Transform Pain into Growth: A Guide to Self-Compassion with Ron Squire, MSW

On this episode of The Adaptive Mind, we're joined by Ron Squire, a licensed social worker with a master's degree in social work from Brigham Young University. Ron's expertise in adolescent treatment and addiction recovery is beautifully complemented by his personal journey of overcoming temporary paralysis. Ron guides us in understanding how pain, shame, and compassion can be powerful catalysts for healing and personal development.

After listening to this episode you'll learn:

• How pain functions as both a deterrent and a route to personal resilience.

• The brain's processes for managing physical and emotional pain.

• Strategies to convert shame from a barrier into a moral compass.

• Techniques for building resilience through discomfort and challenge.

• The importance of self-compassion in navigating feelings of shame.

Join us as we take a look into Ron's journey and the lessons he's learned along the way.

Brady Dowling: Welcome to The Adaptive Mind. Today we have Ron Squire joining us and he is a licensed social worker with a master's in social work from Brigham Young University. With a rich background in adolescent treatment and addiction recovery, Ron brings unique insights shaped by his personal journey to overcome temporary paralysis. And he passionately employs cognitive behavioral therapy, existential therapy, philosophy and practical approaches to guide both adolescents and adults toward healing and growth. Ron, thanks for being on today.

Ron Squire: You're welcome. Thank you for having me, Brady. Appreciate it.

Brady: Yeah, so to start, I would love to just get the really brief version of that story about your temporary paralysis.

Ron: Yeah, so I was at the time I was 19 and this was in 2004. was living in Mexico as a missionary and specifically in Puebla, Mexico, which is just south of Mexico City, but at high elevation. So I was up in a very mountainous region. It snows where I was at. I was at the base of a volcano that has snow on it all year round, active volcano. So it's a really incredible kind of land adventure. And I'm 19.

I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm having a great time. We had a day off in which we went hiking in one of these regions that we were close to. And to make a long story short, we were hiking around and we went up a hill that had a series of boulders on it. We climbed, we were just kind of bouldering around. didn't need necessarily any ropes or anything like that. But we took pictures at the top of these boulders and then we're kind of

kind of descending on the other side. And for one reason or another, I just hit a patch of earth and rock that just gave way below me and started sliding down this ledge on my stomach, sliding down backwards, heading towards this ledge, this drop off. And, you know, it was like something out of a movie trying to hold onto plants and roots and grabbing hands of the other guys I was with and missing their grip.

Then all of a sudden I did a free fall. went up the edge of this boulder and I did a free fall of about 35 feet, landed backwards, or was free falling backwards, landed onto my back, rocks below, and then tumbled down the hill, head over heels for about another 50 yards. And the consequences of that fall is that I had shattered my thoracic vertebrae, which is right kind of in the middle on the backside.

It's about mid level in your chest. Cracked a couple other vertebrae, broke a few ribs on the backside. One of them punctured my lung, the other, and then I think it happened when I was tumbling, but then on my left leg, just below the knee, I completely snapped my leg in half to be amphibula, completely broken. And I was conscious the whole time, so I remember everything. And I remember looking down at my leg and being aware enough to see the

sorry state it was in, was a pretty ugly sight. And then thinking, man, I can't feel that. And if I can't feel that, that's a problem. That's not good that I can't feel that intense injury. And I was active my whole young life, played sports, football, all this stuff. And I just, never was messed up like that. I just remember thinking, I'm I'm really messed up now. And I'm, know, on this hill in the middle of nowhere. And where I lived in Mexico, there was

There is no such thing as life flight where I was at. I mean, it was in the middle of nowhere. So we were up on this hill for a few hours. Some guys I was with, they left to go get help, come back, got me onto a stretcher, hiked me down the hill, got me to a hospital a few hours away. And they performed an about an eight hour surgery on my back in Mexico to help stabilize the injury site. Cause then eventually I was going to be life flight at home to San Diego area.

And I was admitted into a hospital at San Diego about a week or two within those first couple of weeks of being there. They had done another surgery on my leg, or the first surgery on my leg rather. And that was about six hours. And then they did a 13 hour surgery on my back, a second one on my back to further, you know, just correct and clean up the injury side and add more and better metal into the spine. And this whole time, by the way, I can't move anything.

I'm paralyzed from the waist down. And after the surgery, once I had healed enough, they had moved me to what's called like the trauma floor, trauma unit, and eventually to like long-term recovery. was in the hospital for about two and a half months, still not able to move anything. And that's when a lot of depression and anxiety, and I never really understood trauma or what it's like to have a

Flashback or anything like that and I started to have those and so I give that context just to kind of add the emotional pain which I know we can get into later, but there's not only the physical pain, then there's emotional pain that's now being heaped on to me and I honestly feel sorry for that 19 year old kid like that's a lot for a young kid to go through So I'm in the hospital paralyzed and My it was the morning of my 20th birthday. So my birthday is in June

The accident happened in early April and my dad comes to pick me up for the day. He's going to have to bring me back at night, but he comes to pick me up for the day for a little party, little get together in my house. And then as he's helping me get ready, my surgeon in San Diego, my American surgeon comes in and he says, Hey, I saw it was your birthday. I wanted to come by. wish you a happy birthday. And all right. Yeah. We exchange pleasantries. then he says, I'd really like to see you move that toe.

And I'm like, okay, I've been trying to do that for months. And what they had told me throughout this whole process as I'm paralyzed is they would say, imagine if you can remember what it was like to move your toe. Try to remember what it was like to move your toe. And what they're trying to do is just strengthen those neural pathways, sending the signals, because the second surgery, they had cleared out all the blockages that were otherwise kind of clamping my spinal cord, which would

block the signals leaving my brain down to my legs to move. So he said, all right, we've kind of cleared the obstructions and then for the subsequent two months, try to remember, try to remember, just try to strengthen that pathway. And that's like asking you or anyone to look at a object two feet away and just trying to move it with your eyes. Like that's what it felt like. I felt so detached from my own body. was really strange. Anyway, the doctor, the surgeon asks, Marlon, do you move that toe?

And this is when the nerdiness in me came out and I imagined Star Wars and I'm like, okay, if there's such thing as the force, this better be, better make itself manifest. I'm like, yeah, Luke Skywalker, he was in a cave one time and he was reaching out for his lightsaber. like, I could do that. So I'm looking down and focusing intently on my toe, on my big toe, my right foot. And then all of a sudden my big toe just kind of barely moves.

It was strange is that it felt like it was like a neural awakening, like a neurological firework that went off in my brain and I could feel almost like a flushing feeling in my head that then followed my train of thought through my chest, into my waist, down my leg, into my foot. And once it got to my foot, it's almost like the signal reached its destination and then my toe just moved. It was bizarre.

Anyway, I started crying. My dad was crying. The doctor was crying. The nurse was crying. Like everyone there, we were just blown away. And then that was the start of my, what would then become a four and a half year journey of a lot of ups and downs, but eventually learning to walk again. So I, I had to learn how to sit up first. I then had to learn how to stand without passing out because your body gets used to sitting down. So the blood flow and the circulation isn't as good.

So then I had to learn how to stand up and then with the help of a walker and leg braces and a back brace and I just slowly was just kind of crawling back literally and that's another thing I had to learn how to crawl like a baby just like a baby learns how to walk and move I had to learn how to crawl. So I went from a walker, a wheelchair to a walker and then I was for years I used two arm crutches and then two canes and then now I walk around with one cane.

And so if you saw me walking, it's a very unique gate. You would see how I walk and think, yeah, you know, I wonder what happened to that guy. It's a very pronounced blend, but Hey, I'll take it after what I've been through. And that, so that's kind of what my story and different experiences throughout that time led me to being interested in philosophy and psychology because I never, I never saw a therapist. didn't really know, you know, back then it was, it was just kind of

becoming a little more destigmatized to go see a therapist. You still didn't really consider it. And so I just lost myself in books. I've always been a I've always been a reader, voracious reader. So I'm a big believer in bibliotherapy where there's so much wisdom and help that you can glean from incredible authors of the past, whether it's literature or philosophy, psychology.

And so I used a lot of that to help me get through what I was going through. Then I started to share things with other people along the way and they said it helped. And I'm like, wait, could I do this for a job or career? And that's kind of how I landed into the position I am now.

Brady: Cool, a lot of really interesting stuff that we can dig into. I think to build off of that, can you talk about what goes on in someone's brain when they're feeling pain? And you touched on both psychological and physical. I would imagine there's a similar thing happening in someone's brain, if you could touch on that, that would be great.

Ron: Yeah, absolutely. So the way the brain is structured, it's unbelievable. When it comes to pain, you can think of it as like there's a matrix. So there's different points in the brain that have pain receptors within that region of the brain. And it's almost trying to understand what's happening from an emotional perspective, from different parts of your body. Is there pain in the limbs? Is there pain in the heart? Is it internal, external?

So all the different parts of the brain that are in charge of these different areas of the brain are now kind of going through like a coordination effort. They're pinpointing off of one another to really try to pinpoint what kind of pain and where is the pain and can we do anything about it? So it's a type of neurophysiological collaboration, you could call it. And what the tricky thing sometimes is that

while there are specific areas of the brain that focus on emotional pain or are at least more geared towards that, like one of them is the interior cingulate cortex, that's where a lot of emotional pain is kind of registered, there is still a lot of overlap between these areas that try to like discern is this physical or emotional. And so very often what can help people that they're going through pain is that

If you're going through something emotional, you can offer perspective through questioning to help them. It's a very kind of stoic idea where you start to question, well, okay, I'm feeling pain, but am I actually being harmed? Am I actually being hurt right now? Even though it can feel like it, just being able to ask that question presupposes the ability to...

separate. Victor Frank will call it dereflect. Like you can actually step out of whatever pain you're feeling, gain perspective, which then that turns on the prefrontal cortex. And then the prefrontal cortex's role is to kind of help manage those other areas of the brain that are all just kind of more primitive pain detection warning systems. And it's like, hold on, I think we're okay. We're not as bad as we think we are. And so it's an interesting

concept to kind of keep in mind is this matrix is pinpointing that all these areas of the brain do So that's kind of what's going on in the brain

Brady: Yeah, it's interesting that you mention it like that. I know there's this mindfulness concept of being the observer and kind of observing your thoughts and sensations that are happening in your body. And I would imagine there's a lot of overlap or potentially that was even the genesis of that kind of philosophy. Looking at pain and of course there's value in

Let's say you touch a hot stove and it tells you like you don't want to do that because your hand is going to be harmed if you continue to do that. Is there a longer term value or more value beyond just kind of like I don't want to feel pain and I'm going to protect my body from that? What kind of other benefits of pain can we can we get?

Ron: What's interesting is that while pain is simultaneously a warning system, it's also a pathway. It's a gateway to strengthening of whatever emotional muscle or literally physical muscle that you want to strengthen and pain is the pathway. So pain is the pathway to learning, like what you're just kind of referring to. We as a species, we have a unique ability

to project ourselves across time, you know, in our minds. So we can think of, okay, in the future, I want to avoid this kind of pain. And so then pain becomes a teacher, a brutal teacher, but a teacher nonetheless. So we can project ourselves into the future as we allow ourselves, as much as we allow ourselves to really feel and accept what we're going through right now, the key is then, okay, what can I potentially learn from this so can maybe if it is avoidable and if I can do anything about it and I have somewhat of an influence on the avoidance of needless pain then maybe I can avoid that in the future. That's therapy, right? I want people to, I don't want people to come in here and just simply talk about everything that they're going through then we never leave with a plan or a strategy or solution to mitigate whatever it is that they can mitigate.

that they can reduce in their minds and in their lives. And so pain can be a really helpful teacher, but pain is also something paradoxically to be welcomed at times, to not be resisted. Because through the pain or tension, whether it's emotional or physical, that's how we get stronger. So it's this weird, it's a strange dynamic where you have to sit and almost ask a question, is this helpful or harmful? Like what kind of pain am I dealing with here?

But either way, it is a message of some kind. If you can kind of view pain as a messenger, it's like, what question is being asked of me? What is the answer? And it just helps to kind of give a maybe relationship. It's a strange way to think of it, but it's like a relationship dynamic with pain.

Brady: Yeah, so it sounds like there is a benefit of experiencing pain in certain circumstances and I think like cold exposure has become very popular and commonplace, at least in kind of pop psychology and self-improvement. Are there any other examples of like leaning into discomfort or pain or how might someone start this journey of embracing pain.

Ron: The great and very visceral way to do that is exercise. know, and in psychology, there's, there is yet to be, there's a lot of fads, okay. You could even make the argument that cold exposure therapy is a fad. Ketamine could be a fad. You know, psychoanalysis with Freud, you know, it's like these, there's, there's popularities of different treatments. There is obviously yet to be.

panacea if you will that would solve everything but I in my opinion I think exercise is probably the closest that comes to it now let's put aside the health benefits the actual physical health benefits this kind of falls in line with the cold exposure I don't know there's plenty of data out there that will show the benefits of cold exposure or maybe it's not as helpful as we think but I think ultimately it is a net gain

simply because you are exposing yourself to something hard. You are inoculating yourself against future pain. So that's why I say like, you know, when you can go to the gym and obviously work up to it, I don't want you to stack like four plates on the bench and get after it right away, but work up to it, but like push yourself. Because then when you experience pain that is not of your choosing, but is kind of thrust upon you in life.

You can then go, yeah, I remember I did that hard thing the other day, I went to the gym and I'm familiar with pain and I know what to do with pain and I've been in pain before and I've made it through. So I got this. There is an empowering consequence and effect that comes from being inoculated. So it's kind of like an immunization towards future pain because that is a constant in life. Pain is here to stay. It's coming at you. You will experience it. It's the nature of being alive and sentient and conscious.

So that doesn't mean that we have to just leave ourselves defenseless against it. You do have tools and I think just doing hard things. It could be going to the gym. It could be reading a hard book. It could be learning the piano. It could be, you know, I've never learned how to bake bread. I'm going to bake some bread. Like challenge yourself a little bit instead of living a life of

mediocrity and comforts and just these things that are so empty that never really give us anything. Because pain, there's no pathway in life that's painless. And so if you don't choose pain of some kind now, the pain that you want, pain is going to choose you. Suffering will choose you later. It will take you. And you better be ready for it because it's coming. So I'm a very optimistic therapist, right? You can kind of get...

I like to scare my clients a little bit like, the flood is coming. You better build that arc. You better get ready. But it's helpful because it's like, what are we going to do? Deny that pain isn't a part of this world? Of course it is.

Brady: And so focusing more on kind of the psychological and the mental pain. I know with habits and of course with addictions, a certain kind of pain that people have is with shame, just feeling so bad and we could define really what shame is. But how do you differentiate shame from guilt in a clinical or psychological sense?

Ron: I would say they're both very similar. I think there is maybe a distinct difference and then probably in my opinion would kind of come down to severity. So what I mean by that is guilt is I messed up. I did something that was wrong and I can remedy that but I don't, it stays with the act itself. It doesn't necessarily start to seep in and reflect on me. Shame is more I did something bad and I feel bad about myself.

to the core and I think what that does is another way to look at it is I think shame has more to do with a serious violation of a value system. Guilt is, you can feel guilty if you, for example, are at a birthday party and you're throwing a ball around and it accidentally hits a kid in the face, you know? But you're like, I mean, you're not gonna carry that around because you can kind of go, okay, it wasn't intentional and you can start to kind of think through it.

But if that same person then left and going like, my gosh, that just violated, I value safety in children's lives and my goodness. And so that's a problem on that person where they are internalizing it so much to say something about them to their core. Now that's kind of a self-induced shame, but I'm a believer in meaning universals. So universal values, like Frankel will call them.

Victor Frank will call them meaning universals. These tried and true tested principles that help societies come together and bond. I think shame has gotten a really bad rap.

can be helpful in that it's an internal moral compass. Going back to the idea of projecting. See, a lot of times we'll act in opposition to a value system that we hold. That can bring shame, especially if it's a

you minor infraction in our value system might be more in the guilt category. A severe infraction on the value system or breaking of the value, that would probably go down to the shame because you kind of are surprised that you even could do that, that you're capable of it. And shame can be helpful because then it can motivate you to prevent further damaging of the social relationship, of your bond to those around you. Kind of like pain.

Physical pain is a message. Sorry, physical pain is a message. And what it's doing is our body's saying, hey, you need to stop right now or else you're gonna injure yourself and then you're immobile and then you're dead. And shame can kind of, you can see shame is the same thing. It's a warning system saying, if you do this, or if you do this again, you will injure yourself socially and attachment wise to the point where no one will be with you. And...

So it becomes almost like a rule for the person who's done something that they need to be honest with themselves. They have to be honest with others. Then the responsibility of those receiving that person need to then examine, are they safe enough to welcome back in? Like, is this gonna violate our boundaries? Have they done the post shame to do list that Anna Lemke talks about? There's a post shame to do list. Have they done that?

Do we feel safe enough? Can we welcome them back in? We don't want to shun them because that becomes kind of more of a toxic shame. So shame can be extremely helpful. It's pain and it's a deep pain. And I think it's so deep because it just strikes to the very core of our wiring, which is attachment. We are wired to attach to others because we're social creatures and it brings a lot of meaning in our life and it helps our survival. So we don't want anything to get in the way of that. So shame.

I actually use shame in my practice. I don't shame them. I don't sit there and be like, and just go after them. But if I see that they're potentially headed down a road, I'll have them project themselves into the future and say, what will you feel if you go through with this? And if it's in the shame category, then what does that tell you about the path you're heading? Can you now course correct to get to a different place?

Brady: Yeah, so it sounds like to start you mentioned guilt is really not necessarily attached with our value system. Guilt is more like action based. You mentioned the example of someone hitting someone else with a ball and it's not necessarily part of our values that we don't hit people with a ball. then shame is more like attached to someone's value system and maybe there's a spectrum of this healthy level of shame and then I guess if you get deeper then it could be more detrimental.

Ron: Yeah, and I think when it goes deeper, what that looks like is the key word there is potential. Is that I think and feel towards myself in a certain toxic way, in a deeply shameful way to the point where I don't even have potential to change. I don't conceptualize myself as either having potential to change or being worthy to change. But once again, potential, actualizing potential, being worthy of it.

That's gonna require work to redeem yourself with the community. The burden is on you now to kind of course correct your own life. Yes, of course there are societies and people that can make that harder, especially if you're being told you are no good and there's no potential for you and you're not worth anything. That's pretty brutal. That's brutal. But I think what keeps it from going to that place and keeps it in the healthy category is

That is a violation against either what we believe as a family, as a town, as a community. And I know you can do better and I expect you to do better. How can I expect you to do better if you have no potential to do better? Expecting someone to do better presupposes their ability to do better, right? So I'm recognizing their worth and their potential and their ability. And that's where it keeps it healthy. But if you go into the, you'll never...

get better, you will never do anything, you have no potential, you have no worth, then that's where the shame starts to heap upon itself.

Brady: Right, and I like what you mentioned about using shame as almost visualizing the shame that you could feel if you perform some kind of action or if you do something and using that as a motivator. So for the case when, let's say you're feeling shame after some kind of action or something like that,

Ron: Yes.

Brady: Well, I guess let's just take a step back. how would you say how would you talk about the relationship between shame and self compassion?

Ron: That's good. Shame and self-compassion.

What I would do in that instance is, at least to help someone in this context, and maybe for anyone listening, would be, look, I know you're feeling these really dark things about yourself, and you know what, I'm not gonna try to take that away from you. And there are times where certain clients will be like, yeah, you messed up, that's not good.

So I'm not going to, I'm not going to sit here and normalize or make okay, or engage in some Freudian defense mechanism to make it okay in your mind to reduce anxiety. You should feel bad because you did this thing. And what's so interesting as a quick digression and side note to that, people are relieved when they hear that they're relieved. They're like, finally I'm hearing the truth because I think the reason they're relieved is because it does strike at what I think we all have in us as a conscience. I mean, barring

Yes, the actual clinical psychopath, which are very rare to actually encounter one. But barring that, you do have a conscience in there. You have something in the spiritual dimension. And when I say like, yeah, that wasn't good, man, they go, yeah, huh. Because I think in so many ways we're in a world that's trying to normalize way too much, trying to normalize way too much. We're getting rid of the moral part of, I think, getting better anyway.

shame and self compassion, I don't necessarily try to take away their shame, but what I try to do is I go, okay, I'm not gonna try to take that away. I'm gonna hold you accountable just as I want you to hold yourself accountable, but I want you to see if you can, strangely enough, if you can separate yourself from yourself and talk to yourself as if you're talking to someone else that you really care about or like, and what would you say to them?

Usually it comes out more in the line of self-compassion But self-compassion isn't I'm letting myself off the hook or I'm you off the hook. It's more I'm compassionate enough to simultaneously hold myself accountable and Recognize the potential I still have in me to do better Right. I'm not gonna unnecessarily come down on me, but we all do that by the way. We talked so so

brutal to ourselves way more than what anyone else would. But when it comes to, then it comes to self-compassion pieces, like, okay, you messed up. What are we gonna do next? Like, we're not gonna try to take that away. We can't lie to ourselves. We have to be honest. It's just part of the kind of helpful shame cycle. We have to be honest. But simultaneously, it would be dishonest to say, you are pathetic. You have no worth. There's nothing to change about you. So we can, there's a spectrum.

And you can get you can go dishonest on either polarity on either polar opposite you can be you can wash away and try to ignore and Justify everything you did and say you're totally fine, and you're great. That's a lie But it's also a lie to say You are worthless. You can't try to do better. You will not do better. There's no point Those are equal lies. These are lies. So self-compassion is is linked to truth

truth and reality. So that's kind how I would, anyway, establish the connection between the shame and self-compassion.

Brady: Yeah, again, it seems like finding this balance and I would imagine that, like you mentioned, with your recovery from your paralysis, it takes a lot of work and time to get into this specific spot that you want to be. And so to find this balance probably takes a lot of work, whether it's with a therapist or...

journaling or whatever it is through research, but it probably takes a lot of work to kind of strike this balance. Would you say that?

Ron: I would say, yeah, and I would swap out one word that you're using. Everything you said was correct. But if you try to, if you can swap out balance with harmony, with harmony, Aristotle talks about virtue being found in the golden mean, not the median, not the middle, because balance kind of implies a sense of equality on either side. But sometimes you have to be harder on yourself. Sometimes you got to be a little more compassionate. But in that moment,

Where is the average? Where's the golden mean? Where's the golden average that, okay, maybe I need a little bit, I need to be a little bit tougher on myself right now. And that strikes a harmony with what, with the demand of the moment or what, or what would be a healthy response. Another, one of my favorite quotes, little quips from Nietzsche. Nietzsche is an interesting guy. I disagree a lot with what he, what he, you know, believed or his analysis of.

morals and stuff like that. he is a silver tongue guy. He can say some things that, you know, it just sums things up in a sentence that is unreal to me. And one of them is talks about self-compassion and all he says is, look, you need to offer your friend a bed, but make it a hard bed. Make that bed a hard one because it is not so it's not compassionate to offer them a place where then they just stay there and then they set up camp and then they never leave.

And the same thing goes to us, like offer yourself a bed. But if, if the situation is calling for you to continue to progress and move forward, make it a hard bed, right? Finding the right average, the right harmony of well, how much am I demanding of myself? How much of myself do I need to like cut a break to and give some grace? And what's interesting is that there's no like rubric for how much to do of each or either you have to

It takes a lot of practice to kind of fill that out. Sorry, fill that out.

Brady: Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and also your expertise. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Links & Resources

• Ron Squire on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ron.g.squire/

• Ron Squire on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Ron.G.Squire

• Squire Counseling Website: https://www.squirecounseling.com

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