Giving Some Comfort: A Focusing Practice for Self-Compassion and Anxiety

This is the fourth post in the series An Introduction to Focusing. Each post includes a short video practice and a written companion piece. You can start at the beginning with Part 1: Clearing a Space, or pick up from Part 2: A Part of Me or Part 3: Acknowledging What Is There.

Most of us are much better at being kind to other people than we are at being kind to ourselves.

If a friend came to you upset — scared, overwhelmed, carrying something heavy — you probably wouldn’t tell them to pull themselves together. You wouldn’t roll your eyes at their anxiety or criticise them for not having figured it out yet. You’d offer something warmer than that. A bit of understanding. Some acknowledgement that what they’re going through is genuinely hard.

And yet when it’s our own difficult feelings, the response is often very different.

You’re being ridiculous. Other people have it worse. Why can’t you just get over this.

Giving Some Comfort is a Focusing practice that works with exactly this dynamic — learning to turn toward the parts of you that are struggling with the same quality of warmth you’d naturally offer someone else.

It sounds straightforward. For most people it’s one of the hardest practices in the series.

Why self-compassion is so difficult

There’s a common misconception that self-compassion is soft — that it means letting yourself off the hook, lowering your standards, or indulging feelings that would be better pushed through.

The research suggests the opposite. Self-compassion is associated with greater resilience, higher motivation, and better ability to learn from mistakes — not lower performance or more avoidance. People who can be genuinely kind to themselves when they’re struggling tend to recover faster and function better than those who respond to difficulty with self-criticism.

But knowing this doesn’t make it easy.

For many people, the inner critic has been running for so long that self-compassion feels almost dangerous. As though being kind to a scared or struggling part of yourself might make things worse — might invite more vulnerability, more pain, more falling apart.

And underneath that, sometimes, is a deeper belief: that the struggling parts of you don’t deserve comfort. That they need to be managed, suppressed, or pushed through rather than met with warmth.

That belief is worth looking at. If anxiety is part of what you’re carrying, this inner critic dynamic is often closely connected to it.

What giving comfort actually looks like

In Focusing, giving comfort doesn’t mean telling the difficult feeling that everything is fine. It doesn’t mean trying to talk the scared part out of being scared, or convincing the sad part that there’s nothing to be sad about.

It’s more like sitting with it. Being present to it. Offering it the quality of attention you’d offer a child who was frightened — not to fix the fear, but to let the child know they’re not alone in it.

Some of what this can sound like internally:

I know. This is really hard.
Of course you’re scared — that makes complete sense.
I’m here. You don’t have to manage this alone.
It’s okay to feel this. I’m not going anywhere.

These aren’t affirmations. They’re not trying to replace one feeling with a better one. They’re just an acknowledgement — from a steadier, more compassionate part of you — that the struggling part has been seen and is not going to be abandoned.

The part that gives and the part that receives

One of the things Focusing makes explicit that other approaches sometimes don’t is the relationship between different parts of inner experience.

There’s the part that’s struggling — scared, sad, overwhelmed, anxious. And there’s another part — sometimes called the Focusing Self, or the inner witness — that’s capable of being present to the struggling part with some steadiness and care.

Most of us have more access to this second part than we realise. It’s the part that feels genuine concern when a friend is hurting. The part that knows, somewhere, that the critical voice isn’t the whole truth. The part that can sometimes step back from the anxiety and observe it rather than being completely inside it.

Giving Some Comfort is about letting that part — the steadier, more compassionate one — turn toward the part that’s struggling. Not to fix it. Just to be with it.

When it feels impossible

For some people, this practice surfaces something unexpected.

Instead of comfort, what comes up is resistance. A sense that the struggling part doesn’t deserve kindness. Or grief — the realisation that this kind of warmth was rarely available from outside, and so was never learned from inside either.

If that happens, it’s worth knowing it’s not uncommon. And it’s not a failure of the practice — it’s actually the practice working. It’s showing you something real about the relationship you have with your own inner experience.

If the practice surfaces something that feels significant or hard to be with alone, that’s worth bringing to counselling rather than trying to work through entirely on your own.

How to use this practice

The video above guides you through a Giving Some Comfort practice in real time.

As you work with it, a few things worth noticing:

Is there resistance to offering yourself comfort? What does that resistance feel like — and what might it be about?

What part of you is doing the comforting? See if you can find the steadier place — however small — that’s capable of turning toward what’s struggling with some warmth.

And notice how the struggling part responds to being offered comfort. Even a slight softening. A small sense of not being so alone in it.

What’s next in the series

In Part 5 — the final post in this series — we’ll bring everything together with a practice on Focusing and Self-Compassion. How the skills from each of these posts connect, and what it looks like to work with them as an integrated whole.

An Introduction to Focusing is a series of short video practices and written companion pieces exploring the basics of Focusing-Oriented Therapy. Each post stands alone but builds on what came before.

If this practice surfaced something significant — or if you’re finding that self-compassion is genuinely difficult and you’d like to understand why — individual counselling is available in person in Squamish and the Sea to Sky corridor, and online across British Columbia. This kind of work is something I find deeply meaningful to do alongside people. You can read more about the Focusing approach on the about page.