The Compassionate Mind (Compassion Focused Therapy)

for our distress and needs means learning to be more attentive to the changes in our physical feelings and emotions and to our thoughts. This may reveal that, at times, we experience certain small cues or feelings in our bodies that trigger avoidance or defensive strategies rather than processing those feelings. For example, when Kirsten criticized

Anger at others and self-criticism are common problems that deprive many people of happiness and a sense of well-being and purpose. The ease by which such things can be aroused can be linked to painful past memories and experiences. Self-criticism and shame also maintain our sense of threat by stimulating the threat/self-protection system.

key for you, you might find The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness by Mark Williams and his colleagues very helpful.7 The point

The importance of learning tolerance for painful feelings is fairly clear. However, it’s perhaps surprising to discover that some people also need to learn to tolerate and savour positive emotions. For some people, enjoyment for its own sake can feel wrong. Some depressed people develop a ‘taboo on pleasure’ or certain types of it – a trait for whi

your arms at right angles to your body. Note how your body feels and how gently grateful it is to you for spending time trying to let go of tension. Spend a moment really trying to experience the idea of your body being grateful to you for spending time with it. When you’re ready, get up and carry on with your day.

What you’re doing in these exercises is practising overruling your threat/self-protection system, which is determined to focus you on the glass as half empty. Its job is to warn you that you might run out of water or to make you exclaim: ‘Hey, what happened to the other half? Some bugger drank it!’ It’s what it’s designed to do, and you could let i

In compassionate reasoning and thinking, we train our minds to focus on reasoning and thinking about others, ourselves, our relationships and the situations in which we find ourselves in a helpful way. When we ruminate on our anxiety, disappointment or anger, this is only going to lock these feelings in. So can we practise deliberately choosing to

Finally, a person might think that being happy would mean giving up what they consider to be justifiable anger and forgetting the injustices of the past and their desire for revenge. They need to keep reminding others (and themselves) how bad things have been for them, hoping for recognition or rescue. The recognition they seek often never comes so

It allows us to see that so much of what we are has, in a way, little to do with personal choice. Therefore it makes little sense to blame ourselves for some of our feelings, motives, desires or abilities or lack of them, or for how things turned out.