Welcome to the October 2016 ACT With Compassion newsletter!
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 goal is to bring together information and people who are interested in studying and developing treatments that have compassion at their heart, and we accomplish 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 about working with survivors of interpersonal trauma, 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 - September 2016
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ACT with Compassion for Interpersonal Trauma Survivors: Building the Foundation
Shame Is Sometimes Trickier to Work with in Survivors of Interpersonal Trauma Although it is the case that interpersonal trauma
survivors are often highly shame-prone, it is also sometimes the case that working with shame can be especially tricky in this population. This is true for two primary reasons. First, there are often more obstacles to establishing a therapeutic relationship that is secure enough for work on shame and self-criticism to be fruitful. In fact, establishing the therapeutic relationship may itself be part of the shame
work. For example, in order for your client to experience you as liking him, he has to be willing to take the perspective that he is likable by another human. This is often a difficult task for any highly shame-prone person, but even more difficult if the person’s learning history involved being violated by someone they depended on or trusted. Second, approaching issues related to shame, self-criticism, and self-compassion with this population may be likely to elicit a shutdown response which
can interfere with learning that is needed in order for therapy to be successful. We discuss these issues below.
Here are links to the Compassion Tools of the Month that we've featured on the AWC blog since our last newsletter:
You can access all of our posts on 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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