How Compassion-Oriented Therapies Work and What Makes Them So Effective
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with Christopher Germer, PhD;
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with Christopher Germer, PhD; Dennis Tirch, PhD; Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, PhD; Paul Gilbert, PhD;
Kristin Neff, PhD; Jack Kornfield, PhD; Susan Pollak, MTS, EdD; Christopher Willard, PsyD; Ruth Buczynski, PhD and Ashley Vigil-Otero, PsyD
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So, there is a lot of really amazing stuff in this first video, but there are a few things in particular that I am going to blend into my practice. I am in New York City and I work with lots of wildly anxious artists and creative folks and am eager to explain the The 3 circle model with a focus on ways to down shift from the Threat or (over/under)Drive to the Soothing system. I will add McGonigal’s “Heart Breathing” technique (love the imagery of nostrils breathing into the heart!) and Neff and Germer’s Soften, Soothe and Allow intervention to my toolkit. I have a mini-version of this that I use: Label, Locate, Let it be…but will add their “Soften” piece of placing the hand where the emotion lies, and talking gently to one’s self as if talking to a friend. The more senses our clients can engage, the richer and quirker the healing!
I am really impressed with the quality of this training. I often work with survivors of the English boarding school system and I am learning some excellent interventions to use with my clients, particularly ways to change their relationship with emotional pain to enable them to process those feelings more usefully in the present. They have often been the recipients of bullying, abusive treatment at as young an age as 7 years, where they have been completely defenceless in these often harsh and inhumane environments. Consequently carrying the impact of this experience into their grown-up relationships. Many of these beautiful interventions, especially the Self-Compassion Break, will be useful for creating the space to say ‘this hurts.’ The Mindful Seat will help this group of clients to get in touch with feelings that may have been squashed or stored in their sub-conscious for years. The constant state since their schooling will have been one reacting to the ‘threat state’, so practice of the Loving Kindness Meditation will be really helpful to shift the threat state to the care state, very useful for this client group. Thank you.
Sadly I could not adjust my work schedule with the time slots for this Part 2 broadcast. Hope to catch Part 3.
Joan M.M. Retired gerontological social worker now Vancouver Island, Canada.
Thankyou for the excellent presentation of very helpful information and techniques. I think, on the whole, we are speaking about what it is to be fully human and to more fully embrace life.
To not only embrace the joy of life but also it’s pain and struggles and to use that to deepen our understanding and experience of our time walking upon this earth. In so doing, we also accept and understand the limitations and how our body works, as you have so well laid out. The ancients and our ancestors, as history and archeology are continually informing us, many of the ancient societies and today’s indigeneous societies around the world live and practice this knowing. We are not a product, a brand nor a commodity, to be bought and sold: we are humans.. Your presentation reaffirms the gifts, healing and joy that can happen as we move through this world with compassion. Bravo for a truly inspiring presentation.
Unfortunately, I missed the first session in this series. Is there any way that I may still hear it Being retired, I am on a strict budget. Thankyou.
My caseload consists primarily of youth aged 10-18 years old, many of whom have PTSD or complex trauma, along with dealing with the consequences for subsequent harm they may have caused to others in their wounded state. I do a lot of relaxation, grounding and mindfulness work, in preparation for helping the clients work through the deeper trauma (mostly through the use of TF-CBT or EMDR), so that they have self-care tools to help them to self-regulate between sessions.
The Mindful Seat is a new tool that I will be adding to my toolbox to help my clients to gain a new perspective on what they are currently experiencing in the moment. I also like the Mindfulness/Common Humanity/Self-compassion piece. Thank you.
I will try to teach my teenage daughters these methods, especially when having a crisis in the middle of the night, many of the examples given resonate with me. It would be great to teach these methods to school students to cope with the pressures of school and feeling like they are the only one with their ‘problem’s’.
I’m looking forward next weeks talk about shame.
Thank you so much for making this information available.
So much to confirm and strengthen my commitment to compassion as a personal, professional and human practice for our world. Thankyou!
Lots to use with clients, and some I already practice. Two I will start to work with are: Reality Check, as I already base a lot of work on neuropsychotherapy – the concept that they DID NOT CHOSE their brain or the present moment – to reduce shame and open to new learning; and the Imagery of the Compassionate Self – bring back my previous skills in working with imagery to help clients gain insight into the Inner Critic, and then of the compassionate self, as I find not all clients can work with verbally based cognitive skills without the visuals.
“This is part of being human” Yes!
Gratitude for the teachings of the Buddha and the 4 Noble Truths ….suffering and the end of suffering …coming alive and expressed in today’s program… integrating wisdom and compassion practices applied clinically and therapeutically in facing pain, stress and illness, part of the human condition.
These same teachings, principles and practices are of support for physicians as well as psychotherapists and are “medically” effective in facing, treating and healing disease as well as addressing the more psychologically oriented pain and distress. The latest research on ACEs is demonstrating that early childhood trauma contributes to chronic disease later in life and the importance to Integrate this knowledge into everyday clinical practice. Imagine that in every therapeutic encounter, be it psycho-therapy and or medical, compassion oriented therapies are integrated.
There is no cure for the human condition, there is the choice to embark on a journey of healing and path of awakening,
pain as teacher and illness as opportunity.
When the blazing sun of compassion radiates from your heart, all darkness vanishes from the world.
“This is part of being human”
Gratitude for the teachings of the Buddha and the 4 Noble Truths ….suffering and the end of suffering …coming alive and expressed in today’s program… integrating wisdom and compassion practices applied clinically and therapeutically in facing pain, stress and illness, part of the human condition.
These same teachings, principles and practices are of support for physicians as well as psychotherapists and are “medically” effective in facing, treating and healing disease as well as addressing the more psychologically oriented pain and distress. The latest research on ACEs is demonstrating that early childhood trauma contributes to chronic disease later in life and the importance to Integrate this knowledge into everyday clinical practice. Imagine that in every therapeutic encounter, be it psycho-therapy and or medical, compassion oriented therapies are integrated.
There is no cure for the human condition, there is the choice to embark on a journey of healing and path of awakening,
pain as teacher and illness as opportunity.
When the blazing sun of compassion radiates from your heart, all darkness vanishes from the world.
“This is part of being human”
Gratitude for the teachings of the Buddha and the 4 Noble Truths ….suffering and the end of suffering …coming alive and expressed in today’s program… integrating wisdom and compassion practices applied clinically and therapeutically in facing pain, stress and illness, part of the human condition.
These same teachings, principles and practices are of support for physicians as well as psychotherapists and are “medically” effective in facing, treating and healing disease as well as addressing the more psychologically oriented pain and distress. The latest research on ACEs is demonstrating that early childhood trauma contributes to chronic disease later in life and the importance to Integrate this knowledge into everyday clinical practice. Imagine that in every therapeutic encounter, be it psycho-therapy and or medical, compassion oriented therapies are integrated.
There is no cure for the human condition, there is the choice to embark on a journey of healing and path of awakening,
pain as teacher and illness as opportunity.
When the blazing sun of compassion radiates from your heart, all darkness vanishes from the world.
Thank you for the invaluable knowledge and tools on self compassion to help not just our clients but for our own use as well.
It is so reassuring and a confirmation from research that self compassion is so important in the therapy relationship. I have seen it with my clients who have felt so reassured when they sensed , seen and heard the way we approached them with compassion. I could see a lowering of their anxiety level and becoming more hopeful for their future.
I am definitely going to use some of the new tools, like the Mindful Seat and the Language of Loving kindness, I believe will be helpful for my clients.
Thank you once again for your great and generous contribution to the mental health wellbeing of humanity.
Using psych education to help the client understand what they are experiencing is really powerful. Then the practical tools shown in this module follow through. What resonates with me is the powerful frameworks and phrases. It’s not your fault you have a brain. Mindfulness, common humanity and self kindness. SEAT, emotions are visiting us not hi-jacking us!
I love the idea of de-fusion. It seems to me that learning that our thoughts are not real and are mental events external to us can be made really fun e.g Let me have a cool glass of ‘I’m a weirdo…’ It’s a lovely way of harnessing imagination to change our way of experiencing our thoughts.
I enjoyed this 1 hour talk as it provided a cohesive model and practical tools for my work with terminally ill and chronically ill patients as well as men in ongoing group therapy. I am now going to purchase the modules in the gold package to make this material more readily available for use with my clients…Thank you
I want to teach everyone I meet the loving kindness technique; I’ve experienced it in mindfulness meditation but had not thought of teaching clients to use it in the moment.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom and expertise. Having the language to use with clients will be so helpful. I like all four techniques and the information was presented in such a way that it can be easily and immediately useful and implemented with clients. Thank you for sharing this without a fee. There have been times where I have purchased programs and times when funds were just not available. I appreciate all you do for those of us who work in this challenging and exciting field. I feel very honored to be in this field where others allow us to enter into their lives. Thank you for touching my life through this webinar and thank you for helping me do a better job of touching lives and making a difference.
I have been learning self-compassion, happily. It grows. I would like to know more about using this when my 20-year-old daughter is having a hard time. One thing that has worked is that EVERY single time I have reminded myself that yes, this is really hard, something in me gets rewired so that my daughter talks to me (usually about regular stuff, not the problems, but the fabric of the family holds together.)
Thank-you. I am not a practitioner, but I’m a mom and this is very helpful for me as a mother. I am definitely looking forward to applying this understanding. It already aligns with the way I have raised my children, Waldorf and RIE. If we can help children do this then we may have solved at least half the worlds future problems. Thank-you, I am happy I came upon this on Facebook.
Name it to tame it. The loving kind phrases and most of all you did not choose this and its not your fault.
“Can you hold that with compassion” So simple yet so powerful. I’m looking forward to sharing these insights with my clients, particularly the self compassion break. Thank you so much for another informative, interesting and useful webinar.
This was ALL amazing. I have used the self-compassion break with clients and with myself, I love the way the rationale for the exercises was explained and how our brain processes information. Can’t wait to incorporate the mindful seat.
I used the Mindful SEAT with a person who immediately applied it to her life and was very grateful as am I!!
looking lovingly at our clients and asking if they can hold this with compassion- just did something like that with a client and it is so difficult for her to accept and when she is able to take some of it in…. ahhhhhhhh for both of us
This is really interesting. I’m becoming so interested in compassionate therapy. Such a lot of learning that I can use with my clients. Thank you so much.
As a Neuro-developmental I work with clients who have retained Primitive Reflexes and poor development of the Postural Reflexes. This means that they frequently have a poor centre of gravity, with poor balance. Many adjustment reactions which should be automatic have to be consciously controlled. This results in frequent stress, especially as there are associated learning difficulties.
Children grow up feeling different and frequently a failure. Compassion and self compassion will be a really useful tool that I can give them. I really like the concept that you didn’t chose this. This is not your fault.
I am not a professional therapist and I hope it’s ok if I make a comment here anyway. I consider myself a wounded healer working within myself and in the world on healing from trauma. I have a powerful inner critic and am going through a tougher than usual time, so this conference was a real treasure for me and came just at the right time! Also, I’m struggling economically, so I’m thrilled I could access today’s rich conference for free! If it wasn’t free, I couldn’t have participated. So thank you from the bottom of my heart for making it available regardless of my and other peoples’ capacity to pay.
I’m so happy and excited to have had an opportunity to learn these eminently do-able tools! Amazing!
All the tools are simple and profound, but easy to teach fairly quickly, and anyone can do them!
Today’s lessons full of simple, teachable ways of healing, gave me hope that we can assist the different populations of people who are suffering severe marginalization and traumatization especially during the Trump administration. I’m very concerned that many of the people most in need of therapy are too economically poor to pay for a good therapist, and many others are incarcerated or otherwise blocked from help. I’m dedicated to learning these tools the best I can and teaching them to others in my family neighborhood and world.
Before long I hope to be a professional interfaith pastoral-psychological care minister. I dream of working with others to help teach widely the self compassion tools I learned today and similar techniques, so that there can be a vast sturdy network of well trained volunteer wounded healers who could take these tools into the prisons, to very poor people, to the border, to rape crisis centers, and other milieus of greatest human need where people don’t have access to good professional help.
Of course there is already an informal network of compassion and healing reaching toward the most marginalized people, thank goodness. But as suffering in our nation and world mount swiftly, I hope we can build stronger bridges to help those most vulnerable to the traumas of injustice. In El Salvador, during the brutal civil war in which health care was scarce or non-existent for the impoverished multitudes, poor people themselves built structures of well- trained health care volunteers who served
many more poor people who otherwise would have fallen through the institutional cracks. In an analogous way, I think we in the United States could build strong mental health support structures, mostly volunteers, to assist many, many marginalized people who will otherwise suffer greatly in the rising tide of violence in our nation and world.
Hearty thanks to all of you who made this conference possible, and to all participants who are working to heal and bring fresh hope to yourselves and others!
I like your idea of bringing mental health support structures to marginalized people. I am not a therapist but a coach in training. I would like to use these compassion tools with clients and volunteering to share this compassion work is appealing to me.
JR, Coach, NC
Emotions – name it to tame it. Thank you!
So happy to find another teacher! I figure most of my students need some sort of ‘therapy’ and these sessions help me approach my students with more thoughtfulness, empathy and compassion..
I like what you say about self-acceptance. I think how we treat ourselves bleeds over into how we treat others. If we are hyper-critical of our selves, we can’t help but be hyper-critical of others.
thanks!
The phrases of love and kindness are so easy to remember. May I be safe, may I be healthy and etc.
thank you for another great session.
I have a particular client in mind who I had actually started working with using Mindfulness meditations. I believe that compassion based therapy techniques discussed here will enhance and deepen her work- the enhanced definitions of flight, fright or freeze will be very useful-similar to the question below, when a patient is stuck in that they can’t feel or rejects the phrases for self-love suggested during meditation what would be best intervention? Did J miss that in the video?
The benefits of self-compassion is profound. It is lead to decreased Anxiety, Decreased stress enchances the wellbeing . Rumination and isolation is inter connected as when in isolation, the mind ruminates.This module of the program was helpful and focused much on loving kindness etc.
As a Christian working with a lot of Christians, I notice how much we hear, the words of Christ, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself”…and we cut out the “as yourself” part of it, acting like self-love is selfish rather than seeing how it empowers us to love others.
I’m a bit stunned – but grateful – that we are coming back to the value of what are essentially spiritual practices via brain science. Thank you so much…
Compassion break
Recognising How lots of things are not under our control-including how our brain works.
What I did not understand was – how our brain works/ responds to pain- is that an inbuilt function of how brains operate or is that a learned behaviour through social conditioning?
Thanks a lot! Sitting in Germany listening to the webinar is a great opportunity for me. I will try the Mindful SEAT as well as the psychoeducation about external and internal threats, the unholy trinity.
Tine from Munich
I look forward to providing these tools for my clients, which are simple enough, which can give them hope and knowledge that they can choose to change their old brain for a new brain.
In the end Jack Kornfield said it all “Can you hold the suffering with Compassion”
that’s an amazing phrase, preceded by an equally stunning instruction to the counselor: “gaze at your client with loving eyes”.
I love the whole program but was particularly impressed with the SEAT tools which I will use. Thank you so much, Jacynthe Dugas
I have a question- healing takes place in the parasympathetic nervous system. If a client is in collapse, as opposed to fight- flight or even freeze- which is still alert and orienting- and those come from the sympathetic nervous system…sometimes collapsed looks likes calm, but a person can be so “down” that there is no agitation- everything is shut off/ shut down. Do they need to be “roused” into the sympathetic nervous system, say, where they feel safe enough to engage with what is threatening, and then there is something to be calmed down from? What I am wondering is does soothing even reach a collapsed person? It seems they have to “come out of it” even to realize I am there, much less interacting with them. If collapse is also parasympathetic nervous system, can you soothe into the parasympathetic nervous system if a client is already in a collapsed state- parasympathetic nervous system? There’s a world of difference between collapsed and content.
Many components of Self-Compassion Therapy echo the work of Dick Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. They are both on the right track as far as empowering clients to learn how to not fuse/blend with their intense emotions and teaching them how to instead create the separation (through mindfulness) and acceptance (Self-compassion) in which to get to know their Inner Critics and other reactive parts of their personalities that feel beyond their control and lead to detrimental thoughts and actions. By acting with compassion and curiosity toward those parts and getting to know them and their underlying motivations without judgment, we can learn from them and help reduce the power they wield in our lives, thus freeing us to be able to choose more self-loving responses to the situations which those parts were trying to manage in much more unconscious often Self-destructive ways. The beauty in all of these therapies lies in leading the client to find his/her compassionate inner Self, which is critical to healing and developing the ability to find true, lasting inner peace and Self-acceptance.
Yes I was thinking this. It’s reassuring though to see so much convergence between approaches, which one might expect if they are all based on up to date neuroscience and other psychological research. Slightly different terminology and focus, perhaps, but the essence is the same.
So happy to find another teacher! I figure most of my students need some sort of ‘therapy’ and these sessions help me approach my students with more thoughtfulness, empathy and compassion..
I like what you say about self-acceptance. I think how we treat ourselves bleeds over into how we treat others. If we are hyper-critical of our selves, we can’t help but be hyper-critical of others.
thanks!
Compassion break, accepting our life,Reality check, the mindful seat, get a grip of fusion and difusion, power of love and kindness and language. All of it helped me. Thankyou so much
Thank you for these trainings tgey are very informative. I especially liked the idea of
” in the clients own words”. Also the love and kindness meditation and the use of language. Also speak to self as you would to a family member or friend in pain..
I was watching the 11pm Compassion when I switched screens to check a text that came in that I’d been waiting for and when I went back to watch the rest of the broadcast, I couldn’t re enter. I got a message that said this broadcast is over.
Can you tell me how to hear the end of this broadcast? I am not able to buy the Gold Package.
Thank you,
Madelyn Hoffman, LCSW
917-660-4966
I look forward to applying these ideas with all of my clients, but most compelling and exciting for me are the concepts of the Mindful SEAT and imaginal work with Diffusion which I can readily apply with a group of children I work with. I believe the visualizations and step-by step instructions will be helpful and empower them to take compassionate control over their feeling-states. Thank you so much for the valuable webinar!
Valeria Koutmina, Art Therapist
I don’t have clients but today’s module was extremely powerful and yet so simple. So I will use these ideas with myself and the people I care about. People that like myself are suffering … unnecessarily!
Thank you!!!
I suffer from fibromyalgia and for the last year I have been re-educating myself through mindfulness. Self-compassion was the missing piece.