It’s Not Your Fault, It’s Not Your Fault, It’s Not Your Fault

I Wondered If He Was Speaking to Me!

I’ve been busy creating lately and needed to stop for a few days. I found myself flicking through one of the books I bought at the Australian Childhood Foundation’s International Childhood Trauma Conference in August down in Melbourne. It’s titled Living Like Crazy by Professor Paul Gilbert. The title looks healthy, crazily enough!

I had put my notes from his talk inside the book, my way of making me connect what I’d heard in the seminar. The seminar had hit home and that was the reason I bought two of his books, Living Like Crazy and the smaller Compassion-Focused Therapy, to understand a little more about me when I got back home.

Listening to Professor Gilbert (‘Gilbert’) speak about compassion, he was using a case study of a client, with her permission, a video recording of an interview about what work they’d done together. The woman he’d worked with for years, a survivor who didn’t know that she wasn’t finding self-compassion (hmmm, he had my attention). He was sharing with the professionals up in the seats around me how trauma survivors often find that hard to do, if someone, an adult in our life, hadn’t shown us compassion as children or beyond.

Then he did that Robin Williams, Good Will Hunting thing…

Talking up to us in the audience, and I thought, does he know survivors are here… or does every human need to hear it? But it hit me straight in the heart and those wobbly tears started rising up in my chest as they do…

“It’s not your fault… It’s not your fault…….. It’s not your fault.”

He said it again and again, slower each time, maybe as an example of how to speak to someone with trauma, because survivors need to hear it many times before it even begins to land. Do we… oh no, that’s sad to realise. For me it was anyway. We need to hear it many times over, not just in one round.

He shared that when we don’t have compassion, like for the woman he was discussing, they were talking about examples of her life and one was: “when your mother had planned a birthday party for you and you were so excited, then on the day of the party, she decided she was tired and cancelled the plan at the last minute.” The woman said “yes”, and Paul said, “that must have made you feel sad, you wanted that party didn’t you…” and on he went until his words were able to be loaned to her, until she could express them herself.

What compassion really means

Paul Gilbert founded Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) after years of working with people who, like many of us, struggled with shame, self-criticism, and feeling unworthy of love.

CFT isn’t about sentimentality or “just love yourself.” It’s about understanding the biology and psychology of care, how our brains are wired to protect us through fight, flight, or freeze, and how those same systems can block our capacity to self-soothe.

In Living Like Crazy, Gilbert speaks about the chaos of modern life. How we chase achievement and approval while neglecting our need for gentleness and rest. And in Compassion Focused Therapy, he explains how learning to befriend ourselves can literally reshape our brains. It can quiet the threat system, and awaken the part of us that will say:

“I see your struggle, and I want to help.”

Why this matters for survivors

For those of us who grew up without compassion, it can feel almost foreign, like learning a new language. I tried looking at me, from outside in, and my relationships with adults as a child. It’s like I spoke about in Resolve. There was such a lack of presence by my parents, our communications mostly transactional. There were good days, laughter, fun in the pool, plenty of good stuff. For the hard days, the hard times, I still can see there was no emotional intelligence there.

In that decade, was I the only one, or is that something you felt too? Were our parents at all emotionally intelligent? I’d need to go look at that by itself and what it really means to be or not to be EI.

When I heard Gilbert speak, I thought of how many survivors I’ve met who find it easier to feel compassion for others than for themselves.

It’s like the Rescuer role I talk about in Karpman’s Drama Triangle. When we’re in the Rescuer role we want to be loved for being the ‘hero’. We want to be valued for helping others. By focusing on the pain of others, Rescuers avoid their own feelings and do not realise that their pleasing and accommodating strategies keep others disempowered by doing for them what they could do for themselves. The Rescuer role is the Pleaser role.

I can see how survivors easily understand pain in others but are numb, unable to turn that same warmth inward, it can feel impossible.

Generationally, if our parents or carers also grew up in homes without compassion, how could they have shown us what they never received? I don’t say that to excuse harm, just with curiosity because we can’t change what we don’t want to see is happening in the chain of generational trauma that gets passed down, even by ourselves. Healing is about understanding the chain of human pain that compassion helps to interrupt.

The science and the soul

CFT research shows that compassion isn’t just a feeling, it’s a physiological state. Breathing slows. Muscles soften. Our nervous system shifts from defence to connection.

Gilbert had us practice that shift and then how we can listen to someone else differently from that place.

He says that when people start to feel compassion for themselves, they often weep. That’s not from weakness, but because the body is remembering safety.

Listening to him, I realised how many of us live as if safety is conditional. Safeness is another word I was hearing often through his talks. That is something else I want to explore: safety / safeness.

Compassion invites us to imagine that safety can live inside us, that it doesn’t depend on others doing better first.

It takes practice

If you’ve ever found it hard to be kind to yourself, you’re not alone. It takes practice.

Maybe today, all you do is breathe slowly for a minute, the way Gilbert taught us in that room. It went: shoulders soft, breath steady, and whisper, “It’s not my fault.”

Gilbert also said: You don’t have to believe it straight away. Just keep saying it. Let it find its way in.

Self-compassion isn’t about pretending everything’s okay. It’s about recognising that you, and the child you once were, deserve to be met with gentleness. And perhaps that’s where healing begins.

Shared with love,

Alice