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

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, includingThe 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.

Foreword writer Paul Gilbert, PhD, is world-renowned for his work on depression, shame, and self-criticism. He is head of the mental health research unit at the University of Derby and author ofThe Compassionate Mind and Overcoming Depression.