ACT With Compassion

Each month we highlight some practical resources for therapists interested in compassion. We don’t go into great depth about what we find, but encourage you to check them out if you think they’re interesting.

This Month's Find: Part 2: Exploring Past Contributors to Warmth and Self-Compassion

Here is a handout that is the second part of a two-part series. The purpose of these handouts is to help clients to explore their history with 1. relationships involving shame and criticism and 2. relationships involving warmth and compassion.

Exploring clients’ early experiences with warmth and compassion can help to develop a set of resources to draw on as therapist and client work together to build self-compassion. This is also a chance to assess obstacles to feeling compassion, as clients may express fear or shame, or engage in avoidance behaviors during assessment of compassion.

For more about how this form can be used in case conceptualization as it relates to self-criticism, you can read more here.

You can access the handout mentioned in this post along with other frameworks here.