Compassion as an Integrative and Integrating Therapeutic Process

Abstract

Abstract For thousands of years humans have sought to find ways to help other humans with difficult and distressing mental states. With the advent of modern psychotherapy there has been a proliferation of approaches to helping people with various mental states. Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) seeks to be an evolution-informed, biopsychosocial approach that pulls from all the relevant sciences. CFT proposes that the evolution of caring and prosocial motives and behaviors came with a range of physiological systems that help us regulate threat emotion. These same systems serve as sources of meaning and positive affect (e.g., affection, social joy). CFT utilizes evidence-based interventions from a range of therapies but contextualizes them within compassion motivational systems thereby integrating the physiological mechanisms for threat regulation and positive affect generation into psychotherapy. Since compassion is specifically focused on the identification, alleviation, and prevention of suffering, this chapter argues it needs to be a central focus within psychotherapy.