Thoughts on Compassion Focused Therapy

By Khalid Stetkevych

Compassion Focused Therapy: Clinical Practice and Applications (2022).

Edited by Paul Gilbert and Gregoris Simos. Routledge

Gilbert & Simos’ (2022) edited manual on compassion focused therapy (CFT; another acronym, yay.) is a mammoth sized textbook combining the theory, techniques, and applications of CFT. While the theory section of this book is a herculean effort to integrate modern psychological sciences (such as evolutionary psychology, interpersonal neurobiology, and polyvagal theory) with a nearly comprehensive history of psychotherapy styles and techniques (such as Jungian psychoanalysis, somatics, mindfulness, functional-analysis, and good old classical conditioning), its conception was still significantly born out of cognitive therapy.

With this in mind, CFT brings about a less-often talked about layer/dimension of assessing cognition: tone. CFT argues that tone is an imperative, even if overlooked, dimension of cognition because of how it carries the emotional load of the thoughts. From a linguistic interpersonal psychology standpoint, every word is a symbol uttered by the speaker and heard by the receiver. The receiver is affected by the words in some way, shape, or form; think of general attunement, mirror neurons, what have you. Still, the words have tone; on an emotional level, how much are we the receivers influenced by tone versus influenced by the dry data of the symbols? We can play out this thought experiment with ourselves or with our clients: think of a phrase you might say with a critical tone, then try it out with contemptuous judgment and then with heartfelt compassion. There’s an obvious difference.

Let’s make this conceptually even more interesting. Imagine you have a roommate, and every morning they tell you that they hate you and you’re worthless. After a pretty short while, you’re going to start hating them back. Imagine now that this roommate is your own internal dialogue. Your internal words have a sender and a receiver, but in this case they’re both you. You keep telling yourself you hate yourself and you might just start hating yourself back (a funny way of saying there’s a self-amplifying feedback loop inherent to the action). Now, maybe you’ve had one of those funny ironic roommates who trash talks you as playful banter that could only be interpreted as love. It’s not what I was going for, but you already see one point here – the tone mattered; even the most awful words said sweetly or with unquestionable playfulness are not felt as awful. The question then becomes, how do we build a better self-talk? CFT would argue through self-compassion.

If you’re reading this, I’m honored, and this isn’t going to make you throw out the old for the new. Nor should it. Instead it contributes another layer or dimension of analysis for our thoughts:

- What is the content and structure of a thought? (Beckian)

- What is the function of a thought? (ACT)

- What is the tone of a thought? (CFT)

- What are my thought patterns and attentional biases? (metacognition)