What can compassion-focused therapy offer shamanic work?

What is compassion-focused therapy? #

A psychotherapy first developed for people whose shame and self-criticism run deep. Paul Gilbert, emeritus professor of clinical psychology at the University of Derby, noticed that many such people could learn to argue with their negative thoughts and still feel no better. In his words, they would say, “I understand the logic of my alternative thinking but it doesn’t really help me feel much better.”¹ What was missing was not a better argument but the felt experience of warmth, from other people and from themselves. CFT sets out to build that.

Gilbert defines compassion as “sensitivity to suffering in self and others with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it”. He stresses the second half, because becoming more sensitive to suffering can on its own leave people more distressed; what matters is what we then do with it.² CFT draws on evolutionary psychology, attachment research and Buddhist practice, and trains compassion through attention, imagery, breathing, posture, tone of voice and behaviour.

What are the three emotional systems? #

Gilbert describes three: “threat and protection systems; drive, resource-seeking and excitement systems; and contentment, soothing and safeness systems.”³ The threat system keeps us alert to danger, the drive system sends us out after food, success and reward, and the soothing system lets us rest, settle and feel connected. In people with high shame, he found, the threat system dominates and the soothing system is hard to reach. He also separates safety, the absence of threat, from safeness, the positive feeling of being cared for and welcome. A person can be perfectly safe and still not feel soothed at all.⁴

The three systems sit easily with Therapeutic Shamanism’s account of modern life. Being busy all the time is, in this view, part of our domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. In CFT’s terms, the drive system rarely gets switched off.⁵ And the missing safeness Gilbert describes is close to what Therapeutic Shamanism calls the Mother wound, the widespread modern sense of being cut off, of not really fitting in or being welcome in the world. A Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer always welcomes us back, however long we have drifted away, and so helps that wound begin to heal.⁶ See What did the Fall do to us? and How does Power Animal heal and support us?

Is compassion the same as kindness? #

Not in CFT. Kindness, Gilbert points out, does not need courage, and kind acts are usually enjoyable, whereas compassion often means bearing some suffering or unpleasant feeling in order to engage with it. Its opposite is not cruelty but callousness, an indifference to suffering.⁷

Therapeutic Shamanism draws the same line. Compassion is at the heart of the practice, and it is not about keeping things nice. True shamanism means seeing things as they are and feeling them as they are, which rules out spiritual bypassing and emotional numbing.⁸ See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?

How does compassion-focused therapy work with the inner critic? #

Without fighting it. Hostile self-criticism is, for Gilbert, a central target of the therapy. In one practice the person imagines their compassionate self walking round behind the critic to see what it is watching for, which is usually some fear or shame. As he puts it, “Compassion is for the (fear) drivers of the critic, not the aggression of the critic itself.”⁹

Therapeutic Shamanism sees the inner critic in much the same way. It is one of the fort-holderFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer parts, the parts of us that stayed and coped when life was hard, alongside the perfectionist, the pusher and the pleaser. These parts are loyal and often exhausted, still trying to look after us in the only way they know, and meeting them with kindness, listening to them and thanking them goes a long way towards healing them. Self-gratitude is one practical way in. Being grateful for our own qualities and for things we have done helps build self-compassion and rein in an out-of-control inner critic.¹⁰ See What is the Inner Critic and what other inner roles do we develop?

Why can compassion feel frightening at first? #

Because warmth can wake old pain. Gilbert found that the first experience of warmth and kindness in therapy can bring up considerable sadness and grief, as the part of a person that longed for care realises that care might now be there. Some people find compassion-focused imagery stressful in their bodies. Others fear that giving up self-criticism will make them lazy or unlovable, or that they will pay for it later.¹¹ CFT works openly with these fears, blocks and resistances instead of pushing through them. Its research also suggests that fears of receiving compassion, from others or from ourselves, are more closely linked with mental health difficulties than fears of giving it.¹²

This matches the care over pace in Therapeutic Shamanism. No deep or lasting change happens without the fort-holder’s consent, and people need to face particular issues at their own pace and in their own time.¹³ See What are child, Orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?

Does compassion have to begin with ourselves? #

Here the two approaches order things differently. Gilbert describes three flows of compassion: to others, from others and to ourselves. He challenges the popular saying that we cannot be compassionate to others until we are compassionate to ourselves, saying there is no evidence for it, that self-compassion and compassion for others are only weakly linked, and that the saying hurts the many self-critical people who care deeply for others.¹⁴

In Therapeutic Shamanism, mettaMetta. Loving-kindness, practised self-first and extended outward to others, difficult people and all beings; worked shamanically with the Power Animal and Guides. More about this, the practice of loving-kindness, begins with the self. Loving-kindness is shown to ourselves first, and only once that is established does it move on to people we like, then people we find difficult, and then all people and all things.¹⁵ The Power Animal plays a part here too, showing us more love, acceptance and compassion than we usually show ourselves, and so helping to heal the self-criticism most people carry.¹⁶ See What is metta (loving kindness), and how is it a shamanic practice?

Is there evidence that compassion-focused therapy works? #

The evidence is growing, and still early. A 2023 review of fifteen controlled and pilot studies found that CFT improved self-compassion, self-reassurance and clinical symptoms, and called the results promising. The same review rated many of the studies as of unclear quality, noted that most participants were women, and called for research on long-term effects.¹⁷ Gilbert himself points out that compassion research has mostly been carried out with Western, educated, industrialised populations.¹⁸ He and his co-editor explain that they chose to study the processes CFT targets, such as shame and self-criticism, before rushing into outcome trials, and that if those processes turn out not to be as they believe, the therapy must change.¹⁹

Where does compassion-focused therapy fit in the bigger picture? #

Therapeutic Shamanism sees the growth of compassion-based meditation practices and psychotherapies as one of the hopeful signs of our recovery from the Fall, a rediscovery of the empathy that the Fall suppressed. Shamanism has its own contribution to make to that recovery, because deep empathy is at the heart of shamanic experience. Shape-shifting into another being is a deeply empathic act, and it leaves a lasting sense of compassion and kinship.²⁰

CFT also offers a message that takes blame out of suffering. Much of what goes on in us was shaped by evolution and early life, and was never chosen. In the words CFT uses with clients, it is “not their fault”, though it is their responsibility.²¹ Shamanic practitioners can borrow its plain language for that, and its careful, practical ways of training warmth. What shamanism offers CFT in return is the subject of What can shamanism offer compassion-focused therapy?