ACT With Compassion

This month’s tool: Guided meditations for highly self-critical and shame-prone clients

We have updated our resource page with some of our favorite meditations that we find useful in working with shame-prone and self-critical clients. Often, people who are highly self-critical and shame-prone tend to spend a lot of time with emotion systems related to threat activated, or alternatively spend time feeling overwhelmed in response to their internal judgment. Their threat system may be chronically over activated, while their social safety system under activated. The social safety system signals to the person that it is safe to relax and explore, because the person is supported by their tribe or otherwise safe and experiencing a relative lack of aversive stimulation. Lovingkindness and compassion meditations can be very valuable for stimulating the social-safety systems of people who are highly shame-prone and self-critical.

Every month, we scour the scientific literature for interesting studies that have practical implications for therapists working with shame, self-criticism, or compassion. Below are a few of our favorites for this month:

We at ACT with Compassion have been working out how to understand and describe the ways we could use personal perspective taking frames (from relational frame theory) in our work with shame and self-compassion. A few months ago, we wrote a post that described some examples, especially focusing on perspective taking between client and therapist. In that post we noted that during moments of high self-criticism, people tend to get fused with a conceptualized self (e.g., “I am broken”), and this narrow perspective tends to interfere with learning and connection. High self-critics (HSCs) tend to fused with a flawed conceptualized self much of the time. Thus, it is important to work with the client on multiple occasions, and sometimes in creative ways, to help them move toward a more flexible, self-as-context perspective and loosen the grip of the old shame story.

This month’s tool: Books on shame, self-criticism, and self-compassion for the public

We have updated our resource page with some of our favorite books on shame, self-criticism, and self-compassion for the public that we find useful in working with shame-prone and self-critical clients. We find that it can be helpful to recommend these types of readings for clients who are unsure about attending to their shame or about cultivating self-compassion, or for clients who are all-in and want more information. These books are great for therapists to read and apply too! If you have your own favorite books, we would love to hear about them!

Every month, we scour the scientific literature for interesting studies that have practical implications for therapists working with shame, self-criticism, or compassion. Below are a few of our favorites for this month:

Last month we wrote about the importance of helping clients identify trustworthy others. How others respond to an individual’s disclosure of feeling shame or self-criticism can have a profound impact on the likelihood that that individual will continue to disclose content they often keep hidden. In that post we mentioned Brene Brown’s BRAVING framework as one way to help clients determine who to trust when disclosing their vulnerabilities.

This month’s tool: Video recordings for highly self-critical clients

We have updated our resource page with some of our favorite videos that we find useful in working with shame-prone and self-critical clients. Some of the videos are educational for clients, some are emotionally evocative, and some are both educational and evocative. Videos can be a powerful tool for engaging working with clients to approach difficult topics from a place that is non-judgmental and connected to a sense of common humanity. If you have your own favorite videos, we would love to hear about them!

Every month, we scour the scientific literature for interesting studies that have practical implications for therapists working with shame, self-criticism, or compassion. Below are a few of our favorites for this month:

My experience is that my most complex, chronic and stuck clients are often laboring under a great weight of shame. I’ve seen how shame leads them to withhold clinically useful information, how it leads to defensive and blaming behavior, and how it gets in the way of intimacy. I’ve seen how shame about their emotions, their bodies, and their thoughts impedes their self-awareness and makes it hard to be responsive to their own needs. Research also shows these observations to be true.

This month’s tool: Recognizing trustworthy others with BRAVING (adapted from Brene Brown):

People don’t operate in a vacuum

Have you ever worked with a client to change the way she treats herself, only to have her come back the following week beating herself up  because of a difficult interaction she had with a loved one that week? The fact that people don’t operate in a vacuum has been the frustration of many a clinician! At ACT with compassion, we believe it’s important that we help client’s change their relational/social context that serves to maintain their struggles with self-criticism or shame. We need to take into account not only our clients’ relationships with themselves, but also the factors in their environment, which may be shaping or reinforcing their self-criticism and/or self-compassion. One primary contextual factor affecting clients’ shame and self-criticism is their relationships with others.