Claire aka DocReads's Reviews > Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive

There is a lot to unpack in this book.

I’ve been using some of Neff’s guided meditations on the Insight Timer app for a while now, and her model of self-compassion is described frequently in Brene Brown’s work, so I’ve already benefitted from some of the lessons provided in this book.

The most helpful sections for me were early on, and especially the sections and exercises around tender and fierce self-compassion. I think this section makes the book worthwhile, and is the strongest part for me. I would recommend this section to pretty much everyone.

I have mixed feelings on some of the broader applications of these techniques to things like confronting sexual violence, or how to deploy techniques to shape how folks respond to women in the workplace, or confronting issues of injustice more broadly. I think these techniques are necessary to stay well when working on broader issues, but at the same time I would have liked to have a bit more acknowledgement of the systemic nature of these challenges, as well as the important role of community as a support in these systems. Self-compassion is necessary, but like… no person is an island.

This book is very well researched and cites a lot of primary work - maybe a bit too much even for a science and evidence nerd like me. The book is aimed at women, and is quite heteronormative in a lot of ways. Partially, I think this is a side product of the fact that the research itself, the study populations etc, are quite homogeneously white, cis, and heterosexual. This is a known problem in the field, and I would have liked this to be more meaningfully addressed.

In any case, I did enjoy the book a lot, which is why it gets 4 stars despite the critiques. I think everyone would benefit from developing a self-compassion practice, and her tools for doing so have been and continue to be helpful to me.