Welcome to the April 2016 ACT With Compassion newsletter! If you're like us, you're probably looking forward to the warmer weather the spring months will bring (along with a bit of rain, as
well!).
If you follow the ACT With Compassion (AWC) website, you know our goal is to connect with therapists who want to bring more compassion and effectiveness to their work with self-critical and shame-prone clients. We aim to bring together information and people who are interested in studying and developing treatments that have compassion at their heart, and we do that through our
website, newsletter, and social media. You can view a short guide to the website and options for staying connected here.
In this issue we feature an excerpt from one of our more popular blog posts, as well as
links to other blog articles, compassion tools, and research updates. If you know of someone who might be interested in our content, be sure to forward the newsletter to him or her. You can also share it on social media with the social sharing tools at the bottom.
We hope you enjoy this issue – if you have any questions or comments, feel free to send them to
us!
Sincerely, Jason Luoma, Melissa Platt, & Jenna LeJeune
Featured Blog Excerpt - March 2016
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Why is it important to know about shame as a
psychotherapist?
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.
Over the past decade or more that I have been
studying shame intensively, I have found that how shame functions for our clients and how it presents in the therapy room can be quite nuanced and challenging. Part of what’s tricky about shame is that the primary action tendency associated with shame is to hide. This can make it hard to recognize. Often shame works in the background, unrecognized but still motivating many of our clients’ problematic behaviors. Knowledge of how shame functions can help us to see past the
defensiveness and avoidance and be able to bring light to what’s often a very dark and lonely place in which our clients find themselves stuck.
Here are links to some of the Compassion Tools of the Month that we've featured on the AWC blog:
You can find links to all of our clinical tools here. You can read recent shame and self-compassion research updates that we've compiled at the links below:
You
can read up on all of our research updates at this link. We also feature original content on our blog - here are links to just some of the articles we've posted:
Check out more of our original blog content here. Check out our Events page for information on classes, workshops, and conferences relevant to therapists interested in
shame, self-criticism, and compassion. If you know of an event you'd like to see listed, please contact us with the details and we'll put it on our website! |
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