Perspective The Importance of Self-Compassion in Terms of Self Psychology Ming-Yu Claudia Wong Department of Sport, Physical Education and Health, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China;
[email protected] Abstract: Self-compassion has fostered a new way to build connectedness with oneself and affirmed the importance of offering compassion to oneself. However, there have been numerous arguments about the similarity with other self-related concepts, yet they have neglected its importance in self-psychology. For instance, self-compassion could be seen as an important element in Kohut’s concept of self in illustrating the self-object and self-experience theory, thus leading to a healthy self. Additionally, the self-schemas (self-esteem and self-efficacy) have been sufficiently shown to be associating with and predicting positive psychological outcomes and have further demonstrated the positive relations with self-compassion. Self-compassion thus demonstrated that similar features have been shared among the self-schemas. Moreover, with the claim that self-compassion was more precise than self-esteem, self-compassion should be emphasized by self-psychology then to develop a new era of “true self-esteem”. Keywords: self-compassion; self-psychology; self-schema; self-esteem 1. Introduction In daily lives, people, especially parents, always remind themselves or their children Citation: Wong, M.-Y.C. The to show love and mercy to others, in particular, to their friends or people around. However, Importance of Self-Compassion in how often do people remember to show love and kindness to themselves? How often Terms of Self Psychology. Psychiatry do people comfort themselves and say “you are doing great and you are lovable” when Int.