Compassion Focused Therapy for Shame-Based Trauma & PTSD - Three-Day Workshop
Facilitated by Dr Deborah Lee, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Honorary Senior Lecturer University College London
9, 10 and 11 Octobre 2017      Aim for the Workshop
The workshop aims to provide a clinical model to help those who have been hurt and harmed by others, develop the capacity to tolerate experiences that make them feel deeply shamed about who they are and what they have been through.    Abstract for workshop
Shame-based trauma memories are highly distressing and disturbing for most people. High levels of self-criticism appear to maintain the sense of current psychological threat. The personal meaning conveyed in the fragmented images and flashbacks is often painful, condemning and shaming. Those who have been repeatedly traumatised at the hands of others have many challenges to face as they discover a version of themselves that can live life without being defined by trauma - how to live in a mind that not just survive but thrive.
Part of this journey involves learning how to deal with predominant issues of self- blame, self- loathing, lack of trust, interpersonal difficulties and struggles to regulate threat-based emotions. So is there a role for Compassion focused therapy in effective treatments of traumatised minds? Compassion can help us discover what we don’t know, can help us develop a humanitarian and evolutionary perspective on our lives and help us feel what we might not have ever felt? Perhaps this could offer a vital precursor to change the emotional context of minds and allow clients to think differently about their traumatic experiences, in a way that allows them to hold themselves in mind with kindness, understanding, wisdom and live their lives with moral courage.
This 3day workshop will introduce the use of a compassion focused Therapy (Gilbert 2009) as a way, to work with shame in the context of trauma experiences.  It will explore the clinical development of compassionate resilience as a core experience in recovery from trauma and use theoretical and practical understanding of using compassionate images to work with these flashbacks in order, to enhance feelings of self- soothing, safeness in the memories and reduce self- critical maintenance cycles.