Compassion-Focused Therapy

Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) is a system of psychotherapy developed by Paul Gilbert that integrates techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy with concepts from evolutionary psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, Buddhist psychology and neuroscience. One of its key concerns is to use compassionate mind training to help people develop and work with experiences of inner warmth, safeness and soothing, through compassion and self-compassion. Compassionate mind training, its central technique, teaches the skills and attributes of compassion to help transform problematic patterns of cognition and emotion related to anxiety, anger, shame and self-criticism.