ABSTRACT

Compassion Focused Therapy: Clinical Practice and Applications offers evidence-based guidance and extensive insight into the science behind compassion focused therapy.

 

The first section of the book explores the evolution and physiological infrastructures of caring, and how compassion arises when humans use their complex cognitive competencies to address suffering deliberately and intentionally. With this framework and basis, the next sections of the book explore CFT applied to groups, specific interventions such as chair work, the importance of applying the principles of the therapy to oneself, the CFT therapeutic relationship, and a chapter offering a systematic review of the evidence for CFT. The third section offers a series of multi-authored chapters on interventions for a range of different mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, trauma, and many others. 

 

Being the first major clinical book on compassion focused therapy, with leading international researchers and clinicians addressing central problems, this landmark publication will appeal to psychotherapists from a variety of schools as well as being a vital resource for compassion focused therapists.

part Section I|239 pages

Compassion focused therapy

chapter 1|21 pages

Setting the scene

Psychotherapy at a crossroads and a compassionate way forward

chapter 2|66 pages

Compassion focused therapy

An evolution-informed, biopsychosocial approach to psychotherapy: history and challengePaul Gilbert

chapter 4|42 pages

Shame, humiliation, guilt, and social status

The distress and harms of social disconnection

chapter 5|43 pages

Internal shame and self-disconnection

From hostile self-criticism to compassionate self-correction and guidance

part Section II|202 pages

CFT practices and settingsPaul Gilbert

chapter 8|40 pages

Compassionate mind training

Key themes

chapter 10|15 pages

Compassion focused therapy and the body

How physiological underpinnings of prosociality inform clinical practice

part Section III|173 pages

Specific applications

chapter 17|14 pages

Compassion focused therapy chair work

chapter 20|11 pages

True Strength

Using compassion focused therapy in the treatment of problematic anger

chapter 23|15 pages

Compassion focused therapy

An evolutionary and biopsychosocial understanding of depression and its management