Gentle Firmness

The Most Important Relationship

Our relationship with ourselves is the most important human relationship we have. The way you treat yourself is the foundation of how you treat others in relationships as well. When we treat ourselves with kindness and respect, and hold ourselves accountable, we set ourselves up for happiness and success in all of our relationships and in life itself.

An important concept I teach my clients to help them better understand their own relationship with themselves is what I like to call “gentle firmness”. I’m going to break this concept down in this blog and describe four possible variations, the first of which is the goal, and the other three that are more harmful patterns. These four variations are based on two factors—(1) how we treat ourselves and (2) how we carry out our decisions.

Gentle Firmness

As the title would suggest, “gentle firmness”  is the goal here: being gentle with yourself and firm with your decisions. This means that we are kind and compassionate with ourselves, and that we have self-discipline in making and carrying out our choices. We set boundaries, we make careful decisions, and we follow through with our actions. This puts us in integrity and fosters self-trust.

When practicing gentle firmness, give yourself a break, validate the challenges you face, and be open to the fact that things may be new for you and that you may not know how to approach them at first. When there are decisions to be made, carefully consider them, make them with confidence, and be firm with them. Remain in integrity with yourself by following through on decisions with mindful action.

Abusive Looseness

The opposite of “gentle firmness” is “abusive looseness”. When we are abusive with ourselves and loose with our decisions, we beat ourselves up, tear ourselves apart, and treat ourselves harshly. When we are loose with our decisions, we fail to hold ourselves accountable. We make decisions and don’t follow through, which erodes our sense of integrity and self-trust. 

We ultimately slip into regrets, resentments, self-loathing, and self-hatred, and we turn to addictions and co-dependencies (with self and others) to soothe ourselves from the harsh reality we have created. The fact is that beating yourself up simply doesn’t work—it’s like kicking yourself when you’re down. After too much of this sort of self-flagellation, you’re left feeling broken and weak, which perpetuates the cycle of poor behavior and subsequent harsh criticism.

Gentle Looseness

Some of my clients upon hearing the first two variations have a realization and tell me that their style is “gentle looseness”. When you are gentle with yourself and loose with your behaviors, it is ultimately acting and reacting through enabling ineffective behaviors. The “gentle” part seems like self-compassion, but when it’s not backed up by any alignment of words and actions, it falls short.

By not setting boundaries and remaining firm with your decisions, you are actually being codependent with yourself. This pattern allows undesired behaviors to slide further and further in the negative direction. People that fall into this variation tend to experience feelings of helplessness, self-pity, and lack of self-agency.

Abusive Firmness

If you are abusive with yourself and firm with your decisions, now you’re being overly controlling. This way of being brings about anger, aggression, and discontent with self and others. Chances are that if you’re abusive with yourself, you’re also going to be abusive with others as well.

This style of self-treatment is tyrannical and cripples your self-esteem. Even though we follow through on our decisions with this style, we never allow ourselves to feel good about the actions we take or the progress that we make, constantly looking for “better”, raising the bar on ourselves, and lacking gratitude for our lives and the things and people in them.

Practicing Gentle Firmness

As you can see from above, “gentle firmness” is the clear winner of the four possible variations. Chances are if you’re like most of us, you will benefit from engaging with this concept more in your life. It’s a simple framework, but it is not always easy to put into consistent practice. The simple reason for this is because it was not shown or modeled to us consistently or at all in our families growing up and, thus, is not familiar and feels challenging to do, or even remember to engage in, when treating ourselves with what we want to accomplish in our daily lives.

Each time we choose to be gentle with ourselves and firm with our decisions, we have achieved a small victory. As you are incorporating the concept into your life, it’s important to remember that there will be times when you slip up and are either too abusive with yourself or too loose with your decisions.

If and when this happens, we simply go right back to gentle firmness and treat the “mistake” as we would any other—we forgive ourselves, engage with self-compassion, and then we make a decision to practice gentle firmness going forward. We set boundaries with ourselves, and we move forward with integrity.

If this happens consistently, we simply look deeper into our behavior to determine the triggers and any other possible reasons for the abusiveness or looseness. Along the way, we must show ourselves compassion and understanding, and we must make careful decisions followed by mindful action.

Give it a try, one moment at a time, and feel free to let me know how it impacts your life

Much Love,

Noel Neu, The Songwriting Therapist™