Welcome to the July 2016 ACT With Compassion newsletter! We hope you're enjoying your summer so far, and for those of you in the States, we hope you had a safe and happy Independence Day!
If you follow the ACT With Compassion (AWC) website, you know our mission is to connect with therapists who want to bring more compassion and effectiveness to their work with self-critical and shame-prone clients. Our objective is 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 a recent blog post celebrating our 2nd anniversary, 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 - June 2016
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20 science-based recommendations for therapy with highly self-critical or shame-prone clients
It’s our anniversary!!! It was two years ago this month that “Team Compassion” started the ACTwithCompassion website. Over the course of those two years the number of people following our work has grown tremendously and we
feel very honored and humbled that so many of you seem to have found what we are doing here helpful in some way. Thank you!
For the last years, Team Compassion founding member Dr. Melissa Platt has been scouring journals and the empirical literature to bring you monthly research updates. In this post, we have pulled together the 20 research findings we feel are most directly applicable to working with highly self-critical and shame prone (HSC/SP) clients. And so on our anniversary, we present to you, our top 20 science-based recommendations for working with highly self-critical and
shame-prone clients!!!
20. Effective work with shame means exposure to shame. The experience of shame is so excruciating that of course it makes
sense we try to avoid it. For shame prone clients, this becomes a central part of their existence, leading to lots of behavior that revolves around shame and avoiding shame. One problem with pervasive avoidance of shame is that it robs us of opportunities for learning. For example, Luoma et al. found that higher levels of shame immediately following a group treatment focused on shame predicted better outcomes four months later. This suggests that effective work with shame means
bringing clients into contact with shame, while simultaneously using perspective taking and compassion-based exercises to help clients learn new ways of responding to their own shame, other than avoidance.
19. It’s important to assess for past experiences of warmth and belonging, not just criticism and disconnection. Matos and colleagues found that early memories of warmth buffered the effects of shame memories on depression. Shame/criticism and warmth/responsivity are not two ends of one continuum, but rather are two separate continua and clients’
histories can be high or low on one or both of these. Carefully eliciting clients’ experiences of warmth, belonging, and connection is important in identifying resources that can then be built on to foster greater self-compassion.
Here are links to the Compassion Tools of the Month that we've featured on the AWC blog since our last newsletter:
You can find links to all of our clinical tools here. You can read shame and self-compassion research updates that we've compiled since our last newsletter 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, including those we've published since our last newsletter:
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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