What is Cognitive Psychotherapy for Depression?
Participants of the Depression Recovery Programme are usually somewhat aware of symptoms of depression through their own lived experience and also through literature available. However symptoms of depression are usually presented as a list and do not reflect the through nature of depression. The list does not explain why most people feel trapped in depression, view it as a complete change in their personality and lose all sense of being able to control symptoms or recover in any meaningful way. As a consequence hope is often completely absent and the individual is left in a state of despair with strong feelings of helplessness or aloneness.
The CBT model explores depression as a cycle that is maintained by the development of a vicious circle with inherent maintaining factors. Exploring Depression in this way promotes the discovery of personal factors that are fuelling and perpetuating the vicious circle of depression. It also provides an opportunity to “unravel depression” through changes that can be planned through goal setting and behavioural activation.
What is Compassion Focused Therapy?
Compassion-focused therapy is based on the principle that our human brains have evolved in such a way that we are very sensitive to threat in all of its formats. As a consequence, anger, anxiety, fear and depression are often natural consequences that are “not our fault”.
As a result of our experiences in early life we may become very threat focused as we have learned to expect and experience the worst in many situations. Many of us also become incentive focused as a means of trying to regulate how we feel- “If I have more status/ power/ material things etc, I will be better”.
As a consequence of being threat focused or incentive focused we may also behave in particular ways. These behaviours, for example, avoidance or perfectionism are aimed at keeping ourselves safe and making us feel better. Sometimes the unintended consequence is that such behaviours prevent us from engaging in situations that help us to learn to overcome our underlying fear. We find ourselves stuck in a vicious circle.
Shame, self-criticism and self-attacking are often other unintended consequences of our earlier attempts to manage our feelings of fear and helplessness. They are styles of communicating that we may learn and adopt from our early life. They are often used as a means of attempting to motivate ourselves towards incentive. People with high levels of shame and self-attacking can have difficulty being kind to themselves or feeling compassion for themselves. This means that they inadvertently fuelling their underlying sense of threat, feelings of helplessness, despair and ultimately, low self-esteem.
Compassionate Mind Training is a means of attempting to strike the balance by becoming more understanding and empathetic towards our self and having compassion for our personal struggles. We move away from being threat or incentive focused as a means of regulating how we feel to becoming more affiliative-focused. It aims to develop personal resilience through building compassionate attributes that are developed and worked on within group using compassionate imagery, compassionate attention, compassionate reasoning, compassionate behaviour and compassionate sensation.
Participants explore early life experience and their personal internal world as a means of connecting with underlying suffering and learning to tolerate their personal distress in a compassionate and understanding way. This means that they feel more self- supported while approaching personal change that may be helpful.
If you are interested in learning more about Compassion Focused Therapy or the work of Paul Gilbert, you may find the Compassionate Mind Website very helpful.