The Compassionate Mind (Compassion Focused Therapy)

by Paul A. Gilbert

for others, the beginnings of self-compassion can trigger memories of times when people who had been initially kind to them later abused them. This can create real confusion in their minds about trusting compassionate feelings, and for these individuals, the beginnings of self-compassion can reactivate rather fearful or strange emotions. We can make sense of this in the following way. Each of us has a system in our brains that codes for experiences of close relationships: the attachment system, which links to our soothing and contentment system and lays down memories of being loved and soothed. However, if we have memories of others harming us and/or of ourselves feeling anxious and angry towards them, those memories are going to reactivated if a therapist or other person is kind to us. Rather than feeling soothed by them, we’ll re-experience the anger or anxiety because those are the feelings we associate with people being close, or with people who were supposed to be kind but weren’t. We all know people like this: when you’re kind and loving towards them, they pull away as if it’s a threat to them.