The Compassionate Mind (Compassion Focused Therapy)

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.

disconnection. When trying to deal with their anger at life or at the deities that have let them down, or with their rage at their parents who were supposed to be loving and loved, people can be so frightened of their emotions and so want to be loved or protected by parents or partner that they can suffer a kind of inward collapse. So sometimes sel

It takes courage not to act out of guilt but from a genuine belief of what is best for others. This is true of many things in life, isn’t it? And, of course, we can’t always be sure what is actually in the best interest of others.

A distinction that can be helpful here is between shame and guilt – people often get these two confused. When we feel shame, our attention is on ourselves and how others might see us – i.e. think badly of us. In shame, we feel exposed and think that there’s something wrong or flawed about us. We feel anxious, depressed and our hearts sink. We put o

Actually her family clung to each other as best they could but with a fair degree of pretence and delusion through which complex feelings were kept buried. Kim had many suicidal urges, often triggered by feelings of intense anger about some unknown something, feeling overwhelmed and then just wanting to run away. At times, she could be honest enoug

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

Emotional memories and our sense of self Early experiences with our parents and others stimulate different emotions and combinations of emotions that become associated with our sense of self and our sense of what others are like. This is how it works. Consider how a child experiences the emotions of others in an interaction and how these become the

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.

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.