Compassion Focused Therapy PG Cert

The course is designed to facilitate your learning and experience, by creating a balance of theory and practice elements. Assessments also reflect this balance, to ensure your learning is meaningful to your everyday practice. The course also places great emphasis on your own personal practice of using CFT.

You’ll study modules such as:

Compassion Focused Therapy 1

Compassion focused therapy is a new way of working therapeutically that draws together behavioural, cognitive and affect, into a new way of conceptualising client difficulties. High shame and self-criticism are associated with a range of psychological difficulties and recognised to be difficult to help, with traditional therapies. CFT was developed to target shame and self-criticism problems. These individuals often come from harsh backgrounds and find it difficult to feel reassured or safe. CFT focuses on developing people’s abilities to feel inner safeness and self-reassurance as an antidote to self-criticism.

This requires working with specific affect regulation systems. Over the years, various therapies have developed interventions (such as exposure and other techniques involving meta-cognitive processes), aimed at toning down negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, fear and sadness. Recent developments in therapeutic practice suggest that we also need to consider how to tone up and foster certain types of positive emotions.

However, therapists have come to realise that it can’t be assumed that by reducing negative emotions, the positive ones will come on line. Developing the capacities for positive affect, linked to well-being, requires consideration of the type of positive affect that will be the focus of development. Both the theory and practice of compassion focused therapy will be covered in this module. This module is a requirement for students on the compassion focused therapy course.

The module includes the following themes:

• Theories of Compassion including Drive, Safeness and Threat
• Distinguishing External and Internal Threats
• Exploring different types of shame and how shame is linked to self-criticism, threat and safety behaviours
• Therapeutic Relationship
• Functional Assessment and Analysis
• Formulating problems in terms of threat and safety strategies
• Key Therapy skills such as guided discovery, meditation and imagery
• Introduction to the basic model: the nature of compassion as an antidote to shame and self-attacking
• Key tasks of compassion-focus therapy.

The module is assessed by a 4,000 word case study, which is submitted in January.

Compassion Focused Therapy 2

This module runs in the spring semester and builds on the work in Compassion Focused Therapy 1.

The module includes the following themes:

• Theories of compassion and shame and psycho physiology
• Advanced therapeutic relationship and micro skills
• Formulating problems in terms of threat and safety strategies with complex clients
• Key tasks of compassion-focused therapy with complex clients in practice
• Training for self-compassion with compassionate attention, thinking, behaviour and feeling
• Using imagery
• Compassionate reframing
• Compassionate letter writing

This module is assessed using a portfolio which draws together several elements that you will have been working on throughout the year, and includes a video analysis of a roleplay.