Compassion Focused Therapy Overview | Counseling Techniques

Compassion Focused Therapy is ideal for those who need help being loving and forgiving toward themselves and others.

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Compassion
~ The healing properties of compassion have been written about for centuries.
~ The Dalai Lama stresses that if you want others to be happy, or to be happy yourself – focus on compassion
~ Compassion can be thought of as a skill that one can train in.
~ Focusing on and practicing compassion can influence neurophysiological and immune systems
~ Compassionate mind training refers to specific activities designed to develop compassionate attributes and skills, particularly those that influence affect regulation
Observations About Compassion
~ Compassion-focused therapy and compassionate mind training arose from a number of observations.
~ First, people with high levels of shame and self-criticism can have enormous difficulty in being kind to themselves, feeling self-warmth or being self-compassionate.
~ Psychological consequences?
~ Physical consequences
~ Social consequences?

Observations About Compassion
~ Second
~ Problems of shame and self-criticism are often rooted in histories of abuse, bullying, high expressed emotion in the family, neglect and/or lack of affection
~ Imagine growing up in this family
~ What do you, the child want? —But you don’t get it.
~ What does this teach you about the world
~ Individuals subjected to early experiences of this type can become highly sensitive to threats of rejection or criticism from the outside world and can quickly become self-attacking (egocentric child) or defensive and aggressive
Observations About Compassion
~ Third, it has been recognized that working with shame and self-criticism requires a therapeutic focus on memories of such early experiences (similar to trauma work)
~ Fourth, some clients become skilled at generating alternatives for their negative thoughts and beliefs, but still do poorly in therapy.
~ I identify the logical fallacy, but it doesn’t make me feel any better

Key Element
~ Individuals prone to high levels of shame and self-criticism can find it very difficult to generate feelings of contentment, safeness or warmth in their relationships with others and themselves.
~ Psychological consequences?
~ Physical consequences
~ Social consequences?

Brain Systems
~ Threat and protection
~ All living things have evolved with basic threat-detection/protection systems (survival)
~ The behavioral outputs include fight, flight and submission
~ Sensitized schemas and strategies for threat detection and protection can become major influences on the ways in which a person perceives and navigates their world.
~ The clinician will identify, historically plot and validate the functions and origins of safety strategies (partly to de-shame them)
~ In compassion-focused therapy the focus is on understanding the functions of a person’s symptoms and difficulties in terms of safety strategies
Brain Systems
~ Drive and excitement
~ Animals need emotion and motivational systems that direct them towards important rewards and resources.
~ The function of the drive and excitement system in humans is to give us positive feelings that energize and motivate us to seek out things (e.g. food, sex, friendships)
~ If people take cocaine or amphetamine this is the system they are likely to stimulate.
Brain System Conflict
~ The drive system and the threat protection system can be linked in complex ways
~ Avoid negative events, which shows up in thoughts of ‘shoulds’, ‘oughts’ and ‘musts’.
~ Working to avoid rejection
~ Doing things we shouldn’t
~ Status Seeking (Wealth, power, (status))

Brain Systems
~ The contentment system
~ When animals are not threatened and not seeking resources they can become content
~ Contentment is associated with a positive ‘calm’, positive affects and sense of well-being; contentment is not just the absence of threat

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