Self-Compassion
From an ACT Perspective:
An Intellectual and Experiential
Exploration
Dennis Tirch PhD & Jason Luoma PhD
www.mindfulcompassion.com
http://www.portlandpsychotherapyclinic.com
Rate how often you behave in the ways below, using the following scale:
Almost never
1
Almost always
2
3
4
5
_____1. When I fail at something important to me I become consumed by feelings of inadequacy.
_____2. I try to be understanding and patient towards those aspects of my personality I don’t like.
_____3. When something painful happens I try to take a balanced view of the situation.
_____4. When I’m feeling down, I tend to feel like most other people are probably happier than I
am.
_____5. I try to see my failings as part of the human condition.
_____6. When I’m going through a very hard time, I give myself the caring and tenderness I need.
_____7. When something upsets me I try to keep my emotions in balance.
_____8. When I fail at something that’s important to me, I tend to feel alone in my failure
_____9. When I’m feeling down I tend to obsess and fixate on everything that’s wrong.
_____10. When I feel inadequate in some way, I try to remind myself that feelings of inadequacy are
shared by most people.
_____11. I’m disapproving and judgmental about my own flaws and inadequacies.
_____12. I’m intolerant and impatient towards those aspects of my personality I don’t like.
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Compassion Solutions
Ancient wisdom
Compassion transforms the mind. (Buddhism)
Evolution
Evolution has made our brains highly
sensitive to internal and external kindness
Neuroscience
Specific brain areas are focused on detecting
and responding to kindness and compassion
ACT
Compassion is a value inherent in
psychological flexibility model –
Self-compassion related to flexible perspective
taking
Compassion definitions
Compassion can be defined in many ways: “As a
sensitivity to the suffering of self and others with a
deep commitment to try to relieve it” Dalai Lama
Eight fold path - represents a multi-modal
approach for training one’s mind
Compassion Definitions
Neff (2003b) has operationalized selfcompassion as consisting of three main
elements:
1. Self-kindness vs harsh criticism and selfjudgment
2. A sense of common humanity vs seeing self
as separate and isolated
3. Mindfulness vs overidentification
Self-Compassion
and Psychological Flexibility
These components combine and mutually
interact to create a self-compassionate frame
of mind.
Self-compassion is relevant when considering
personal inadequacies, mistakes, and failures,
as well as when confronting painful life
situations that are outside of our control.
Self-Compassion Data
Higher levels of reported self-compassion are
correlated with:
• Lower levels of depression and anxiety (Neff, 2003;
Neff, Hseih, & Dejitthirat, 2005; Neff, Rude, &
Kirkpatrick, 2007)
• life satisfaction, feelings of social connectedness (Neff,
Kirkpatrick, & Rude, 2007)
• personal initiative and positive affect (Neff, Rude, et
al., 2007)
Compassion Training Data
Practice in imagining compassion for others
• produces changes in frontal cortex and immune system (Lutz et
al, 2009)
Loving kindness meditation
• increases positive emotions, mindfulness, feelings of purpose in
life and social support and decreases illness symptoms
(Frederickson et al, 2008, JPSP)
Compassion meditation (6 weeks)
• improves immune function, and neuroendocrine and behavioral
responses to stress (Pace, 2008, PNE)
Compassion training
• reduces shame and self-criticism in chronic depressed patients
(Gilbert & Proctor, 2006, CPP)
Self-Compassion
from a CBS perspective
Dahl, Plumb, Stewart and Lundgren, (2009)
• Self-Compassion involves:
– willingly experiencing difficult emotions;
– mindfully observing our self-evaluative, distressing and
shaming thoughts without allowing them to dominate
our behavior or our states of mind
– engaging more fully in our life’s pursuits with selfkindness and self-validation
– flexibly shifting our perspective towards a broader,
transcendent sense of self (Hayes, 2008a).
Self-Compassion
and Psychological Flexibility
• Our learned capacity for flexible perspective
taking is involved in our experience of
empathy (Vilardaga, 2009), as well as our
related experience of compassion.
• In order to understand self-compassion,
therefore, it’s useful to consider the “self” that
is the focus of compassion, from an RFT
perspective.
Self-Compassion
and Psychological Flexibility
• Deictic relations are building blocks of how we
experience the world, ourselves, and the flow
of time.
• Returning to an awareness of self-as-context
offers us a non-attached and dis-identified
relationship to our experiences.
• This allows the habitual stimulus functions of
our painful private events and stories to hold
less influence over us.
Self-Compassion
and Psychological Flexibility
• From the perspective of the I-Here-Nowness of
being, I can view my own suffering as I might
view the suffering of another, and be touched
by the pain in that experience, without the
dominant interference of my verbal learning
history, with its potential for shaming selfevaluations (Vilardaga, 2009; Hayes, 2008).
Formation of Self-as-Context:
The No-Thing Self (Hayes, 2008)
YOU
HERE
NOW
I
THERE
THEN
I-Here-Nowness of Perspective Taking
Self-as-context
Brain Development
in Deep Historical Context
Private Events and Brain Development in the
context of Genotype, Phenotype, and Present
Moment
1. “Old Brain”
Emotional Responding:
Overt Behavioral Responding:
Relationship Behaviors:
Anger, anxiety, sadness, joy, lust
Fight, flight, withdraw, engage
Sex, status, attachment, tribalism
2. “New Brain”
Relational Framing, Imagination, fantasize, look back and forward,
plan,
Integration of mental abilities
Self-awareness, self-identity, flexible perspective taking, selffeeling
3. “Social Brain”
Need for affection and care
Socially responsive, self-experience and motives
Interaction
of oldof
and
new psychologies
Sources
behaviour
New Brain:
Derived Relational Responding,
Selfing
Planning, Rumination,
Old Brain: Emotions, Motives, Relationship
Seeking, Safety Seeking Behaviors
Understanding our Motives and
Emotions
Motives evolved because they help animals to
survive and leave genes behind
Emotions guide us to our goals and respond if we
are succeeding or threatened
There are three types of emotion regulation
1. Those that focus on threat and self-protection
2. Those that focus on doing and achieving
3. Those that focus on contentment and feeling safe
Types of Affect Regulator Systems
Content, safe, connected
Drive, excite, vitality
Non-wanting/
Affiliative focused
Incentive/resourcefocused
Safeness-kindness
Wanting, pursuing,
achieving, consuming
Soothing
Activating
Threat-focused
Protection and
Safety-seeking
Activating/inhibiting
Anger, anxiety, disgust
Self-Protection
In species without attachment only
1-2% make it to adulthood to
reproduce. Threats come from
ecologies, food shortage, predation,
injury, disease. At birth individuals
must be able to “go it alone,” be
mobile and disperse
Dispersal and avoid others
Protect and Comfort: Less ‘instinctive’
brain – post birth learning
Compassion Process
Giving/doing
Receiving/soothing
SBR/booth
Validation
Gratitude appreciation
Mindful Acts of kindness
Engagement with the
feared
Compassionate Self
Threat
Mindful awareness
Triggers
In the body
Rumination
Labelling
Present Moment
Contact
Values
Authorship
Willingness
Psychological
Flexibility
Commitment
Defusion
Self-As-Context
Sympathy,
Sensitivity
Care For WellBeing
Distress Tolerance
Compassionate
Flexibility
Commitment to
Compassionate
Behavior
Non-Judgment
Empathy
Present Moment
Contact
Values
Authorship
Willingness
Psychological
Flexibility
Commitment
Defusion
Self-As-Context
Contact with the present
Build awareness of self-criticism/self-attack
• Clients often do not even notice their self-evaluations.
Methods:
• Teach client to notice evaluation/judgment as it occurs in
session (noticing antecedents)
• Help clients to notice avoidance of shame as it occurs in
session (noticing behavior)
• Bring costs of self attack into the room (noticing
consequences):
– Read aloud self-attacking thoughts, but imagine she were
saying them to a friend in the same position
– Use a mirror when reading self-attacking thoughts to self
– Act out self-attack in chair work
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Acceptance Interventions
Develop ability to acknowledge and embrace aspect of self that
feels damaged, broken, unlovable, not-good-enough, and/or
rejected
Methods:
• Examine workability of behaviors aimed at avoiding shame (anger, shutting
down, addictive behavior).
– How do they avoid feeling bad about themselves or feeling rejected?
What happens in shame producing situations?
• Bring process of shame and self-attacking into the room and improve
ability to sit with it and with reaction to self-attack (usually with chair
work)
• Practice willingness in relating shameful experiences and secrets to
trustworthy others (starting with therapist)
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Defusion
Develop distance, distinction from self-attacking thoughts.
• Clients typically see critical view of self as normal, earned,
or needed for motivation.
Methods:
• Imagery – imagine this critical self as if it were a person
(include tone, size, facial expression, etc.). Give it a name.
• Naming the critic – develop a name for the critical side of
the self that has some endearing qualities
• Act out criticizer as if it were another person
• Many common defusion exercises can be helpful here
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Self as context/flexible perspective taking
Develop connection a sense of self that transcends our stories about self
• Shame/self-criticism is fundamentally a problem with self/other as
content
Methods:
• Work on letting go of attachment to self as content, e.g., self
evaluations
• Practice flexible perspective taking (loving kindness meditation, taking
perspective of shamers, taking perspective of therapist, and caring
others)
• Physicalize self as content through chair exercises
– Add a third chair, perhaps a compassion chair or observer chair for
experiencing the ongoing dialogue.
– Have client be the compassionate therapist in the third chair. What
would that person say?
• Use hierarchical framing to build sense of common humanity in
suffering and normality of shame and fears
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Flexible perspective taking
Shift perspectives to expand possibilities
•
If your best friend was watching this interaction, what would they say?
•
If you were a therapist for a couple that acted this way, what would you think of
them? What would you want for them? For him, for him?
•
If you were (someone client admires) [in the self chair], how would you act
differently
•
If you were me and you heard what you are saying right now, what would you
think?
Notice change in perspective
•
When you look at this from another perspective, does it feel the same? Different?
Do you see yourself the same way when you take these different perspectives?
Combine with augmentals
•
If x (whatever the critic says) were not weighing you down, what would you be
doing? What would you need from him/her to make that possible?
•
If x (whatever critic says) no longer held you back, what would you be doing?
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Values
Help person explore and define values toward self
• Most people value empathy and connection, but fusion
with self-concept impedes applying that to themselves
Methods:
• Empathy and compassion for self can emerge when the
damage done by fusion with self-criticism is fully
contacted
• Elicit and define the kind of relationship person wants
to have toward themselves
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Committed action
Help client take steps to act on values while practicing gentleness
and compassion
• Self-attacks often function as a way to coerce the self to act in line
with self-standards and values (e.g., “buck up” and “push through
it”).
• Self-criticism makes it harder to take risks and learn, which inevitably
involves failure and mistakes
Methods:
• Build commitment to practices of self-care and self-kindness
• When exploring other kinds of valued actions, explore what kind of
relationship person wants to have toward self as they do this--“and
how do you want to be with yourself as you take these actions?”
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