Welcome to the January 2017 ACT With Compassion newsletter - we hope you had a great holiday season!
In this issue we
feature an excerpt from a recent blog post about helping clients identify personalized lovingkindness phrases, as well as links to other blog articles, compassion tools, and research updates. If you know of anyone 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 - December 2016
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Working with Clients to Identify Personalized Lovingkindness Phrases
In addition to the sequence of lovingkindness meditations we have created for use with highly
self-critical clients, we have found that it is often powerful for the phrases used in lovingkindness meditations to be customized for a particular person. The goal is to identify personalized lovingkindness phrases based on the client’s own idiosyncratic experience that are responsive to their emotional needs. The goal of this is to enhance the activation of the social safety system by making the phrase more personally relevant.
One of the most powerful ways to identify more evocative lovingkindness phrases is to have the client imagine what they need to hear from a caring or supportive person during emotionally difficult moments, including times when they are stuck in self-criticism or shame. This
can be worked into sessions in response to difficult moments that arise in the course of therapy or in the form of a structured exercise, like we outline below (this is what we do in our groups).
You can also help clients identify customized phrases by having them look at lists of potential phrases and identify ones
that they think might be meaningful to them. These can then be worked into in-session lovingkindess meditations or for them to practice with as homework. We offer a list of potential lovingkindness phrases for download here. 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. We are hosting two upcoming workshops next month on using ACT with highly self-critical and shame-prone clients:
Both workshops will be led by Jason Luoma, PhD, Jenna LeJeune, PhD, and Melissa Platt, PhD, and will be held at the Lifequal Center in Beaverton, Oregon.
Be sure to check out our Events page for information on other 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
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