Self-compassion promotes social safeness in patients with eating disorders: A 12-week longitudinal study

Social safeness, the affective experience of being comforted and soothed by others, promotes positive mental health and when compromised, contributes to mental illness. Although there is some knowledge about the factors that give rise to social safeness, research has focused on developmental predictors such as parental warmth, leaving it unclear how adults who lacked these early experiences can feel socially safe. Self-compassion is a skill that can be cultivated; it involves directing warmth inward and may thereby facilitate emotional states akin to social safeness. We tested this theory in a population known for low social safeness, adults with eating disorders, by examining whether increases in self-compassion facilitated subsequent increases in social safeness during a cognitive-behavioural group-based treatment.

A longitudinal design was used.

Eighty-six patients with eating disorders completed the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, Self-Compassion Scale, and Social Safeness and Pleasure Scale approximately every three weeks over a 12-week intensive eating disorder treatment program.

Multilevel modelling revealed that following periods of increased self-compassion, individuals reported higher levels of social safeness (B_t1 = .16, p < .01; B_t2 = .18, p < .05). Additionally, individuals with higher average levels of self-compassion over the course of treatment experienced higher social safeness (B = .53, p < .01).

Findings suggest that the cultivation of self-compassion may facilitate the feelings of social safeness that individuals with eating disorders generally lack. Results therefore highlight the role that the development of self-compassion can play in fostering social safeness in people with psychological disorders.