The Compassionate Mind (Compassion Focused Therapy)

by Paul A. Gilbert

In the decades to come, we must, as a society, think what all this work is for.

compassionate behaviour sometimes requires courage, to make changes in our lives.

some of our unpleasant feelings and reactions are usually not abnormal and we should not feel ashamed of them.

Modern societies are, in a whole variety of ways, over-stimulating both our threat system and our incentive (‘want more’ and ‘need to do more’) system.

for thousands of years philosophers and religious people have pondered the problems that come from human behaviour being guided by rather primitive emotions and what we can do about them.

our first challenge is to recognize and cope with desires, motives and dispositions that have been written for us, rather than by us long ago, and which operate within many of our animal cousins too.

A well-known finding suggests that ‘neurons that fire together wire together’. So you can imagine how extensively the brain of an infant receiving soothing and affection will be getting wired up compared to one of an infant receiving little soothing, who is also neglected or often being stressed.

Powerful early experiences of feeling loved or stressed – and even the environment of the womb – can actually turn genes on and off.

Our genetic potential is called the genotype; the actual way our experience shapes us, and affects what we actually feel and do, is called the phenotype.

We have a brain that can reflect, ponder and conceptualize the world; we can be observers and experimenters, making purposeful interventions to see what happens and discover how things work; we can peer below the surface of things, have theories and test them out. Because we have such a complex, meaning-conveying language, we can pass on our learning so that we now increasingly live in a world built by human knowledge and creativity accumulated over thousands of years.

We fantasize the best for ourselves to want more and more – never satisfied because we can always imagine having more or better. Fantasies can fuel our greed. We can be constantly disappointed because reality is never as we’d like it to be

Animals will defend their groups and territories at all times, but only humans can think about how to do it more effectively with guns, or sadistically by torturing those who are either not in the group or who have betrayed it. At least a third of all the world’s research money is spent on weaponry. Rich nations sell poor nations armaments, crippling their economies, maintaining tyrants and causing untold harm, with the profits from the arms sales flowing back to the rich nations. It is, of course, disastrous, but is the consequence of a fantastic ‘new brain/mind’ not being able to sort out the tribal motives of the ‘old brain/mind’ – greed and a belief in the importance of aggressive power. Even religions can feed into this tragedy.

if we don’t understand and train our minds very carefully and learn to be wary of the dangers of allowing ‘new brain/mind’ competencies to be directed by ‘old brain/mind’ passions, we’re going to be in trouble.

Compassion invites us to use our ‘new brains/minds’ in new ways – to stand back from some of our primitive passions and desires, such as tribalism, and remember that we’re all human beings, in the flow of life, who feel pain and suffer the same way; we’ve all just somehow ‘arrived here’ and are actors of the narratives of life.

The passions, motives, wants, lusts, fears and vengeances of our ‘old brain/mind’ can hijack the capabilities of our ‘new brain/mind’. When it does that, we simply find ways to satisfy those desires or find reasons for feeling what we feel, supporting our prejudices. Emotions can suggest their own self-justifying reasons. ‘I feel it, so it must be true,’ we say. ‘I feel anxious, so this must be dangerous and I should avoid it.’ ‘I feel disgusted, so this means it’s bad.’ ‘I feel that this is wrong; therefore it is.’ ‘I feel that I can’t trust you; therefore you are dangerous to me.’ We don’t question what we feel or do because we have ‘gut feelings’ and urges that we’re right.

In fact, we can actively look for reasons to support our feelings, even ignoring or dismissing alternative, more reasonable views.

the passions and fears of the ‘old brain/mind’ were designed to be very powerful and not easily overruled.

we humans can respond to the world that we have created in our heads, the one that we have imagined, the one that we think about, and can experience ourselves within that world within our heads. Our self-awareness and our capacity ‘to think about our self’, to recognize we are, for instance, a self that we may not want to be, an ashamed self, a ‘less than self’, an ‘out-of-control self’ – all those reflections seriously add to our miseries.

So although self-awareness is a fantastic feat of evolution and brain complexity, this very sense of ‘me-ness’ and ‘I-ness’, which Buddhists call the ‘ego self’, will want to defend itself, protect itself, promote and give itself pleasures, and it can judge itself, criticize and even attack itself.

A key problem with a sense of self and self-awareness is that just about any problem can become linked to it. If I put on too much weight because I don’t control my eating, if I make mistakes, if others reject me, if others criticize me, if I struggle to understand how my computer works when others seem to do this easily – just about anything can become a way of judging and experiencing myself negatively. I then have two problems: the annoyance or disappointment about the thing itself, and the experience of me as inferior, bad, defeated, unloved or inadequate in some way. The annoyance or disappointment over the thing itself may dissipate quickly, but my ruminations about myself as inferior, incompetent, lacking will-power or whatever can stay with me for hours, days, weeks or even years, constantly undermining my happiness.

Our sense of disconnectedness is the price we pay for having a brain that gives rise to a sense of our being an individual self.

When we set out to develop compassion, we adopt the basic idea that, if we learn to concentrate our attention, thoughts and behaviours on compassion, imagine ourselves as compassionate and think about how to be compassionate for others, we’ll be stimulating particular systems in our brain. Indeed, there’s now a lot of evidence that this is so (see Chapter 8). It turns out that, if you get those compassion systems in your brain working, they will create feelings of peacefulness, calmness and connectedness, not to mention insight into the nature of the self and one’s role in the flow of life. Furthermore, the physiological changes you create in your body as you become compassion-focused will affect your immune system and other systems relating to health.12

By the time of humans, our brains have evolved to be caring and to need caring to such an extent that the way they shape and wire themselves throughout life, the pattern of their interconnections, is significantly influenced by the affection, love and caring they receive.13 Parental caring not only soothes children when they’re distressed, but it helps them to understand and come to terms with how their minds work; they can talk about their feelings and things that have happened to them. Knowing that they exist in the mind of another as a loved person stimulates their soothing/contentment system and makes their world feel secure. This is the way our brains are built. We depend on care and love.

Receiving kindness, gentleness, warmth and compassion tells the brain that the world is safe and other people are helpful rather than harmful. Receiving kindness, gentleness, warmth and compassion improves our immune system and reduces the levels of stress hormones. Receiving kindness, gentleness, warmth and compassion helps us to feel soothed and settled and is conducive to good sleep. Kindness, gentleness, warmth and compassion are like basic vitamins for our minds.

Medicine can prolong dying, which is not the same as prolonging life.

The challenge here is to recognize the importance of kindness and affection and place them at the centre of our relationship with ourselves, with others and with the world. So ask yourself: Have you really put warmth, gentleness, kindness, support and compassion at the centre of how you relate to yourself and the way in which you try to help yourself through life’s tragedies? Have you put those qualities at the centre of your relationships with others, even people you don’t like very much?

another aspect of compassion relates to the recognition of our interdependency with each other.

Humans want to be thought about when ‘out of sight’, and not be forgotten. We have evolved to have a need to live positively in the minds of others – another form of interconnectedness, thinking about how we exist for other people.

The shift in Britain from the welfare-orientated politics of the 1950s and 1960s to the ‘need to maintain competitive edge’ politics of the last 25 years is as tragic as it is typical.

One of the first casualties is often the time to think through issues with colleagues. Emails are fired off without much thought, responding to one emergency after another. Electronic communication means the loss of voice tones and facial signals, all of which normally stimulate the amygdala in the brain that is integral to how we interpret and ‘feel’ about communications. We can’t tell if the person sending the message is being humorous, critical or just stressed. There is also constant reorganization, which changes whom one works with and relates to, undermining stability – all to try to find that competitive edge and increase efficiency.

Today relationships are more about impressing. People often feel like actors on a stage with their lives increasingly like a performance, up for judgement, and judges – overt and covert – are everywhere.

Our brains have been designed by evolution to be very sensitive to what we believe others think and feel about ourselves because fostering good relationships with others is good for our mental and physical health. But if we are overly sensitive in a field of comparative strangers, we risk becoming lost to our own theatricals and performance judgements.

cultivating caring relationships with others is a key element of feeling happy and is beneficial for our well-being. However, we have built societies that neither teach nor inspire this. Even our entertainments are recognized as being increasingly designed to thrill and grab our attention with violence and simplistic views of good versus evil. 21

one of the reasons we are able to communicate and cooperate in the ways that we do is because we use our own minds to make judgements about what is going on in those of other people. However, here’s the catch – this assumption of similarity can cause confusion. How often have we found ourselves thinking: ‘If I was in that person’s shoes, I wouldn’t have done/said/felt that. How can he/she do/feel that? I would never have done that’? We use our own inner experience of feelings and our sense of self-identity to judge the other person – when their values and ways of thinking and feeling may be quite different to ours.

This ability to have empathy for difference, to be open to diversity, to work hard at thinking about how other people may differ from you is a key step on the road to compassion – and it’s not always easy.

When I was younger and training to become a therapist, trying to help people who were very distressed, I used to say to my supervisor that my patients would be so much better off having somebody with far more experience than I had. To some extent, that was clearly true. However, my supervisor, who was a wise and gentle older lady, pointed out that this was the essence of life. We can live life in the ‘if only’ lane or make the best of it and appreciate where we are right now. So the question for me was not ‘How can I have 20 years’ experience on Day 1?’ because that wasn’t possible. Everyone has to walk exactly the same road as I was walking, from being inexperienced to experienced. There is no other way. Rather the question she wanted me to ask myself was ‘How can I be the best young, inexperienced therapist I can be, given my limitations?’ Because that was all there was for these individuals – there was no one else. It was a harsh lesson in some ways but it helped me confront the reality of my limitations: I could only be what I could be.

the ability to value the talents and attributes of others is a vital element of compassion but can be undermined by envy or self-insecurity. Compassion can, therefore, actually involve learning how to appreciate and take pleasure from the talents of others, to be pleased for them.

When the Dalai Lama first came to the West, he was stunned by the levels of self-dissatisfaction, self-disappointment, self-criticism and self-dislike he encountered. For all our technology and comforts, he found us a people in conflict with ourselves.

If you want one recipe to make you unhappy, it would be to focus on the things you criticize or don’t like about yourself.

it was the many conversations I’ve had over the past 30 years with depressed, anxious, lost and lonely people that convinced me that the one core element they seemed to lack was the ability to be kind, gentle, warm and compassionate with themselves.

We can stimulate patterns in our brains that are self-nourishing, supportive, encouraging and soothing, so that in whatever we do to help ourselves (say, change the way we think about ourselves or face up to and cope with things we struggle with), we practise creating in our heads an experience (brain pattern) of warmth, kindness and support as our primary starting position. If we do this, we may find that things will be slightly better for us.

Most experts talk about ‘when’ the next killer virus will strike, not ‘if’, with all the suffering and grief that will follow in its wake.

very timely right now.

According to Aristotle and ancient Greek tradition, the only people deserving of compassion are those who do not deserve their suffering, and that sentiment, which is alien to Buddhist compassion, has continued to ripple through Western thought.

The Romans thought compassion was a weakness in a society that needed to constantly demonstrate its power.

people differ in the ease by which they understand the value of compassion, and the ease by which they develop it. Our reasons for pursuing compassion or resisting it vary. Some of us might have been taught that we should always put others before ourselves. Self-compassion smacks of self-indulgence and even selfishness.

self-compassion is quite different from self-promotion, struggling to do better than others, fostering a sense of entitlement or just doing ‘nice things’ for oneself or giving oneself treats.

achievement doesn’t fulfil our inner yearning for a certain type of recognition and affection; only by facing up to those feelings directly can we heal them.

there is a long tradition of thinking in the West that kindness and compassion should be for those who are not responsible for their suffering – their suffering is not their fault and they have not brought it on themselves or done something to deserve punishment.

coming to terms with rather than ridding herself of her inner feelings and fantasies, by accepting that they are part of the human mind, as writers of horror stories easily show.

Another form of resistance to developing self-compassion can be produced when people begin to develop it, especially by doing the same sort of exercises as in this book, and this exposes a yearning in them that may have been buried for a long time. This yearning may be for a sense of closeness or for a feeling of being connected to others – not alone – or a desire to feel loved or wanted. As the candle of self-compassion starts to flicker, it can illuminate great sadness and yearning within us. For some people, that can be overwhelming at first, and so we must go a step at a time – compassionately.