Introduction
How do you talk to yourself in your own mind? Is that voice kind and compassionate? Or is it a critical and negative voice telling you that you aren’t good enough? For many people the voice in their head is often a critical voice rather than a compassionate one. Compassion focused therapy is designed for those who have a strong critical negative voice inside their head.
The idea behind Compassion Focused Therapy is that we have three systems that drive us. The threat, drive and soothe system. The threat system is there to try and keep us safe from danger. When triggered it makes us want to act in a way to either fight the danger or escape from the danger by taking flight or freezing. The drive system helps us to get up in the morning and motivates us to meet our needs by giving a little dopamine hit when we gain something. The soothe system helps us to calm down and connect with our loved ones so that we can rest, digest and heal.
We need each of these systems in order to survive and thrive. We also need these systems to be in balance with each other and when the threat is too large then we end up suffering as our mind being in constant threat takes a toll on our mind and our body. Our inner critic is our threat system trying to keep us safe by warning us of all the things that could go wrong and it thinks it’s actually being helpful and part of the problem is that everytime we survive it thinks it did a good job and that it needs to keep doing what it’s been doing. Sometimes that voice can seem so loud that we can think that it is the only voice that we have in our head. But no matter how small we do have an inner voice that is more like a cheerleader, that knows instinctively what we need to be our authentic selves. Our inner cheerleader is our soothe system.
Why do so many of us have a louder inner critic than inner cheerleader?
We have threat focused minds because having a threat focused mind would have been evolutionary advantageous. When we were living as cavemen, if your mind was quick to pick up on and react to danger then you were more likely to stay alive and raise your children so they could then have children. So in a world where almost everything could kill you, surviving in any form was better than dying. Evolution takes a long time and our lives have changed in such a short period of time. Our minds and bodies therefore were not designed to live in the world that we are currently living in. The problem solving mind that humans have that has created this amazing world is also trying to apply the same problem solving skills to managing in a world that is effectively sensory overload and sometimes those skills can make things worse for us. This is because we solve problems for the short term and not the long term. The couple of glasses of wine at the end of a bad day can help us to escape our negative feelings and works in the short term but if this is the coping strategy we always do then it will eventually have negative effects on our health and can in some cases lead to dependence.
Often if we have a louder inner cheerleader then we can listen to our minds and bodies and with compassion recognise what we need and give it to ourselves rather than rely on coping strategies that only work in the short term.
How does Compassion Focused Therapy work?
We begin by understanding our systems so we can recognise when we are in each system, how big they are relative to each other and how much time we spend in each system. Through understanding that the threat system isn’t meaning to cause you harm and is just trying to keep us safe, we can also then develop compassion for the inner critic and allow it to be there rather than getting upset with it or trying to ignore it/get rid of it.
Then we use the power of our breath to help us to exit threat and begin to enter soothe. This can take practice as we often do not realise that we are in threat and breathing fast shallow breaths rather than slower breaths from the belly.
Then we can look at other ways that we can look after ourselves and enter the soothe system.
We also begin to develop a more compassionate voice inside ourselves and practice this so that the inner cheerleader becomes the louder voice and the one we listen to.
The first time I learnt about Compassion Focused Therapy was in a training with Psychologist, Dr Deborah Lee and she said some words that have always stuck with me. The only relationship that you will have for your entire life is your relationship with yourself, how do you want that relationship to be?
Conclusion
If you would like help to develop a better relationship with yourself then please contact me to discuss further.