CFT Made Simple: A Clinician's Guide to Practicing Compassion-Focused Therapy

Description

For the first time ever, CFT Made Simple offers easy-to-apply tools to help clients develop self-compassion, learn mindfulness skills, and balance difficult emotions for greater treatment outcomes.Created by world-renowned psychologist Paul Gilbert, compassion-focused therapy (CFT) is extremely effective in helping clients work through painful feelings of shame and self-criticism. However, the theoretical aspects of this therapy such as evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, and affective neuroscience can make CFT difficult to grasp. This book provides everything you need to start implementing CFT in practice, either as a primary therapy modality or as an adjunctive approach to other therapies, such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and more.CFT has unique strengths, and is especially effective in helping clients work through troubling thoughts and behaviors, approach themselves and others with greater compassion and kindness, and feel safer and more confident in their ability to handle life s challenges and difficulties. This book articulates the theoretical basis of the therapy in simple, easy-to-follow language, and offers practical guidance and strategies on how to tailor your CFT approach to specific client populations.As a clinician interested in the benefits of CFT but wary of the dense theoretical principles that lay behind it, you need a user-friendly guide that will let you hit the ground running. CFT Made Simple is that guide.

Russell Kolts, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University, where he has taught for the past sixteen years. Kolts has authored or coauthored numerous books and scholarly articles, including The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Managing Your Anger, and has pioneered the application of compassion-focused therapy (CFT) to the treatment of problematic anger. He regularly conducts trainings and workshops on CFT and is scheduled to appear in his own TED Talk.

"A clinician's ability to be compassionate, to help clients face their pain with kindness and courage, is at the core of all effective therapies. Bringing together evolutionary psychology, affective neuroscience, attachment theory, behaviorism, and mindfulness approaches, Russell Kolts provides a compendium filled with heartfelt wisdom, step-by-step guidelines, and exercises that therapists of any orientation can use immediately to help their clients reclaim warmth, affiliation, safeness, and hope in their lives. This indispensable volume is a must-have in any clinician's library." --Robert Kohlenberg, PhD, ABPP, and Mavis Tsai, PhD, codevelopers of functional analytic psychotherapy (FAP) "An excellent book. Well written, easy to read, insightful, and inspiring. And bursting with practical ideas that will be useful for any health professional with an interest in compassion and mindfulness. A valuable contribution to the field of health and well-being." --Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap and ACT Made Simple "CFT is a revolutionary new approach to therapy firmly rooted in ancient wisdom and modern science. The author has an uncanny ability to present this multidimensional model in a practical, straightforward manner without losing any of its subtlety. This book is a wonderful resource for clinicians who wish to dive deeply into CFT, or who simply want to integrate key aspects of the approach into their existing practices. Drawing directly on our innate capacity for compassion, CFT offers compelling insights for therapy and how we may live our daily lives more fully. Highly recommended!" --Christopher Germer, PhD, author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, and coeditor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy "This book is not just simple. It is elegant and powerful. Through engaging didactics and detailed clinical examples, Russell Kolts demonstrates how we can bring compassion to clients' lives by applying innovative and precise techniques of compassion-focused therapy (CFT). You will learn to use perspective-taking shifts and imagery techniques formally and through natural conversations. You will learn to help clients understand and overcome their struggles using evolution and contextual sciences. Be kind to yourself and to your clients: read CFT Made Simple." --Matthieu Villatte, PhD, coauthor of Mastering the Clinical Conversation "This is a phenomenal book that manages to convey the complex theory underlying CFT into extremely simple ideas and practices that translate directly into clinical practice. This book will be an essential tool for any therapist wanting to effectively incorporate compassion into their work with clients." --Kristin Neff, PhD, associate professor in the department of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Self-Compassion