S1E1: Working with a strong inner critic | with Dr Chris Irons

Just a quick one from me, can I introduce you to Supervisor Platform? If you're looking for a clinical supervisor thinking about changing or want a one-off consultation or group, have a little look. It is a free directory of qualified psychologists, counsellors and psychotherapists. You can browse by specialism or modality and you can message people directly and if you're a supervisor you can list your profile and try it for free. Visit SupervisorPlattform.com back to the episode. Welcome to the mastering therapy podcast with me, Dr Natalie Stopp, clinical psychologist. This is a show for psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors who are looking to build on their therapy skills, increase confidence in working with clients and be inspired by alternative models, tools and ways of working. Join my guests in me as we learn from one another and aim to take insights and put them into action. Welcome to episode one. I thought it started as we mean to go on and that is with a brilliant mind and a much respected guest. I had the privilege of speaking with Dr Chris Ions as we discuss the tricky topic of working with a strong inner critic. Working with high levels of self-criticism is so common in the work that we do and what better way of managing this than interviewing a very experienced clinician to walk us through it. We discuss compassionate mind training, how to work out the type of self-criticism and the function of it. I love that he goes through the actual questions he asks people and then the options of how you might follow that up. This is a packed episode with lots of resources mentioned and exercises that you can try. So it's going to be one for the show notes, get your note pad out because you're probably going to want to take notes. Enjoy. Chris thank you so much for joining me today. You are one of the directors of balanced minds and also you fairly recently co-created a compassionate. Do you want to just say a bit about who you are for this is that maybe you're not so familiar? Yeah sure thank you so much for having me on this episode. It's a great joy. I'm Chris I'm a clinical psychologist I guess a academic researcher and a trainer in the CFT and I've been doing this for quite some time. I first met Paul Gilbert who is the big brain behind CFT 1999 so it's been 25 years in my life basically working in this model I did at PhD. I did a PhD with Paul so I was looking into attachment theory and shame and self-criticism so helping to do some of the early studies, looking at some of the background processes that we want to discuss a lot in CFT and then when I did my clinical training I was lucky enough to have two years on placement with Paul and so I had him as clinician Paul Gilbert as my clinical supervisor and that was just amazing. I think there's mass recognition work and so I felt very lucky and blessed to have had these different versions of backgrounds in the CFT and then since then lots of years working using this approach in inpatient settings in MDT settings CMHTs, outpatient settings, every services but more laterally just trying to take this model and spread it as far and wide as possible. One of the things I think I've realised through my years of experience is that regardless of the presentation that somebody comes with and the difficulty that they're coming to therapy with, I think the majority of people would say that they find it hard to have that same compassion that they might have to other people to themselves and that can be a real block for many people and when they're feeling vulnerable how do they operate in a compassionate manner to themselves and so many clients it's one rule for everybody else and another rule for them and one of the things that I have seen lots of people ask about and I've definitely come up against in my own practices when somebody's internal voice is really really negative so when they have what we would call a strong inecritic when making any kind of progress in being able to like yourself be warm to yourself feels really impossible. I would be really keen to get your insight on when you have worked with people that are very strong in self-criticism when their inner critic shows up and doesn't budge and doesn't move out of the way. Where would you begin with somebody and would you name that with them and then where would you go from there? It's a great question I guess the first thing just to sort of validate your personal experience since that's you know the whole starting point in a way of CFT was with Paul Gilbert of recognising that some of his clients those are very high in shame and self-criticism were struggling to benefit from therapy in the way that other clients were able to benefit from therapy so the whole CFT model in a way started with shame and self-criticism and there was a recent matter analysis by Laro et al. I think it was published maybe two or three years ago we can send a link in the notes for the show and they found that across multiple studies and multiple therapies those clients starting therapy with higher levels of self-criticism did less well in therapy than those clients starting off with lower levels so this is backed up very clearly by research that there's something about self-criticism that blocks the ability of therapy to be a specter if it would be for people who don't struggle so much for self-criticism so I think your point isn't really important one of the years and a lot of work in CFT focusing on exactly this bit which is at first becoming aware of the potential power of self-criticism and how do we begin to raise that and help the people that we're working with and so I don't know it's helpful but maybe we could have a think about this in almost like stepping stones I don't mean that I would necessarily do it in a sort of linear based way in therapy but in my mind there are a variety of steps and the first one of course is identifying it you know if you don't know that this is happening as a clinician or as the person seeking therapy then of course it's very unlikely that you can do something about it so first is in identification that there is a self-critical process going on and so I guess for me it's always holding in mind that self-criticism is significantly higher in all the major mental health diagnoses than people who are currently given a diagnosis of mental problem so in a way I expect there at times to be self-criticism running under the hood one of the things I'm looking for is to check in with people you know if somebody's describing a difficulty they've had at work if somebody's describing a struggle they've had with their partner or with their child or whatever it might well be trying to look out for and asking explicitly when this thing happened whatever it was a how did you feel but how do you respond to yourself in these moments in that sense as you were saying watch yourself for the relationship and one of the pieces of work that Paul Gilbert and I did many years ago was to recognise that actually there can be different types of self-criticism so the first bit is kind of helping people to identify when they are being self-critical so we can help them to begin to notice the types of things they say to themselves and recognise that those can be quite different I had a client who once was sort of quite mild with themselves you know it's not you you silly idiots silly sausage it was critical but it was saying with a lightness and then of course of where you begin to hear the inner dialogue and it's you fucking piece of shit you stupid idiot so you beginning to try to pick up both the words the content but also the emphasis that that comes with and with that client did they realise that until they had begun the work with you did they realise that it was as aggressive as it was no I think for many of us and I also us here because traditions also still go very much with self-criticism too it's a little bit like we don't notice what it's like to be breathing we don't think about or or really consider speaking the language that we speak there's our mother tongue we just speak you know for many people self-criticism is so ingrained it is automatic and they just don't notice it in fact I've had many many people say to me I'm not self-critical and then when you throw the process down and you actually get people saying out loud what they're saying to themselves and you ask them what would you feel like if you said this to the person you love the most and they have that strong reaction or you know I'd never do that that's awful you know why not be so in a horrible way so critical and they kind of catch themselves that it is in that moment that I would not be saying these things to my child to my partner to my colleague that I care for but actually it's kind of running underneath the hotel without me even noticing so bring me awareness is a first step and then helping people to recognise that there are different types of we found that there can be a type of self-criticism which is more about inadequacies and failures and setbacks which was significantly associated with psychological distress so we didn't publish studies on this we'd better question that to measure exactly this again I can leave a link to it in the show notes but then there's also a type of self-criticism which comes with a real sense of hostility and hatred and as you can probably imagine highly associated with psychological distress really highly very very type of self-criticism okay so awareness as the first step to bringing that out into the open having that be something that you address if you're in an assessment with someone and they're bringing this problem at work and you ask the question how do you respond to yourself and then you ask the follow up question and how would you respond to someone else like that and they've got this light bulb moment of oh gosh yeah I'd never speak to somebody like that would at that point you be exploring okay which type of self-criticism criticism is this, would you go into that level of detail with the client or is that something that just in your formulation you're holding in mind? A person depends, it depends on the person, but potentially yes and potentially one other thing is that we might do is helping the person to begin to monitor this. So for example they could start to use a diary in which over the next week they start to track and become more familiar with the frequency, the presence and the content of their self-critics and that they're actually tuning into this now. After many years of being dissociated from it, beginning to recognise just how often it's turning up and what the consequence is on the room. So we could do it in a diary like way we could also get people to begin to get more familiar with the pattern of self-criticism because self-criticism isn't just the words you say to yourself so one with self-critical. So if I am self-critical of my body, it guides attention to my body. I'm not like focused on, I don't know, something completely irrelevant, I'm focused on my body, maybe the part of my body that's like dislike. Self-criticism of course will shape up the content of my thoughts so they will be negative and focused and you know, they believe or judging, I'm fat, I'm ugly, whatever it might be. Criticism is likely to shape behaviourally what I do or don't do. So for example if it's a summer holiday and I'm self-critical about my body, maybe I'm more likely to keep my t-shirt on and taking my t-shirt off when I'm on the beach. And of course self-criticism can also come with a type of an emotional tone and of course there's research going on about this for a very long time down by the screen burn and so on that self-criticism and just a cognitive process to also own emotional one which I'll come back to later because that's another stepping stone of what we would do but first but it's just getting people to recognise the pattern and then beginning to recognise that then we can explore with people one of two things. Sometimes it's useful for people to begin to explore where this came from to be able to work in time and to think about how old is this part? Where did this part learn to do this critical process? Was there someone or something that shaped the way that this part is operating so we can do a little bit of backwards tracking? But for sure one of the exercises that we get people to do is a type of functional analysis in which we ask people to bring their self-critic to mind maybe a time recently where they're being self-critical and then we ask them to imagine that magically somehow that in this session that somehow I could take away their self-critic so that they could never ever criticise themselves again and as they're imagining this I get them to try to imagine living their life without a self-critic to them and see if I can guide them what type of concerns or fears begins to emerge inside of you about living your life without self-critic and so what we find and again we've done research that is on this we've published a questionnaire that focuses on the functions of self-criticism is that people start to reveal some very common themes so people get under without the self-critic they'll make mistakes that they'll become lazy they run progress in life they'll become like Donald Trump this narcissistic eco-critical just be out there doing everything for themselves but they would hurt other people and so this types of fears they begin to emerge mentally and and underneath those it we hold the phrase follow the fear what is it about those things because I'm sure most of us know people who are quite narcissistic who seem absolutely fine with that I know bunch of people who seem relatively lazy in life and not cheating stuff that they seem fine with it so partly is thinking about what's underneath all of this and mostly what you get to of course is that the fear and depending these things are existential ones rejection loneliness that essentially I will be stuck in this kind of position disconnects and a failure and that's normally what you begin to get to so the I guess of doing this functional analysis is to help people to begin to recognise that is there something that their self-critic is trying to do for them almost in a protective way and of course what this exercise helps people to recognise that yeah maybe there is a functional reason there is something that this critical part is trying to prevent it's me from doing or experiencing and that of course can be quite a powerful revelation but also one which can begin to open up some empathy I guess for expected what the critic is doing I think that can also be really powerful for the clinician as well I'm just thinking about a client of mine who I don't think I've met someone with a stronger and a critic and we started on that path of really getting her to tune into you know what the inner critic was saying and when it showed up and then really trying to understand what the function of it was and we just were coming up against this block of lots of oh I don't know and we try drawing it out which I think sometimes helped to take it out of the the chat and get it on paper and I noticed and I think I did supervision almost feeling frustrated myself and probably it was feeling what she was feeling this frustration at the inner critic but it was when we realised wow this is a protector this voice is protecting you because you were so terrified to let me in so what I was seeing were all these walls and barriers and questioning her motivation is she wanting to do the work is this the right time but actually the inner critic which was frustrating for her for stating for me was just this protector part and so since we've labelled it as that my goodness the compassion that I have and so now when it shows up we just really gently acknowledge it that this protector part is looking after you here because that's what it's had to do you know your whole life it's just help language to something that before was happening unconsciously and between us it's really a helpful feature you have highlighted that and also when people are thinking oh which route do I go down do we go down where has this voice come from or do we start with what are the functions of it and I think that will be dependent on the kind of service you're in if you're in the NHS and you've got six sessions with somebody you're probably not realistically going to have the time to go right back to where has this come from where did you learn this way of relating to yourself so maybe starting with the functions is going to be more helpful for them in the shorter term and maybe you would acknowledge that look if we had longer this is the kind of work that I do with you but for now this is going to be most useful exactly and everything you're saying really resonates with me so it's finding a way basically to help people and like with many aspects of our threat systems which serve some sort of protective function if you get people to imagine or you get them to imagine that being taken away from them it's like you're looking underneath the hood of the threat system you're able to get into the fears and the point there is you can say they pick up all the people how would you feel if this therapy them was about me trying to reduce or get rid of your self-critic and of course most of those shape I had to know because we just have this relationship if it there it is that without it I'm going to feel lazy I'll make more mistakes I'll hurt people I'll be not so cystic all these tough things so one of the things you say in CMT is that if you want to keep hold of your self-critic to the time being keep hold of it because me going up against the self-critic somebody else is self-critic which is rooted and powerful and strong a bit around for decades and there's me that gets 50 minute sessions once a week for how many weeks who's going to win well it ain't going to be so the bit that we're saying first of all is we validate and reassure people as long as you need to keep hold of this this is fine now in my mind what I'm thinking is of course hold this as long as you want to until there can be another part of self that can begin to take over some of this in a way which isn't going to be harmful for you because it's really important from the CFT model that while self-criticism does often have a function it's trying to protect us from something the way it goes about doing it is very very very painful and causes me to put it in the correlation between self-criticism depending on the type and psychological distress is at 0.4 0.5 0.6 sometimes 0.7 I mean this is a major predictive psychological distress so we also then need to flip the side of the coin to say whilst on one hand this part is trying to protect you from another concern the way that it does it often causes huge distress and to help people to do that we then have an exercise in which we ask people to to put an image to their self-critic so that if they could imagine that they can see their self-critic in front of them what would this look like now we specify here for it's not to be real person so we have to be able to create something new the reason for that is partly the work that we come on too later on but often of course what will happen is that people will start putting an image like my mum or my dad or my other problem there is how much of this is a self-critic versus an internalized other like a real abusive person and so we want to be able to identify and separate out and see if you basically internalized your abuser it's a real person who said these real things to you and now that's living in your head in a way masquerading as a self-critic but actually it is an external critical harmful other what we're trying to do is create space for people to be able to create something which can be a little bit separate from this and so what you'll find is that people can create all sorts of types of images some of them will be archetypal which is snakes goblins but it can be also sorts of things. We ask for people to imagine whether the image is static or moving, whether it's making any gestures, if it has a face, what's its facial expression like, if it has a voice, what's its voice like, and then crucially as people are developing this image, we also then ask them to imagine that the image is direct to criticism at them, what sort of words it's saying to you, so to get people to say that out loud through the imagery exercise. But then crucially to ask them, what emotion or emotions is this image of your critic directing towards you? And the important thing there is is that you'll get a wide mixture. So sometimes it'll be anger, rage, anxiety, disgust, contempt, disappointment, shame, anxiety, and the interesting thing is they're massively different emotions. They are not the same emotions. So knowing that as a clinician becomes crucial because when we work with the self-critic, we need to know in a way what sort of what's it punching with, what's its weapons, what type of emotion because of critic this directing, let's say, contempt at you is quite different from a critic that's directing disappointment or anxiety to you. So this is a really crucial bit for us to know and to help our clients to know, and then our follow up question is, so in the face of this criticism from the image of yourself critic, how does that leave you feeling receiving that? And again, the interesting thing here is that the emotions and feelings can be very different. So again, some people might start with fearful, anxious, panicky, sad, distressed, disappointed, ashamed, but sometimes what you'll also hear, are things like angry or rageful. And so my response, the part of me that's receiving the self-criticism can have very different emotional responses to this. And again, we're going to need to know this because we would deal with those responses in very different ways, just like in the therapy room, if a client turned up a net full of anger and rage, the way that you might work with that face-to-face with that person is quite different than if they turned up with a self-critical example. We don't just respond to all emotions in the same way, and that's going to be the case that when we bring compassion to these two separate parts, the critical part of self and the criticised part of self, we're going to want to know what's held inside of this. And when you're doing an excise like that, I mean, we're really talking about when I guess you've got that therapeutic relationship with somebody and you've got that trust. Exactly. This depth of work can activate someone. So when they're thinking about the inner critic and they're in it, in some ways they are almost reliving it in the moment. And I wonder have you ever had an experience of when someone's become really distressed in that kind of an exercise and you've had to do a grounding exercise or pull them out of that? How would you manage that if someone was really struggling because they were getting upset? I have had that a few times. I mean, you're correct that I would not do this session one. I wouldn't do this session three. This was one of the line where I already know the person. They've also got to know me as well. Because we're doing exercise, I'm tracking them and I'm asking them how they're getting on as they're doing it. So I wouldn't just leave somebody open just the whole of it. I'm checking in. How is this okay? Now, of course, it might be that we need to support people with some grounding stuff that goes back a little bit to some of the compassionate mind training that we would have already been doing with people like the capacity to regulate the rest system. But I think one of the crucial things that emerges from this, even if people get upset, is quite a powerful thing because this lives inside our heads. We don't realise the deleterious effect we're having on us. We put it on the outside and we start experiencing what it's like as an external other directiveness to us and people bolt away with just how hostile, just how panicious, just how potent and powerful this criticism and how awful we feel in the face of this. So even if people do get distressed, often it's actually a therapeutic gain. If that makes sense because it is in this bit, I've had clients say, "I never realised how awful this was. It was only ended this exercise." And one of the bits that we try to round that exercise off with is we ask a couple of questions, "Do this image of yourself critic want to see you do love at life?" And then the second question, "Does this image of yourself critic take joy from your happiness?" The interesting thing is with the first question, now and again, you'll get people say, "Yeah, I can get those wanting to see me do one in life." But most people shake their head. When you start asking about, "Does it take joy in your happiness?" 99.9% of people I've ever done this with have shaken their head because joy is not an emotion with self-critic, the self-critic belongs, threat system, the threat system has emotions like anger, discuss things like tea shame and so on. It does not have access to pleasurable emotions of things like joy and it's not bothered about happiness, it's bothered about you not effing up, it's bothered not making mistakes, it's bothered about you not being rejected. So it's not really so bothered about you flourishing and you're well-being and so in that moment you can begin to help people to see that whilst with the functional analysis exercise we saw that on one level this part is trying to protect you. On this other hand, in this exercise we've suddenly uncovered that the way it does it, the emotional tone of it and the way it leaves you feeling is horrendous, it's awful, off the back of that sometimes where we can go to is a very short backwards and forwards exercise, IZOPEN, which is about best teacher. So we try to then say to people, "Look, if your child, for example, was struggling with mass at school, they're having a really hard time, they were falling behind, they really hated mass. Do you want the image of your self-critic to be the teacher of your child? Immediately people shake their head because I would not want this type of thing on the outside speaking to somebody who I love and care for and who's struggling and then of course to follow up a bit is, well, how come it's okay that it resides unimpeached inside of here and of course quite challenging for people and then we can follow that up with what sort of teacher would you like for your child who's struggling with mass and we can be a little bit playful with it and say, you know, would you want a teacher that says, "Oh, mass is boring, they don't need it, you've got smartphones, alcohol, so let's go play football." And of course people shake their head because they know that it's important for kids who are struggling with mass to be able to learn. So they'll say, "I need a teacher to be persistent, I need them to be supportive, I need them to be kind, I need them to be understanding." And of course, what do those qualities sound like, what they sound like, what we describe as compassion. And so what we're leading people onto here is a recognition that actually when it comes to compassion and self-compassion, this isn't about ignoring problems, it's not about a lot of mistakes. You know all those fears that we had about letting go of self-criticism. A compassionate teacher is also bothered about those things in the kid. A compassionate heart towards you is also bothered about you making mistakes becoming narcissistic about being rejected. It cares about those things just as the self-critic does, it's just the way it's going to go about dealing with those is vastly different. And so it gives a little bit of a segway then that's a then move on to think about how we can specifically bring compassion to the self-critic and then to aspects of self-former-struggling. That's a really lovely exercise that's an alternative to the, what would you say to a friend, which is I think one we're all familiar with. But often I've had the response, oh well I'd tell them, oh don't be silly, oh we've got a bantering relationship and so people will often say that they would say the same thing. But you wouldn't get that response when you get them to think about a child or their child. Yeah exactly, I mean it's not that there's anything wrong with that questioning, it's just that actually sometimes what we recognise is that people have to learn how to cultivate a compassionate part. CFT, when we think about developing compassion, whether it's for others or receiving it from others or crucially self-compassion, for us it's like a muscle, we have to build the skills, we have to build the capacity of the strength of this. We can't just assume that it's there because for many people they don't have this, they might have it a bit others, but even then you can't guarantee that it's got all the components that we might want it to be and certainly to self. But it's like saying to somebody who's never heard Japanese before, well you know just to speak Japanese, I don't know this thing, this is literally like a foreign language to me, I don't even know where to start it, we have to build capacity first and then we can start putting it to work in a variety of different ways. And this is where the compassionate mind training becomes crucial, that we would suggest that you build just as you go down to the gym and there's multiple machines that help build your biceps, your thighs, your stomach muscles, whatever it might well be, the point here is that it rebuilds the compassionate part of you, we can focus on the physiology of this, we're just grounding and helps to regulate threat, we can build the psychology of this and the components that become crucial because the bit that we're going to need are strength intolerance, so we're going to engage our self-critic, we're going to need to be able to be in the presence of it without getting washed away, we're going to need to have wisdom and understanding about why it's doing what it's doing, we need to be able to see behind it and see the fears that it's tried to cover for, and then thirdly we need to have a caring commitment to it, but also to why it's doing its role, why it's been picking up and trying to cover for some of these other fears, and by using that and building up that part, what's uncomfortable that I've got that part running and working, then I've got some choices for doing some more work with directly engaging with and addressing the self-critic, which of course could be in a could write a compassionate letter, so the self-critic, and I could write a compassionate letter to the criticized part of self, the part that receives all of this. I could do some chair work in the way that would typically be dumb, I guess, in having the chair for the critical part of self, and then the criticized part of self, and we could have some dialogue going back and forth. But in a C-A-T way, the tweak that we would make to that is that we would then have a third chair, and what we get people to do is document on third chair as their compassionate self. So we have got them already practicing accessing this part of self, that is why strong and caring, and we would, they'd be very brief warming up exercise so that people can feel into this, and then we get them directing compassion either to the critical part of self, and having a dialogue there, or of course the criticized part, and doing some dialogue in there. But another way that we do it in the C-A-T is using imagery. And so this time around, we will get people again, to generate an image of their self-critic, put it on the outside. But this time around, close to all what they've done, is to imagine themselves stepping into their compassion itself, to occupying the part of self, which they practice, which is strong grounded, which is wise and understanding. It has some understanding about the self-critic why it's there, what its function is, but also has it caring, committed motivation. And so taking that part into the imagery, we then ask people to see the image of the self-critic in front of them, to focus first of all, on just being able to be in it to present, and tolerating it. So a bit like a tree with deep roots, the remains standing through a storm, this idea that your compassion itself can tolerate, the hostility, the emotions, the awful words, the self-critic is checking towards you. And then once we can stabilize that, bit people feel okay, we might then go to wisdom. So looking out from your compassion itself, from this image of your self-critic, what do you understand about why it's there, what it's trying to do? Almost if you could look behind the self-critic, what is it trying to protect you from? And of course that goes back to the function. I know I said this one, which is all about fears of making mistakes, rejection, and so on. So there's a wisdom here, a little bit like, we use the analogy of the wisdom of Oz, that when the carrot's first meet, there was this big, booming, scary voice. But if you remember from the film, when the curtain gets pulled back, it's this little, oh, scared man. And the point is, is that once you get behind the big, booming voice, the scary voice, often there is nothing far more vulnerable, far more scared, far more concerned behind it. So there's a wisdom to see that. And then the final point is that you direct a caring commitment to your compassion. So if you begin to verbalize or direct your compassion at the thing that sits behind the self-critic, at its vulnerability, at your fears of rejection, at your fears of failure. And what we find is that once you start directing compassion at that thing, the critic starts to lose its power and often what people strive is literally the image of the critic or reducing size, in power, in its hostility, or actually, it'll transform into the vulnerability. So I had a client recently who said, "That's big, almost like devil-like self-critic." As an image, as we started to direct compassion behind the self-critic to this vulnerability that she had experienced for many years, the image of the critic morphed into a five-year-old version of her and it was, of course, the five-year-old version of experiencing the abuse and experiencing the awfulness of life. And so there was this real momentum which, because in a way for us, the compassionate self-represent the secure attachment figure, it's say, "Hey, even in secure-based functions, it can allow the threat system just to settle down and once it starts to settle down, then, of course, we're more likely to be able to reveal some of those more vulnerable, fearful memories or parts of self." And, of course, that's ultimately where we want to be able to do the work. So the self-critic is important, but really it's often these other parts underneath all the hinders that we really want to get to. For many people listening or watching, they may be familiar-ish with CFT, but maybe haven't done the compassionate mind training or be familiar with some of the things that you're talking about. So for people in that camp, doing these imagery, exercise, and things, do you think there's anything that you would be saying to people where they might need to do some work prior to that? Like, is this something that any kind of good counsellor therapist could do? Or do you feel it really does need that grounding in talking someone through the motion regulation systems initially, having some of that compassionate mind training? Or is it that people can just use as a tool? What would you say to that? I mean, it's interesting. I could take somebody, as long as they're maybe lower in psychological distress. I could take somebody through some of these exercises, and they probably would find the very powerful and quite helpful. But my sense would be the further you get up, by dimension of psychological distress, the more is it therapist when I'm doing this work, that you're going to need to know some of the bigger parts of the CFT model, because I had lots of experiences where somebody's gone on CFT training. They've heard about an exercise like meeting yourself, critique with your compassionate self, and then they go and try it with their clients without first having done those different steps with understanding the self-critic, without crucially having done compassionate mind training and building the part of self to be able to engage in it. And then of course, what happens? Their clients hate it because basically they get overwhelmed, and they get knocked out to the compassionate orientation into a critical one. And there are some approaches in which you're told that you can shout at your critic, and you can get angry at a critic, you can even attack it. Whereas for us, the problem with that is that the critic's already in the threat system, and if you start attacking it, that's threat system. So it's threat systems, threat systems, it's a mid-dela to a mid-dela, it's like fighting fire with mole fire. And if you understand physiology, you understand the evolution of mammals in which you regulate the stress through the attachment system, what we first need to do is cultivate that aspect, that part of our clients, that is then a to do the work. And so we're really keen on helping people to understand that process, and then using some of the exercises, rather than just using an exercise out of context, which of course can be very tricky. In terms of where people can get more information on CFT if they're not familiar, or to really understand key components of how an exercise like a frontier in a critic would go, is balance minds the best place? Where would you say is a good place for them to start? Yeah, so on our website, we've got a host of resources, linked to compassionate mind training, but also dines to some of these steps that I've just outlined, running people through, sort of handouts, in which they can begin to do this. So I think the balance minds website, there's all three people can access to them, and one of the things I guess I've been doing, apart from balance minds, which we've set up basically, to try to bring compassion-focused interventions out there into the world outside of the NHS, to as many people as possible. I've also just been trying to find ways of bringing the model in a sort of self-help-y kind of way, whether it's writing blocks, doing the app, just a whole bunch of different things that are trying to spread the words as much as possible. Thinking about the resources that people can use outside of sessions, do you want to just say something about the aim of the app? We have so little time in the therapy room with people, and what they do outside really does count. I think the app is an amazing way of someone having something in their pocket that they can access at any time. What's the vision behind that? And what have the results been? Well, one of the aspects of compassion-focused therapy, a significant part of it, it's called compassionate mind training. So compassionate mind training of the body and mind trainings that anybody can do, which has been shown to stimulate aspects of your physiology, like a vagus nerve, attention training, various types of mind-phemous work, body posture work, body movement work, breathing within work, using memories, imagery, acting techniques, there's a whole bunch of things that we will use under the banner of compassionate mind training. But I guess the intriguing thing about compassionate mind training is that it can also be done separately to therapy, so they could use the app. And basically, we're taking them through key bits of the CRT model, now it's not therapy, because I'm not there with them. I'm not providing a therapeutic relationship that they get to learn some psychoeducation and wisdom about the nature of how hard it is to be human. The three-system model, how we've evolved this amazing, but tricky brain, so we give them some insights about themselves. They can begin to learn about themselves and hopefully are deshaming. And then a whole host and different types of practices that I've just outlined there to you, that people can practice and start to use. And then compassionate mind training can also include ways in which we can begin to apply this to ourselves and to the difficulties, whether that's to our self-critic, whether it's to different parts of self, angry part to our sad part or anxious part, and also, of course, in a variety of other different techniques in a way to cultivate compassion. So coming back around to your question, that our, and some of the resources that we have on the Bad Arts Mines website are so basically to give people aspects of what they could do in therapy, but outside of therapy. We've got lots of studies now showing that when people do relatively short periods of practice of compassionate mind training, that this brings around significant reductions in shame, self-criticism, and emotion regulation difficulties. Actually, we had a study that was published a couple of years ago, four week, compassionate mind training study that shows significant reductions in anxious attachments and also avoiding attachment. So really interesting that we could hit the attachment system through relatively small amounts of compassion-based training. And these practices have also been shown in these studies to lead to reductions in things like depression symptoms. anxious symptoms and increases in well-being. Now of course they're not panaceas. There are no panaceas but the fascinating bit is that these can be used by anybody and it seems to show that it can lead on the whole to significant benefits or as a clinician, I might ask my clients to download a copy of the self-compassion app and maybe use that alongside therapy then in which we have to say let's say something to do with self-criticism and here's one of the sessions which is specifically focused on self-criticism which will also help to guide and practice so I guess it can be used as alongside therapy tool or potentially a backside therapy tool just to help people to alleviate some of their distress. Yeah yeah it's so great I've used it with a few clients and I think people really like having something that they can follow and that can lead them through because there's perhaps collecticises on there but there's also the education side so if people are not familiar with it I would highly recommend I think it's a great resource and I think that's much needed. In most of the CFT books, the self-help books, there'll be specific chapters on working with shame and self-criticism and so there is often give a very detailed guide and a sort of step-by-step kind of ways and then if not they can always email me as well and I can guide them so other things that might be used. Well Chris thank you so much there's loads there I'm thinking about clients even in this conversation and it's just inspiring to hear of some of your success stories as well of when people have made significant progress with this because I think as a clinician in a critic work sometimes can feel a bit like a mountain it's not just a succession piece of work and maybe it's also important to know that in terms of our own expectations but when you are afforded the ability to be able to do the work it is life-changing for people. Thank you so much for coming on for sharing that I definitely feel inspired. Thank you so much for that. 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