Self-Compassion as a Personal Attitude Towards Oneself

This master's thesis is devoted to the study of self-compassion as a personal attitude towards oneself. Its goal is identifying and describing the structure of this phenomenon, examining the effect of self-compassion on a person in a difficult situation and revealing the condition of genesis of self-compassion as a special attitude towards oneself in a situation of suffering. The first part is devoted to a theoretical analysis of sources on the subject of self-compassion. It was shown that the phenomenon of self-compassion has great potential as a predicate of the psychological well-being and substantiates the necessity of studying self-compassion at the level of a phenomenon. The second part is devoted to a qualitative study of the phenomenon of self-compassion. The sample consisted of 15 people from 24 to 56 years old, self-compassion phenomenon was discovered in 10 cases during semi-structured interviews. The interview texts were processed in accordance with the phenomenological analysis by A. Giorgi [Giorgi, 2009]. As a result we were able to create a phenomenological description of self-compassion as a person's relationship with himself in which there is the acceptance of his feelings, weaknesses and the situation as a whole, sympathy for his experiences and careful, consoling treatment, respect for oneself, a sense of inner dignity, even in difficult situation. We also identified the main stages through which a person passes in a difficult situation, if at that moment he treats himself with compassion, and considered the prerequisites that contribute to the emergence of self-compassion.