Therapy: Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT)

Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) aims to help promote mental and emotional healing by encouraging people in treatment to be compassionate toward themselves and other people.

Compassion, both toward the self and toward others, is an emotional response believed by many to be an essential aspect of well-being. Its development may often have the benefit of improved mental and emotional health. Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) looks to help particularly those who struggle with shame, guilt and self-criticism. Often these can be the driving forces behind depression and anxiety as well as other difficulties.

CFT is considered to be an integrative form of therapy as it uses tools from other psychotherapies.

Although psychological therapies in general would aim to encourage you to be kinder with yourself, CFT more explicitly focuses onn helping you consciously develop your ability to be more compassionate towards both yourself and others. There are lots of different tools and techniques used within compassion-focused therapy, some of which are drawn from other therapies. The primary technique used is called compassionate mind training, or CMT. This aims to help people experience compassion and develop non-condemning attributes. This can be achieved by mindfulness, appreciation exercises and compassion focused imagery exercises.