Heal your relationship with yourself through compassion-focused therapy

CFT is a therapeutic approach aimed at helping you to reduce feelings of shame and experiences of self-criticism. CFT encourages you to cultivate the skill of compassion for yourself and others in order to regulate your mood and build a sense of safety and self-assurance. This approach draws on insights from attachment theory, cognitive behavioral therapy, Buddhist principles, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology to offer you a well-rounded approach to address your struggles.

Compassion-focused therapy is best suited for anyone who struggles with shame, self-criticism, attachment issues, or insecurity. Compassion-focused therapy targets your relationship with yourself, meaning that whether you’re dealing with depression, anxiety, poor body image, or more, CFT can help you view the pain of any of these struggles with more kindness. This promotes healing and the ability to move forward in your life with more ease and patience with yourself.

Yes, CFT is designed to target patterns of persistent shame, self-criticism, and perfectionism. The therapy encourages you to examine the origins of these patterns and recognize ways in which you can be gentler and more supportive of yourself. You’ll start to see how these patterns don’t help you become more successful or less alone - and you’ll realize how being supportive of yourself can promote inner healing.

CFT was actually born out of CBT therapy, so it retains some elements of CBT, such as examining your mind and recognizing when you are believing unhelpful things. However, this modality differs from CBT in that it recognizes that our internal ability to soothe and be warm towards ourselves adds an element of healing that is missing from traditional CBT. In CFT, you aren’t just trying to change how your mind thinks; you are rebuilding your relationship with yourself into something more secure and stable.

CFT differs from mindfulness therapy in that the added layer of compassion is brought in. With mindfulness therapy, you may focus on building your ability to shift your attention to the present moment and view your challenges with more acceptance. In CFT, mindfulness is a piece of the work, but you’ll also be guided to add feelings of kindness and care to your present moment awareness.

Typically, we’ll start our session with a brief check-in about how your week was and whether you tried out anything we discussed from the previous session. We’ll then work together to identify a main focus for the session. This might be based on something that came up during your week that you want to explore, or we may decide to work on a wider goal that you came to therapy to address.

I’ll guide you to describe your challenge, and will help you recognize ways you are directing harshness to yourself. I may ask you to explore shifting your perspective to a more self-compassionate stance to try that on and see how that feels.

At times, I may share a little education about how our emotional systems work, such as how we see the world differently when we are operating from a place of shame versus from a place of compassion for self and others. I sometimes bring in guided exercises to help you explore more experientially what it feels like to cultivate self-compassion.

Yes, CFT incorporates elements from attachment theory, which is focused on how our early experiences shape us. CFT aims to help you heal from difficult childhood experiences where you may have developed a shame-based or self-critical way of treating yourself. By shifting your relationship with yourself, you’ll be able to treat your childhood wounds with more care and begin to understand how you can move forward with a more supportive relationship with yourself and healthier, more stable relationships with others.

This is a common feeling for many people, especially if you’ve been in the habit of being hard on yourself for a long time. You may come from a background where you rarely or never heard someone being warm or nurturing, and so you have no role models to guide you when trying out a more compassionate inner voice.

We’ll work together gradually to build your comfort level with directing compassion your way. We might start with directing compassion outward, such as towards a pet or a child. Once you get more used to practicing compassion, we can start with some neutral phrases, such as “I am a human and deserve to get my basic needs met.”

CFT is focused on creating a kinder stance towards yourself and others. For many people, this takes time and practice, and can be supported by guided exercises and practices. I may bring in guided exercises to our sessions from time to time to demonstrate how to build mindful self-awareness and self-compassion, or I may share recordings of exercises for you to try on your own.

Exercises include guided practices such as imagining a safe space to cultivate feelings of safety and warmth, or writing a compassionate letter to yourself to shift perspective and build self-forgiveness. Guided exercises aren’t for everyone, so I’ll work with you to explore ways you can cultivate self-compassion in a style that works for you.

The timeline of results from compassion-focused therapy usually varies based on what challenges and issues you are facing. For some issues, compassion-focused therapy can show results fairly quickly, as you realize how much better it feels to respond to your pain with compassion. For other issues, like ongoing patterns of insecurity or low self-worth, we may need to spend more dedicated time exploring ways to build inner compassion.

To get the most out of compassion-focused therapy, I recommend that we meet weekly at first, for at least 6-8 weeks, and in some cases, a little longer. For some issues, we may be able to reach your therapy goals within 1-3 months. For longer-standing challenges, I may recommend longer-term therapy to allow us to more deeply shift patterns. I’ll give you a more tailored recommendation after we meet and I am able to learn more about your specific needs.

Compassion-focused therapy is a relatively new therapy that was developed in the early 2000s and is still building its evidence base. However, research is looking promising, as multiple randomized controlled trials have shown it to be effective at reducing depressive symptoms, treating disordered eating, generally reducing psychological distress, reducing self-criticism, improving self-compassion, and improving self-reassurance.