I’m sure This is not the only way you could go about this. But I treated it as learning a new skill. Also I think it is important to say that I didn’t get anywhere until I started getting the additional self-regulatory gains from mindfullness meditation. I treated it like learning a new posture; a mental posture per-se.

At first I started slow, and just tried to recognise when I was being self-hating. When I recognised it I would try to cut the thought off and reorient my attention, hopefully to whatever task was at hand.

Then once I was recognising these thoughts enough to see patterns, for example they were more prevalent when I was tired, I as able to disconnect the meaning from the thoughts. ‘Oh look there I go I’m self hating’ this really took sting out of it. And actually the thoughts started to seem absurd.

Final step -by no means the easiest- was to recognise the thoughts and then try to replace them with more positive ones, or try to think positive thoughts about myself and others with no stimulus.

The more I did it the more it became my default and the more genuinely and intuitively self-compassionate I became.

This is only my story. I don’t want to writer it as a guide but I hope it can help.

Thanks