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Compassion Focused Therapy For Dummies
About This Book
Don't be so hard on yourself â use compassion focused therapy as your guide
It's often said that we're our own worst criticsâand it's true. Compassion Focused Therapy For Dummies offers straightforward and practical advice that helps you view yourself through a more sympathetic lens. This motivating text covers the key principles of compassion focused therapy, which guide you in caring for your wellbeing, becoming sensitive to your needs, recognising when you are distressed, and extending warmth and understanding to yourself. This transformative resource provides you with metrics that you can use to monitor your progress, including sensitivity, sympathy, empathy, and overall wellbeing.
Initially developed to assist people experiencing high levels of shame and self-criticism, compassion focused therapy increases your awareness of the automatic reactions that you experienceâand motivates you to combat negative reactions with kindness and affection. Used on its own or in combination with other therapeutic approaches, the value of compassion focused therapy is supported by strong neuropsychological evidence.
- Understand how to handle difficult emotions with greater easeâand less stress
- Transform difficult, potentially damaging relationships into positive aspects of your life
- Encourage and motivate yourself to continually meet your goals, rather than criticise yourself for perceived failures
- Stop being so hard on yourself, and appreciate yourself for who you are
Compassion Focused Therapy For Dummies is a wonderful resource if you are seeingâor thinking about seeingâa therapist who utilises compassion techniques, or if you would like to leverage the principles of compassion focused therapy to manage your own wellbeing.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Getting Started with Compassion Focused Therapy
Introducing Compassion Focused Therapy
Getting to Grips with Compassion Focused Therapy
- Compassion, in its simplest yet potentially most powerful definition, involves a sensitivity to our own, and other peopleâs, distress, plus a motivation to prevent or alleviate this distress. As such, it has two vital components. One involves engaging with suffering while the other involves doing something about it. Chapter 2 delves into the ins and outs of compassion in more detail.
- Focused means that we actively develop and apply compassion to ourselves. It also involves accepting and experiencing compassion from and for others.
- Therapy is a term to describe the processes and techniques used to address an issue or difficulty.
Defining common terms
- Common humanity: This refers to the fact that, as human beings, we all face difficulties and struggles. Weâre more alike than different, and this realisation brings with it a sense of belonging to the human family.
- Tricky brain: Our highly complex brains can cause us problems. For example, our capacity to think about the future and the past makes us prone to worry and rumination, while our inbuilt tendency to work out our place in a hierarchy can have a huge impact on our mood and self-esteem. In CFT, we use the term tricky brain to recognise our brainâs complexity and the problems this complexity can lead to. We consider our tricky brain in more detail in Chapter 3.
- Compassionate mind: This is simply an aspect of our mind. It comes with a set of attributes and skills that are useful for us to cultivate (I introduce these attributes and skills in Chapter 2). This frame of mind is highly important for our wellbeing, relationships and communities. But just as we have a compassionate mind, we also have a competitive and threat-focused mind â which is highly useful, if not a necessity, at certain times (Chapter 4 takes a look at our threat-focused mind).
- Compassionate mind training: This describes specific activities designed to develop compassionate attributes and skills, particularly those that influence and help us to regulate emotions. Attention training and mindfulness are used as a means to prepare us for this work, and we look at these practices in Part 3.
- Compassionate self: This is the embodiment of your compassionate mind. Itâs a whole mind and body experience. Your compassionate self incorporates your compassionate mind but also moves and interacts with the world.
- Compassionate self cultivation: Your compassionate self is an identity that you can embody, cultivate and enhance. Compassionate self cultivation describes the range of activities that help you develop your compassionate self. Head to Chapter 10 for more on the cultivation of your compassionate self.
- Exercises: These are activities for you to try. Sometimes they help to illustrate a point or provide a useful insight. Other exercises can give you an idea of what helps you to develop and maintain your compassionate mind.
- Practice: Once youâre aware of which exercises are helpful to you, you can then incorporate these into your everyday life. Regular use of these exercises becomes your practice.
Observing the origins of CFT
- People demonstrating high levels of shame and self-criticism often struggle with standard psychological therapies. For example, using CBT, many find that theyâre not reassured by the generation or discovery of alternative beliefs and views and that this doesnât result in changes to the way they feel. Individuals may say âLogically, I know Iâm not bad/not to blame, but I still feel itâ and âI know itâs unlikely that things will go wrong, but I still feel terribleâ.
- What we say to ourselves is important, but how we say it is even more important. Ever called yourself âidiotâ in a light-hearted and jovial manner? You probably did so without feeling any negative effects. But, have you ever called yourself an idiot in a harsh and ju...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Part 1: Getting Started with Compassion Focused Therapy
- Part 2: Understanding Ourselves
- Part 3: Developing Our Compassionate Mind
- Part 4: Compassionate Practices
- Part 5: The Part of Tens
- Appendix: Additional Resources
- About the Author
- Connect with Dummies
- End User License Agreement