Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with IHeart Radio.

I like to say that the goal of practice is simply to be a compassionate mess.

This is messy. Social justice is messy. Our lives are messy. Every part of it is messy. We're going to get it wrong over and over and over again. And we shouldn't actually expect otherwise.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. I'm Laverne Cox.

Something a lot of people don't know about me is I can be really hard on myself, like

debilitatingly hard on myself. Years ago in an acting class in New York City with Brad Calcutterra,

Brad would have me do this exercise to take on the shell of the bitchiest drag queen from

Rupal's drag race and to read myself, as if, you know, I was reading someone else with all the

negative things that I say about myself.

And so I commenced to doing the exercise and fully committing because that's what I do as an actor.

And after Brad said, cut, I broke down into tears because I had witnesses, a class full of people who witnessed how hard I am on myself, all the

horrible, awful things I say to myself about myself.

Self-criticism is something that has been a theme in my life.

It's something that I, I think, have used as a survival strategy.

And last year, when the pandemic started and I was alone a lot, I realized that all of those old self-critical thoughts were creeping back in.

All of a sudden, I was being really, really mean and awful to myself and that I'm just kind of almost hardwired.

And so I turned to Kristen Neff's work on self-compassion. I went to

Christian Neff's website and I was like, okay, I should definitely look into this. That's why I wanted

to have Kristen Neff on the show to talk about it to help me on my journey towards being better

at self-compassion.

Hopefully it'll help you as well.

Dr. Kristen Neff is an associate professor

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