultaneously believing plants shouldn’t exist.

Richard Schwartz (the founder of Internal Family System's Therapy) talks about this in his work — the parts of us that carry shame aren’t trying to make our lives miserable. They took on that shame because at some point, it was safer to believe I am the problem than to accept the terrifying alternative: that the people who were supposed to protect you, didn’t. Children do not have the psychological resources to hold that truth. So they turn it inward. And sometimes they carry it for decades.

When those parts are still running the show in adulthood, self-compassion doesn’t just feel hard. It feels like a lie.

Why “Just Be Kinder to Yourself” Misses the Point

I think the wellness industry — with the best intentions — has flattened self-compassion into an aesthetic. Candles. Affirmations. Rest. And while none of those things are bad, they skip over something important: you cannot access self-compassion through willpower alone when your nervous system and your sense of self are actively working against it.

Gabor Maté puts it plainly — we cannot heal in isolation from the conditions that made us who we are. The self-concept that makes self-compassion so difficult didn’t develop in a vacuum. It developed in relationships, under specific conditions, for specific reasons. Which means unraveling it also has to happen relationally, slowly, with a lot of patience for the parts of you that have very good reasons not to trust the process.

Marsha Linehan, who I think about constantly in this work, built her entire model of DBT around the idea that people are doing the best they can and they need to do better — and that both of those things are true at the same time. That dialectic is, in itself, a form of compassion. It doesn’t let you off the hook, but it refuses to make you the villain of your own story.

That reframe — I am doing the best I can with what I have, and I am also capable of more — is sometimes the first crack in the door. It’s not a warm fuzzy feeling. It’s just a slightly more accurate story than I am fundamentally broken.

What Self-Compassion Actually Looks Like After Trauma

It rarely looks like what you see on Instagram. I want to be honest about that.

For most of my clients, early self-compassion looks less like I love and accept myself and more like I’m going to stop calling myself an idiot every time I make a mistake. It’s modest. It’s concrete. And it usually comes with a fair amount of internal pushback from the parts that have been running the self-criticism for years — those parts have a job, after all, and they’re not going to hand in their resignation just because you decided to try something new.

This is where I find Internal Family Systems (IFS) thinking really useful alongside DBT. Rather than trying to bulldoze the inner critic or white-knuckle your way into being nicer to yourself, you get curious about it. What is that voice actually protecting you from? What did it learn to do, and when? Because usually — not always, but usually — the harshest inner critics developed in response to external harshness. They’re not your enemy. They’re just working from an outdated script.

When you can get even a little curious about that part of yourself, rather than fused with it or fighting it, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But it shifts.

This is Slow Work, and That’s Okay

If you’ve tried self-compassion practices and found them hollow, or activating, or just impossible — I want you to know that’s not a you problem. It’s information. It’s your system telling you that the path in needs to be more gradual, more relational, more attuned to what’s actually happening underneath the surface.

Self-compassion after trauma is not a destination you arrive at. It’s something that gets built, painstakingly, in moments of being met with genuine care — including, over time, by yourself. It grows in the space between who you were told you were and who you actually are.

It grows when someone sits with you and says: that makes sense. Of course you feel that way. Of course it’s hard. And means it.

That’s what I try to offer in my work. Not a quick fix. Not a program. Just a relationship in which it slowly, gradually, becomes safer to be human.

Stephanie Campoli, MSW, RSW, is a trauma therapist and DBT specialist practicing in Oshawa, Ontario. She works primarily with individuals navigating complex trauma, BPD, and the complicated inner lives that come with both. Virtual therapy available across Ontario and Nova Scotia. Book a free 20-minute consultation at stephaniecampoli.ca.