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: Imagined touch may reduce pain perception and increase exploration Two studies examined whether imagining being touched by a romantic partner in a supportive … Read more
My experience is that my most complex, chronic and stuck clients are often laboring under a great weight of shame. I’ve seen how shame leads them to withhold clinically useful information, how it leads to defensive and blaming behavior, and how it gets in the way of intimacy. I’ve seen how shame about their emotions, … Read more
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: Experiential acceptance and common humanity are related to increased telomere length in experienced meditators Telomeres are sections of DNA at the end of … Read more
We at ACT with Compassion have been working out how to understand and describe the ways we could use personal perspective taking frames (from relational frame theory) in our work with shame and self-compassion. A few months ago, we wrote a post that described some examples, especially focusing on perspective taking between client and therapist. … Read more
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: Self-critical perfectionism predicts less empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard from therapists The Rogerian conditions of empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard predict … Read more
This month’s tool: Recognizing trustworthy others with BRAVING (adapted from Brene Brown): People don’t operate in a vacuum Have you ever worked with a client to change the way she treats herself, only to have her come back the following week beating herself up because of a difficult interaction she had with a loved one … Read more
This month’s tool: Guided meditations for highly self-critical and shame-prone clients We have updated our resource page with some of our favorite meditations that we find useful in working with shame-prone and self-critical clients. Often, people who are highly self-critical and shame-prone tend to spend a lot of time with emotion systems related to threat … Read more
This month’s tool: Books on shame, self-criticism, and self-compassion for the public We have updated our resource page with some of our favorite books on shame, self-criticism, and self-compassion for the public that we find useful in working with shame-prone and self-critical clients. We find that it can be helpful to recommend these types of … Read more
Last month we wrote about the importance of helping clients identify trustworthy others. How others respond to an individual’s disclosure of feeling shame or self-criticism can have a profound impact on the likelihood that that individual will continue to disclose content they often keep hidden. In that post we mentioned Brene Brown’s BRAVING framework as … Read more
Case conceptualization with highly shame-prone and self-critical clients may often be thought of as case re-conceptualization. That is, clients with high degrees of shame and self-criticism often arrive in therapy with their own conceptualization of their problems, one that is often driven by fusion with the story that they are broken, damaged, incompetent, stupid, or … Read more