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 ...

Compassion isn’t about becoming less focused or less able but about becoming refocused and more able. If you think of people who are seen as very compassionate, such as Buddha, Christ, Nightingale, Gandhi and Mandela, you’d hardly call them under-achievers. Indeed, compassionate people can often be inspired to work for a cause. Developing self-compassion, therefore, is not simply a case of sitting around contemplating one’s navel or just having nice thoughts about oneself. Developing self-compassion can be hard work and can inspire us to hard work.

Why do we call this approach a compassionate mind approach rather than just a compassion approach? First, it’s a term that has been used many times in various spiritual traditions. More importantly, however, it helps us to focus on the fact that our minds work in terms of patterns. If you access one pattern, you’ll make another less easy to generate. If you’re very anxious, this can block (patterns for) feelings of calm; if you’re very angry, this can block (patterns for) feelings of kindness. Different patterns in our brain turn different systems on and off. You can’t feel relaxed and frightened or angry and loving at the same time. You can switch between them, of course, but you can’t feel them simultaneously. One pattern negates another.

When we fully realize how and why we did not design much of what goes on in our minds, we can then take responsibility in new ways and learn how to live in and work with such a mind. This may seem odd but it’s not really so strange. After all, you didn’t build your physical body – your genes did – but learning how your body works means that you can train it to be toned and fit, working on different muscle groups or your cardiovascular system and eating a balanced diet. Two hundred years ago, people didn’t realize that lack of vitamin C caused scurvy; now we do and so can prevent it by eating fruit. As we learn more about our brains and minds, we are coming to realize that they too need certain types of ‘input’ to function well. As we will see, compassion is like a multivitamin for the mind. In the centuries to come, a better understanding of the kinds of inputs and social relationships that ‘feed’ and ‘nurture’ the brain is needed, along with political courage to advance a mentally healthy society.

The experience of being born into a loving household or a stressed and abusive one would actually affect how my brain matured and the types of connections that were made between my neurons. It is not just my ‘values’ that would be shaped in a certain way by my relationships with others (e.g. my parents), but my actual brain, from where my thoughts, feelings and desires flow, is sculpted by my relationships.1 If I’d been unlucky enough to have been born into, say, an old-style orphanage where infants were left in cots all day and there was little care or interaction, then all the potential that lies inside me, which could have been sculpted by love and kindness feeding my brain, would simply have withered away. I would have suffered intellectual losses and decline.

when we give up blaming and condemning ourselves (and others) for things then we are freer to genuinely set sail towards developing the insight, knowledge and understanding we need to take responsibility for ourselves and our actions. Learning and practising compassion will help us feel more content and at peace with ourselves and also more concerned for others.

We can learn to be open and even amused by some of what goes on in our minds once we are honest about it. However, acting out some of our fantasies, being taken over by some of our desires, wants, fears or vengeful feelings, can cause problems – so as we’ll see, we can learn to develop a way of becoming aware and honest but equally more in control of some of our feelings and urges. Our actions have consequences, and we as a species can understand that and (sometimes) foresee them. Life is about learning when to act and when not to act on our desires and emotions. This takes us to the heart of compassionate behaviour because it isn’t just about acting in kind, warm and friendly ways. It’s also about protecting ourselves and others from our own destructive desires and actions; it’s about being assertive, tolerating discomfort and developing courage

Another response is to be compassionate to that anger or denial, seeing them as entirely understandable – it is indeed very unfair that I have a brain (not of my design or choosing) that makes me really enjoy and want things that are bad for me (or others). I can learn to be understanding and empathic to my feelings of irritation and loss arising from the fact that I can’t have what I want. When I was trying to give up cigarettes, my wife bought me a wonderful book by Richard Klein called Cigarettes Are Sublime.2 It focuses on all the pleasures of smoking – and that giving up will involve quite a major grief process. It was then that I realized that I had neither recognized nor been prepared to face up to or deal with my grief and loss – the loss of the romantic Paul, with the jazz, glass of wine and soft smoke. Smokers will understand this. So it was a sad and compassionate goodbye to smoking – well, okay, if I’m honest, a string of goodbyes. But in the end if I want to stave off health problems, getting fat and having headaches, I haven’t much choice but to take control over my pleasures of smoking, eating and drinking. It is how I do that that is key. The thing is to cultivate the genuine desire to look after and nurture oneself, with a sense of warmth, kindness and even playfulness and to limit our acting on our desires from a position of kindness and understanding.

We can also become more aware of how our societies may be stimulating the selfish ‘me first’ part of ourselves with unrealistic fantasies and desires and setting us up to want more and more and, at the same time, to feel more disappointed and personal failures

So for mammals, sexual competition, driven by the desire to both engage oneself and prevent others from engaging in sex, will texture their lives. Long before humans appear at the very twilight of our day, we will see the working of the archetypes that enable sexual competition, loyalties and betrayals, group living and tribalism, submission to leaders and fear of dominant males, the striving for status and social position, cooperative hunting and working together – all the themes that, when we eventually arrive, are going to play big time in the minds of humans. I find it amazing that so many of the desires that flow through me, and indeed all of us, were designed not only long before me but long before all humans.

We recognize that we have enormous capacities for being benevolent or malevolent, which we need to gain insight into compassionately. Only then should we start to think about ourselves in more local terms, such as our tribe or political group. Our evolved mind will already have been working in the other direction, to stir up strong passions of identification with our local group, and it is understanding how we work against those passions, by identifying ourselves as human beings, that can become key to our actions.

People often wonder if there is a ‘real self’ or a ‘real me’ among all the aspects of self one does and doesn’t like. We sometimes talk about trying to discover the ‘true’ self. However, this is partly an illusion. There is no ‘real self’; there are only states of mind and patterns of consciousness. There is not a single atom in your body that you were born with; in fact, you are constantly changing the physical fabric of your body all the time, including your brain. The experience of yourself as a being emerges from the patterns that are created in your physical brain. If, for some reason, part of your brain is damaged, then your experience of yourself would be very different. These are the paradoxes that modern science is grappling with today. So rather than the ‘real self’, think of yourself as a pattern of great complexity, a rainbow of many colours, and the point of discovery is not so much finding a particular colour, but rather learning how to blend all the colours. A garden is not just the flowers or the trees or the grass or the soil – it is all these things. So think of yourself as not a single self but as a consciousness that is textured by a multi-faceted, multi-coloured set of possibilities.

Now the idea of archetypes has been around for thousands of years, reaching back to Plato and, much later, to Kant. But probably the name most associated with the idea is Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961).6 Jung was the son of a pastor and a contemporary of Freud’s. While Freud focused on flows of libidinal energy, Jung suggested that the human mind is made up of a set of special systems that organize our motives, thinking, feelings, fantasies and behaviour around specific themes. He called these ‘archetypes’. They evolved, he said, because over time they helped us navigate through the basic tasks of life. These tasks included children seeking out and becoming attached to parents and obtaining care from them, and adults forming relationships with peers, joining and defending groups and group boundaries, becoming sexually interested and engaging in procreation, caring for their offspring, growing old, seeking meaning, becoming wise and coming to terms with death. Archetypes are like inner guides that orientate us towards certain things and motivate us in certain ways. So Jung thought that there can be many types of archetypes. For example, the mother archetype can orientate us towards caring figures and to respond to being cared for (mothered). The sexual archetypes, in the form of the anima (in the man) and animus (in the woman), provide a sense of the desires and behaviours towards the opposite sex. The persona influences our social representations and seeks to keep our reputa...

Now archetypes are no more than ‘rules of thumb’, ideas that are linked to the innate aspects of our minds. Personas, shadows, hero archetypes and so on are just ways of describing and thinking about different aspects of ourselves. In fact, psychologists are constantly debating and researching how best to describe and understand the interactions of what is innate in us and how our innate potential turns into lived experiences. The point here is to think about the ways that archetypal processes live in all of us and can be harnessed, often without our full awareness.

We do not become greedy by seeking the ugly; we do not seek power to make things ugly. Books comprising myths can thus prevent us from seeing that it is our own greed for nice things that can be, for others, a source of injustice and vengeance. By constantly creating these false good/beautiful, bad/ugly distinctions, we are able to turn a blind eye to our own destructiveness, because we think that we are pursuing the pleasant, the beautiful and the good. The compassionate point is to focus on what is common to all of us – which is the struggle we have within our own evolved brains and minds with so many competing urges and feelings. We can open our eyes to the ease with which we can become deluded and not see the realities we are creating around us – through no fault of our own.

The cooperative mentality can orient us to be egalitarian in our ways of thinking. Recent evidence suggests that egalitarian attitudes produce more healthy responses when people are confronted with stressful social encounters than biased, competitive and non-egalitarian attitudes.13 There’s also growing evidence that fostering cooperative attitudes and behaviours in children and adolescents (in contrast to competitive and individualistic ones) promotes positive relationships, improved mental and physical health and higher achievements.14 In addition, it’s increasingly thought that cooperative groups will out-compete competitive/individualistic ones in the long term. In fact, business is finding out that the internet is a good source for problem-solving because people simply like to share their thoughts and ideas for free! It’s sad that, in the face of this, governments continue to buy into the business model that competition creates efficiency. Within the NHS, for example, we’re increasingly split into small competing groups called ‘business units’. Fostering high levels of cooperation would be far better.

It is this tribalism that can turn itself into the very antithesis of compassion. This is especially true when people take a sense of their self-identity from the group to which they belong and adopt its values. Research has shown that we form feelings of ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ – ‘them’ and ‘us’ – extremely easily, and once we’ve identified an out-group, they then become the ‘not us’. To cut a long story short, we can become extraordinarily contemptuous of, cruel towards, and paranoid about, those we see as belonging to the out-group. We may even see their values and ways of life as potentially contaminating our own and then seek to identify, destroy and eradicate them. Whether you want to see this as an archetype, a social mentality or an evolved mechanism, whether you wish to focus on its genetic or social regulators, the fact is that our tribal psychology, tribal prejudices, tribal expansionism and tribal vengeances have been the source of immense suffering perpetrated by humans against other humans for thousands of years. And, of course, because we know that other groups can be as hateful and as paranoid as we can, we fear them . . . and so continues the cycle, from the drug gangs of Los Angeles to the genocides of the world. Our tribal psychology and fear of other tribes can cause us, in the relevant social context, to see cruelty as a virtue

We have to think beyond individuals and individual minds and brains, and think about ourselves as mutually influencing beings. So on a simple level, our irritation with each other will raise our stress and increase our vulnerability to a range of health problems and to social discord, while our kindness to each other will lower our stress and impact positively on our well-being and increase our social safeness. At a more complex level, mental illness and criminality are woven from complicated genetic, social mentality and cultural/social interactions. And, of course, at an even higher level, the ways in which our societies operate, seek goods and services, secure trade agreements and enable international companies to extract huge profits from stock markets (and, as the recent crash has shown, exploit them) will greatly affect the lives and pattern the minds of people far away. We are all interconnected minds. It’s clear, however, that we can make choices, too. We can live in a world where we choose to foster our tribal psychology or sit back while it develops in areas of poverty and injustice. We are then faced with angry groups who come after us. We can choose to develop our competitive, ‘have to be the best and have the most’, ‘my interest or my tribe’s interests above yours’ archetypal side. Or we can choose a compassionate approach that’s more thoughtful of others. Ideally, of course, we blend these. We think carefully about our values and try to be the ‘best we can be...

if we want to engage in a compassionate and caring relationship with another person, the brain area that produces our ability to have empathy and understanding for them is turned on. We have feelings of warmth and concern for them; our attention is directed at how we can help them. The brain areas that produce our desires for aggression and to harm them are firmly turned off. If we could look in our brain, we would see various parts lighting up in mosaics of activity. But supposing that the person we are interacting with is seen as a threat or an enemy? The patterns in our brain will now be quite different. The systems for feeling empathy, care, concern and so forth are firmly turned off; the lights will go out in those brain areas and the systems for feeling anger and the desire to retaliate or hurt the other person or even remove them completely will be turned on. We will see a completely different mosaic. This insight tells us two important things. First, the social mentalities that are operating in (patterning) our brains have major effects on what we find pleasurable and rewarding in social relationships. Consider how it works. If we’re in the caring mentality, caring and helping others and seeing them flourish is rewarding and gives us a warm glow, and their suffering is painful to us. By contrast, if we’re in the competitive social mentality, seeing others hurt or do less well than us may be rewarding and seeing them flourish may be painful. We might only feel good ...

So just as a blend of yellow and blue make green, a blend of caring, cooperating and sexuality gives rise to affectionate and sharing sexual experiences in which partners cherish each other and build a bond through their sharing. Most psychologists believe that the ability to blend mentalities, and our emotions, so that we are flexible and multi-faceted is key to our well-being. We understand that we can love and be angry with somebody, that we can want to be close to others sometimes but also alone occasionally. Individuals who are more black-and-white about things, who find it difficult to cope with ambivalence, blends and conflicts, are more prone to emotional problems.

It is important to see how easily the archetypes that live through us are ‘summoned’ by the values and passions of the groups we live in. Once we know this, we can start to think about how we can recognize different patterns of activation in our brains, and the strategies that might be underpinning them, in order to refocus our minds. Do we really want our minds to be taken over by the archetypal in us? Shouldn’t we object to how our passions are so easily aroused? To pull back and offer resistance is not going to be easy because the patterns and strategies stir emotions and passion. But there is also choice. Psychologists suggest that the more our ‘new brains/minds’ are able to think, reflect and understand the emotions and passions flowing through them and stand back from them, the more we’ll be able to take control and make conscious choices of what to act out and what not. Indeed, that’s the whole premise of psychotherapy on the one hand and meditative practices on the other. They seek to help us become more aware of and familiar with our minds and thus more in control. It’s not going to be full control, of course, because all kinds of things can be going on outside our awareness, but it’s a step in a useful direction.

Worksheet 1: Building a compassionate image This exercise is intended to help you build a compassionate image for you to work with and develop key areas of your mind. You can have more than one image if you wish, and they may well change over time. Whatever image comes to mind or you choose to work with, remember that it’s your creation and therefore your own personal ideal: what you would really like from feeling cared for and cared about, understood, supported and encouraged. In this practice, it’s important that you try to give your image certain qualities, including: • wisdom • strength • warmth • non-judgement. So as you deal with each box below, think about these qualities and imagine what they would look, sound and feel like. If possible, begin by focusing on your breathing, finding your soothing rhythm and making a half smile. Then let images emerge in your mind as best you can. Don’t try too hard – if nothing comes into your mind or it wanders, just gently bring it back to your breathing and practise compassionate accepting. Here are some questions that might help you: • Would you want your caring/nurturing image to feel/look/seem: – old or young? – male or female? – human or non-human (e.g. an animal, sea or light)? • What colours and sounds are associated with the qualities of wisdom, strength, warmth and non-judgement? (Indeed if you only have a sense of a compassion colour surrounding you that feels warm and caring, that’s a good start. Re...