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 1: Exploring Past Contributors to Shame and Self-Criticism

Here is a handout that is the first 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 shame and criticism from others can help to remove blame from the client by helping to understand how their experiences make sense based on their history. It may also serve as a defusion practice in that it invites clients to look at their self-critical “programming” from an outside perspective.

Stay tuned for part 2: Exploring the Past – Warmth and Compassion, coming up in our July Tool of the Month.

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.