Blog
Clinical tools, research updates and reflections on shame, self-criticism and compassion — 113 posts since 2014.
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Sometimes the hard thing isn’t the right thing: How taking it easy can help you learn
Without realizing it, for most of my life I followed the maxim “If it’s the hard thing, it’s the right thing.” I often pushed myself too far. Exercise would result in injury when I didn’t…
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How Receiving Compassion Buffers Depression
Extending compassion to others is undoubtedly important. Especially since America is, arguably, more divided now than ever. But being able to receive compassion is important, too. In fact,…
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Developing Openness to Feedback Through Cultivating Healthy Self-Doubt
For those of us, like myself, with a history of harsh self-criticism, it may seem like the last thing in the world we need to do is cultivate self-doubt! We often feel like we’re doubting…
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Does Self-Compassion Make You Lazy?
Does too much self-compassion make a person lazy and self-indulgent? It seems sensible that self-compassion could help a person feel better, but couldn’t it also lead a person to, say,…
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Helping people who are highly self-critical benefit from feedback
It’s often painful to get feedback from other people, and even harder to know what to do with it when we do get it. It can feel like an attack on our person, and it can be hard to identify…
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Self-Enquiry into self-criticism, self-blame, and shame
A mentor of mind, Kelly Wilson , said the following years ago about himself and it’s always stuck with me. The levels of self-deception are endless. There are certain phrases that stick…
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Study Suggests It’s Important to Target Shame Early in Eating Disorder Treatments
Background Certain therapies, such as Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) and the work we do at ACT With Compassion, are based upon the idea that shame plays a role in the maintenance of a…
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August 2017 Tool of the Month: Adaptive Disclosure for Moral Injury – A New Treatment that Uses Exposure and Perspective Taking to Address Problematic Social Emotions such as Shame
In talking with colleagues working within the Veterans Administration in the US, I’ve noticed that the topic of moral injury is receiving a lot of attention as of late. For those of us…
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Self-Compassion and Body Image
Unfortunately, there often seems to be a wide chasm between what happens in the research lab and what happens on the front lines of clinical work. On the one hand, researchers need to…
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“It’s OK Kiddo.” On internalizing self-compassion
Like many people, public speaking has been a struggle for me. When I first started out, I wasn’t simply anxious about public speaking, I was really bad at it. And I have the evidence to…