Workshop Outline

The concept, benefits and recommendations for the cultivation of compassion have been recognized in the contemplative traditions for thousands of years. In the last 30 years or so, the study of compassion has revealed it to have major physiological and psychological effects influencing well-being, addressing mental health difficulties, and promoting prosocial behavior (Gilbert, 2020). It is an integrative, multidisciplinary, process-based therapy that utilizes insights and wisdoms from many of the main schools of psychotherapy with a recent meta-analysis demonstrating that it is effective at improving clinical symptoms and compassion-based outcomes (Millard, Wan, Smith & Wittkowski, 2023).  CFT was developed with and for people with mental health difficulties, particularly those who had not responded to other therapies, who had problems with self-criticism, shame, and trauma, often came from difficult backgrounds and were fearful and/or distrustful of compassion from others and/or for self. While many CBT therapies focus on helping people deal with threats fairly directly and often helpfully, this is mostly by working with the threat system itself either through exposure or cognitive change. CFT, however, seeks to work with basic motivational systems and, in particular, how to create inner capacities for feeling supported, and hence able to activate “safeness processing” and to develop mutually supportive, prosocial, and caring relationships, and to live ethically.

This half-day workshop will begin with an exploration of the evolution of care and the specific functions of care on psychosocial development (which is to provide a secure base and safe haven which in turn sets up an internal regulation of threat by the cultivation of a safeness system or process). It will focus predominantly on how these insights can be used to guide and support psychotherapy and be integrated into practice for clinicians who predominantly work within a cognitive-behavioural framework. The workshop will outline the various interventions and processes of training for developing compassionate mind states and competencies (Gilbert and Simos, 2020). It will provide an overview of the range of practices and interventions such as breathing practices that stimulate the vagus, a range of different visualizations and meditations, exploration of compassionate reasoning, and compassionate behaviour, some of which are guided by understanding the physiological underpinnings of caring compassion. Particularly, important is for clients to begin to understand how to create an inner sense of a secure base and safe haven that counteracts (among other things) shame and self-criticism which they can turn into when distressed and also utilize as a source of encouragement and guidance. These are related to the compassionate self, mind and the compassionate image.