The Understory
Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish
Late Summer 2026 | Issue 27
The Voice You Use With Yourself
I have a client, and I'll call her Renata, who runs a mid-sized company with forty employees and a reputation for being the person everyone can count on, and who also has a teenager at home who is autistic and struggling this year, and Renata will tell you without hesitation that she is doing everything wrong.
She is not doing everything wrong. She is doing an enormous amount right, and she is doing it while running on almost nothing, but if you ask her to describe herself in a hard week, she reaches for words like lazy and behind and not enough, and she would never in a hundred years say those words to one of her employees or to her son, and yet she says them to herself before she has even had her tea.
I hear some version of Renata almost every week, and she shows up in different bodies. Sometimes she is a founder who built something out of nothing and still cannot accept a compliment about it. Sometimes she is a neurodivergent professional who has spent so many years masking that the harsh internal narration feels like the only honest voice left. And sometimes she is a parent of a neurodivergent child who has read every book, sat through every meeting with the school, and still lies awake convinced she is the reason things are hard.
What all of them have in common is a well of compassion for other people that runs deep and wide, and a well of compassion for themselves that has nearly run dry, or that maybe has not really run since early childhood.
A new study out of McGill University, covered recently in the Washington Post, gives this pattern some real data behind it. Researchers surveyed more than a thousand adults about how much compassion they held for other people, for animals, and for themselves, and then compared that to their levels of anxiety, depression, and overall well-being. The group that reported high compassion for others but low compassion for themselves had some of the worst outcomes in the entire study, right alongside people who were simply unkind across the board. The group that felt sturdy and well was the one that held compassion for others and for themselves at the same time, in balance rather than in competition.
Bassam Khoury, the lead researcher, put it plainly when he said that caring for everyone except yourself will eventually fail, because a person cannot run on empty indefinitely, however capable they are. (You can read the full Washington Post coverage of the study here, written by Sydney Page and published September 16, 2026.)
If this sounds familiar to those of you who have followed Kristin Neff's research with me over the years, it should. Neff has spent two decades building the research base showing that self-compassion, treating yourself with the same warmth you would offer a friend, is not indulgent and does not make people soft or complacent. It is consistently associated with lower anxiety, lower depression, and a sturdier sense of self across every population researchers have studied, from students to caregivers to combat veterans. This new study is not a departure from that body of work. It is another brick in the same wall, and a welcome one, because it shows the cost of the imbalance so clearly.
Here is where I want to be honest with you about why this shows up so often in this particular community. Leaders, entrepreneurs, and neurodivergent adults share a habit of running an internal monitor that never fully clocks out, always scanning for what was missed, what could go wrong, what someone might notice. For a lot of the neurodivergent professionals and parents I work with, that monitor was built early, often in response to a world that was already quick to criticize, and it became a survival skill long before it became a burden. The trouble is that the nervous system cannot tell the difference between a voice that is trying to keep you safe and a voice that is slowly wearing you down. Both register as threat, and both keep the body in a state that makes rest, connection, and clear thinking harder to access. (In my next newsletter I'm going to talk about a governmental lead employee who found that relating to himself compassionately, over time, allowed his nervous system to settle and an unexpected result was being able to help out with dishes after breakfast.)
Self-compassion is not about lowering your standards or letting yourself off the hook. Mindful Self-Compassion, the framework I teach and practice, asks you to notice the hard moment without flinching away from it, to remember that struggle is part of being human rather than evidence that you are uniquely failing, and to offer yourself the kind of steady, warm attention you would offer someone you love. That combination, mindfulness, common humanity, and kindness, is what the research keeps pointing back to, and it is available to you in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, not just on a retreat.
If you want a place to start this week, try this. The next time you catch yourself in that harsh internal narration, pause and put a hand over your heart, and ask yourself what you actually need in that moment, physically, emotionally, or otherwise. Then see if you can offer yourself even a fraction of what you would offer a friend who told you the same story.
Renata is still working on this, and so am I, and so, most likely, are you. That is the whole point. It is not a place you arrive at once and stay. It is a practice, and every time you choose it, you are building something sturdier underneath you.
This is also, quite simply, one of the foundations underneath every coaching relationship I build. Whether we are working through a hard season with a neurodivergent child, a leadership role that is asking more of you than it is giving back, or a transition that has knocked you off balance, self-compassion is not a side note in that work. It is part of the ground we stand on together, right alongside the practical strategies, because the strategies tend not to hold if the voice underneath them is still harsh.
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Janine Johnston, ARCC Coaching · janine-johnston.com
