BE YOUR OWN BESTIE: A No-Nonsense Guide to Changing the Way You Treat Yourself

Review

SECTION ONE Misha Brown's *Be Your Own Bestie* opens from a premise that will feel immediately recognizable to a specific kind of reader: the woman who shows up fully for everyone in her life — her children, her colleagues, her friends — and treats herself with a harshness she would never direct at anyone she loves. Brown's argument, drawn from the self-help tradition published by Hay House, is that the relationship a person has with herself is the foundation every other relationship either rests on or cracks beneath. The book aims to teach readers how to extend to themselves the warmth, patience, and advocacy they already know how to give. Its audience is women who have internalized a grammar of self-criticism so thoroughly that they can no longer hear it as criticism — they hear it as just being realistic. Brown positions herself as a guide out of that internalized harshness and toward what she calls being your own best friend: attentive, honest, encouraging, and reliably present to your own inner life. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book's foundational intuition — that the self deserves care, not just productivity — touches the Catholic conviction that each person carries inherent dignity prior to any achievement. The imago Dei is not earned; it is given. A self-help text that pushes back against relentless self-criticism is, at its best, recovering a truth about original goodness that performance culture has obscured. - **Fallen**: Brown's target reader is someone whose inner voice has become an adversary. In CCMMP terms, this is a specific expression of the Fallen condition: the disordering of self-regard not into pride but into chronic self-contempt, which Aquinas identifies as a deformation of the love one properly owes oneself as a creature made for good. The book diagnoses a real wound. - **Redeemed**: The movement Brown proposes — from self-attack to self-accompaniment — echoes, in a secular idiom, what spiritual direction calls the turn from scrupulosity toward trust. Healing, in the book's terms, looks like learning to witness oneself with honesty rather than verdict. Catholic formation would locate the source of that transformation in grace rather than in an inner resource the self already possesses, but the experiential territory is recognizable. - **Prudence (personal wisdom)**: The capacity to see one's own situation clearly — without either self-deception or self-condemnation — is the precondition for practical wisdom. A reader who learns to observe herself with fairness is practicing the kind of accurate self-assessment that prudence requires before any good decision can be made. - **Justice (friendliness)**: Aristotle and Aquinas treat friendly communication as a genuine moral virtue — the habit of good will in ordinary social exchange. Brown's 'bestie' framework, whatever its anthropological limitations, is trying to install something like a habit of friendly interior speech. That is a recognizable, if theologically thin, version of what the tradition means by ordered self-regard. SECTION THREE The most instructive conversation partner from the canon is Hayes[^1], whose ACT self-compassion exercises ask participants to view themselves from across a room and ask: 'Do you see a whole human being — a lovable human being, a person who is valid?' That exercise runs almost exactly parallel to the imaginative self-friendship Brown proposes, though Hayes grounds it in a psychological model of defusion from the evaluative self rather than in a therapeutic social vocabulary. Where Brown encourages readers to treat themselves as they would a best friend, Hayes[^1] builds the same observational distance through a formal mindfulness protocol — the mechanism is more precise, and the philosophical anthropology is more carefully hedged. Mate's[^2] observation that mindfulness practice produces a 'more emotionally present' and 'less reactive' self-relationship gestures toward what both Hayes and Brown are reaching for: a regulated inner life that can accompany rather than attack itself. ## References 1. Hayes, S. (n.d.). *ACT and RFT videos* (DMU video lecture). — 'do you see a whole human being a lovable human being a person who is valid' 2. Mate, G. (2008). *In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts*, Chapter 31. — 'when I do practise meditation, I find more ease in my life. I'm calmer, more emotionally present'

✓ Strengths

• ✓The book addresses the legitimate pastoral concern that many people extend to others a generosity and patience they systematically withhold from themselves — a concrete asymmetry in self-regard that Catholic psychology, following Aquinas on ordered love (ST II-II, q. 26), would recognize as a distortion of proper self-love rather than humility.
• ✓Insofar as the title's premise invites a reader to observe themselves from a compassionate third-person perspective, it resonates with the integral virtue of self-understanding that underlies personal prudence — knowing one's own situation honestly before acting wisely within it.
• ✓The self-help genre's emphasis on internal dialogue and self-examination, when stripped of individualist ideology, maps onto an ancient spiritual tradition: the examen of conscience, practiced in the Ignatian tradition, is precisely the practice of honest self-accompaniment.
• ✓A book oriented toward the inner life of women who have neglected their own well-being speaks to a real pastoral population — caregivers, mothers, ministry workers — whose burnout is well-documented and whose formation needs are frequently underserved in parish programming.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The self-as-best-friend framework risks conflating Christian self-love with therapeutic self-sufficiency. Aquinas distinguishes ordered love of self (which refers the self to God as final end) from disordered self-regard (which makes the self the terminus). A popular self-help text from Hay House is unlikely to maintain that distinction, and readers may absorb an implicitly closed anthropology in which healing is an internal transaction rather than a response to grace.
• ⚠The title's register — 'bestie' as a relational ideal — trivializes the ontological weight of genuine friendship, which Aristotle and Aquinas treat as a bond ordered toward the good of the other and ultimately toward virtue. Reducing the self-relationship to the idiom of peer friendship may flatten what Catholic anthropology would call the interior life into a social media grammar.
• ⚠A Catholic clinical reader should be alert to the Hay House publishing context, which routinely packages self-actualization spirituality drawn from New Thought, law-of-attraction frameworks, and non-theistic mindfulness. These frameworks are not incompatible with Catholic practice at the surface level but can introduce anthropological assumptions — the self as sovereign creator of its own reality, the universe as a responsive force — that conflict with the CCMMP's account of the person as creature, not self-originating.