Lovingkindness Meditation with Highly Shame-Prone and Self-Critical People: A Social Safety System Workout

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As mentioned in our previous post about guided meditations for highly shame-prone and self-critical clients, high self-critics tend to have under activated social safety systems. Under activated social safety systems are associated with loneliness, chronic alternation between striving toward achievement and fearing failure (e.g., perfectionism), depression, pervasive anxiety, and other issues that tend to bring … Read more

August 2016 Tool of the Month: Learning about Shame Worksheet

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Sometimes it can be hard for us to tell when shame is present. It often operates in the background, driving particular action tendencies, thoughts, bodily sensations, social signaling, and memories. When someone is experiencing shame from the inside, it can be sort of like being trapped inside of a dark room without a flashlight. This … Read more

August 2016 Shame and Self-Compassion Research Update

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Every month, we scour the scientific literature for interesting studies that have practical implications for therapists working with shame, self-criticism, or compassion. Below are a few of our favorites for this month: The first randomized controlled study of a self-compassion intervention in a Japanese sample Shame and self-compassion may function differently in collectivist cultures. However, … Read more

July 2016 Shame and Self-Compassion Research Update

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Every month, we scour the scientific literature for interesting studies that have practical implications for therapists working with shame, self-criticism, or compassion. Below are a few of our favorites for this month: Adolescent neighborhood quality predicts social vigilance in adulthood Parents of 12-year-olds (on average) from a range of socioeconomic statuses rated the quality of … Read more

June 2016 Shame and Self-Compassion Research Update

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Every month, we scour the scientific literature for interesting studies that have practical implications for therapists working with shame, self-criticism, or compassion. Below are a few of our favorites for this month: What is compassion? The authors review existing literature on the definition and measurement of compassion to offer guidance on how we might best … Read more

September 2016 Tool of the Month: Use of chair work in “CFT Made Simple”

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In working with highly self-critical and shame-prone clients, we (at ACTWithCompassion) often utilize chair work as a way to increase flexible perspective taking and facilitate self-compassion. Much of what we rely on for guiding our chair work comes from Leslie Greenberg, Ph.D. and his colleagues in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). EFT provides an empirically-grounded and well-researched … Read more

The absence of criticism is not the same as the presence of warmth: shame, responsivity, and adult attachment

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“I don’t understand why I’m like this. I wasn’t abused or bullied. My parents weren’t ever critical of me. What’s wrong with me that I hate myself so much?” Statements like this are fairly common when someone who is highly self-critical and shame-prone clients is asked to reflect on the origin of their problems. A … Read more

July 2016 Tool of the Month: Self-Esteem versus Self-Compassion Handout

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If you read our recent post about the top 20 science-based recommendations for working with highly self-critical and shame-prone clients, you already know that the pursuit of high self-esteem should be dead. The scientific community has definitively shown that attempts to raise self-esteem don’t generally work, and may even have some negative side-effects (Baumeister, Campbell, … Read more

April 2016 Tool of the Month: Video recordings for highly self-critical clients

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This month’s tool: Video recordings for highly self-critical clients We have updated our resource page with some of our favorite videos that we find useful in working with shame-prone and self-critical clients. Some of the videos are educational for clients, some are emotionally evocative, and some are both educational and evocative. Videos can be a … Read more