Coaching practices for Compassion Focused Therapy Imagery

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Compassion Focused Therapy Imagery, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • When everything’s falling apart I have nobody in my head to turn to
  • Every time I try to be gentle with myself my body’s still wound tight and braced, and the calming part just won’t take
  • When someone’s steamrolling me or my inner critic is screaming, I freeze and fold because it feels like I’m facing it completely alone
  • Whatever I’m feeling, I pile on top of it
  • This isn’t something I can fix

Practices that may help

  1. Compassionate Imagery: The Compassionate Image and Safe Place
    Develop a vivid compassionate figure in imagination whose care you can access during distress.
    Compassion-Focused Therapy: Calming the Inner Critic
  2. Compassion-Focused Therapy: Calming the Inner Critic
    Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT), developed by Paul Gilbert, targets shame and self-criticism by training a compassionate inner voice to replace the punitive self-critic. It draws on evolutionary psychology and affective neuroscience — specifically, the finding that different emotional systems (threat, drive, soothing) have distinct neurobiological profiles. A growing body of RCT evidence supports CFT for shame-based difficulties, self-criticism, and depression, though the evidence base is smaller than for CBT.
  3. Soothing Rhythm Breathing
    Use slow, rhythmic breathing to deliberately activate the physiological soothing system before other compassion practices.
    Compassion-Focused Therapy: Calming the Inner Critic
  4. Call on your inner fierce ally
    Develop an internalized image of a powerful, compassionate protector you can invoke in moments of threat.
    Fierce Self-Compassion, Made Practical
  5. N — Nurture with self-compassion
    Offer the part that is suffering what it most needs — care, acknowledgment, reassurance — as you would a dear friend.
    RAIN Meditation: Tara Brach’s Four-Step Practice
  6. IMPROVE the moment
    Use Imagery, Meaning, Prayer, Relaxation, One thing, Vacation, and Encouragement to get through right now.
    Distress Tolerance Skills, Made Practical
  7. Direct tonglen toward a specific suffering person
    Bring a person who is suffering to mind and breathe in their pain; breathe out whatever would give them relief.
    Tonglen: The Tibetan Practice of Taking and Sending
  8. Cultivate Self through directed inner compassion
    Practice sending compassion inward — toward the parts that are suffering — to build the Self-energy those parts need.
    IFS Self Energy, Made Practical
  9. Shared condition meditation
    Sit briefly with the awareness that right now, thousands of people are feeling exactly what you feel.
    Common Humanity, Made Practical
  10. The self-compassion break
    A three-step phrase you say in a hard moment: this is suffering, suffering is human, may I be kind to myself.
    Self-Compassion, Made Practical

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