Right off the bat I was disturbed by her dehumanization of a homeless man and other instances where she demonstrated a clear lack of compassion for other people. Then I got to her gross, ableist portrayal of autism and had to put the book down forever. Extremely disappointing and harmful.

This would have rated a touch higher if it weren’t for the blatant ableism towards autistic people. 

The rampant ableism (it turns out Neff is a supporter of Autism Speaks) heavily overshadows the lessons of self compassion, which were overall helpful but also consistently derailed by the wandering passages of her personal life. These excerpts often made me question her morals (eg cheating on her husband, grieving that her son will never get a PhD because of his autism (???), monetising her son’s ND, etc) but additionally I found Neff’s writing so expositional that the whole text could have been summarised in maybe a third of its total length.

Big trigger warning for chapter eleven, which was incredibly disturbing in its recount of a distressing trip to Mongolia which “healed” her son of autism (aka forced him to make his autistic traits) through rituals and horses (???). This is such a dangerous and unethical narrative that Neff is perpetuating.

What does Neff think of her autistic/ND readers trying to introduce self compassion into their lives? Are we not included in your readership? Are we destined to be burdens on NTs, their reason to read this book?

I will be looking for lessons in self compassion elsewhere.

This book was very helpful to me (even without sitting down and formally doing the exercises) because it does repeat a variation on the same lesson over and over. The chapters build on each other and I need repetition to make something stick. However, there are definitely elements that are outdated and frustrating, the biggest for me being that she is the stereotype of an autism mom. Any autistic readers should go in knowing that whenever she brings up her son, it is probably going to be triggering at worst or offensive and frustrating at the least. They generally only come up in the “My Story” sections at the end of a particular subject or chapter. Proceed with caution. But a generally interesting book I highlighted a lot, and I’ve already started to notice a difference in my self talk when I make a mistake.

I really struggled with this one.

The author has an autistic child and describes her experience with this. It's not great. She seems resentful of having an autistic child. I had to take a break from it for a few weeks. When I came back to the book it was okay for several chapters with no mention of her son until the end of the book. It's very distracting from the topic of self compassion, and I'm not really sure how the two are connected. She doesn't seem to have a lot of compassion for her child. She's learned some things, but there is still a lot of ableism by the end of the book.

I would consider giving the book 4-5 stars if everything about her child were taken out because the self compassion portion is good. It's not necessary. It's almost like she is putting two books into one. One about self compassion and one about her struggles with her child.

The whipping part was a bit weird for me too, and that whole trip her family took wasn't well described. It's not clear what the shaman did to "cure" her son. I'm glad they had a good time, but this whole chapter was not something I could use and I didn't feel inspired by it.

 Good. useful. Many important ideas and good points and exercises. Many things I had already thought (that were very helpful to my growth) were in this book. Good thoughts about self esteem/ego and comparison also. I don't like that she thinks it possible to "over feel" your feelings and exaggerate your pain. personally, that's a bad vibe. also very surprised and upset by HEAVY ABLEISM SPECIFIC TO AUTISM. if you sign up to have a child you sign up to have a disabled child ok. and its borderline hilarious that one of her first thoughts was that autistics can't get PhDs. It would be funny if it wasn't horrible. I reccomend reading this and skiping all of the sections containing her personal experience as they only made the book worse in my opinion. This review is remaining unedited.

This book has been recommended to me so many times, so I finally borrowed it from the library. Maybe I’m not the target audience? She uses several very disturbing examples of classism and ableism (referencing a hypothetical unsheltered person and bemoaning having an autistic son) to explain why people should care about others? 

Think this might be for white heterosexual middle class people who have no social consciousness. Maybe? 

I would recommend investigating the concept and practices of self-compassion (which I do think may have value) online or elsewhere, rather than in this book.

In a self-help book that the author is positing will be helpful for everyone, it seems to me she unknowingly had a very limited view of who everyone might be while writing it. It gets off on the wrong foot by using an imaginary homeless person as a prop for teaching us readers about compassion for others, really setting up who the expected audience is. Later on the author writes twice about her experience having an autistic son in such a way that it's extremely obvious she never imagined an autistic person might be reading it. The author does address that having self-compassion is not necessarily linked to having compassion for others.

Really upsetting reviews about autism. Went to look up more because I thought maybe she had gotten better and saw that she and her husband took they are six year old child on a difficult and frightening trip to Mongolia to have horses and shaman "heal" their child of autism. Also she supports Autism Speaks. 

Many parts of this book gave me red flags, but the way she speaks of wishing she had a "normal"child and feeling self-pity about it just sent me. I thought maybe she was going to talk about having self compassion with herself for making judgments about autism, but no she was basically having self compassion in accepting that her life was destroyed by her child having autism. 

Self compassion might be important but I'm going to look for it from a different source. I just cannot deal with the views from this author.