Tim Desmond - Self-Compassion in Psychotherapy: Mindfulness-Based Practices for Healing and Transformation

SELF-COMPASSION IN
PSYCHOTHERAPY

Mindfulness-Based Practices for
Healing and Transformation

TIM DESMOND

Foreword by Richard J. Davidson

W.W. Norton & Company

New York London

A NORTON PROFESSIONAL BOOK

SELF-COMPASSION IN
PSYCHOTHERAPY

Copyright 2016 by Tim Desmond

All rights reserved
First Edition

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Desmond, Tim, author.
Self-compassion in psychotherapy : mindfulness-based practices for
healing and transformation / Tim Desmond ; foreword by
Richard J. Davidson. First edition.

p. ; cm.

A Norton professional book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-71100-4 (hardcover)

I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. Mindfulnessmethods. 2. Empathy. WM 425.5.C6]

RC480.5

616.89'14dc23

2015024260

ISBN 978-0-393-71101-1 (e-book)

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This book is dedicated to
Thich Nhat Hanh, Marshall Rosenberg, and Joanne Friday.

Anything that I understand about compassion, I owe to Thich Nhat Hanh, the monks and nuns of Plum Village, and the other spiritual teachers I have been fortunate enough to meet in my life. I cant express the depth of my gratitude to them.

Joanne Friday, my first meditation teacher, taught me that compassion is the essence of mindfulness and the foundation of fearlessness. The beautiful monks and nuns of Plum Village, especially Brothers Phap Luu, Phap Dung, Phap Tri, Phap Ho, Phap Lai and Sisters Jina, Dang Nghiem, and Hanh Nghiem are, for me, living examples that the practice of understanding and love can be applied to every moment of life. Thanks to the community of Morning Sun Mindfulness Center, especially Michael and Fern, for your support in my practice.

I have also been deeply influenced by the teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Alan Wallace, Pema Chdrn, and their spiritual ancestors. Thanks to Marshall Rosenberg and the community of Nonviolent Communication practitioners who have helped me understand the meaning of empathy and connection. Thanks to Art Stein, my political science professor at the University of Rhode Island, who first exposed me to Thich Nhat Hanhs teachings, and his wife Clare Sartori who provided invaluable feedback during the writing of this book.

Larry Boyang has been my intellectual mentor since college, and he is the one who taught me to love science. He introduced me to many of the important ideas contained in this book, helped me develop the concept of modular constructivism, and is the epitome of an independent and rigorous thinker.

Thanks to the community of researchers whose tireless work has built the scientific foundation of what we know about suffering and well-being, especially Richie Davidson, Jaak Panksepp, Dan Siegel, Joseph LeDoux, Dan Kahneman, Bruce Wampold, and Richard Bentall.

Thank you so much to Richie Davidson (again) and Chris Germer for your support and encouragement. Thank you to Gary Brain, Brian Toomey, and Gavin Raders for your friendship. Thank you to Andrea Costella Dawson and Ben Yarling at W.W. Norton for your guidance in this process and for believing in me. Thank you to Tanya Bezreh and Phap Luu (again) for your feedback and help during the writing process. Thank you to my mother, Pat Desmond, who is an inspiration for me and taught me that deep, personal change is possible. Thanks to all of my clientsyouve taught me more than Ive taught you.

Thank you so much to Annie, my absolutely wonderful wife, whose love and support made this entire project possible. She is a brilliant editor and a bright light in the world. Thanks to my son, Finnegan, for inspiring me to be my best self.

In gratitude to parents, teachers, friends, and all beings, I bow deeply before the Three Jewels in the Ten Directions.

FOREWORD BY RICHARD J.
DAVIDSON

Compassion and self-compassion lie at the very heart of well-being. For those in the helping professions, and for psychotherapists in particular, the expression of compassion and self-compassion is likely a critical constituent of being an effective therapist. This book is an extraordinarily practical and useful guide to the importance of self-compassion in psychotherapy. It is also a how-to manual of simple practices that can be used to kindle the development of self-compassion.

When I first met His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1992 he challenged me, exclaiming that if I was using tools of modern neuroscience to study anxiety, depression, and fear, why couldnt I use the same tools to study kindness and compassion? At that time I did not have a very good answer to this question, but the very way His Holiness posed it awakened a calling in me to dedicate the remainder of my work life to this topic. In 2009 we established the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which has as its mission the cultivation of well-being and relief of suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind. Following this life-altering initial meeting with the Dalai Lama, compassion was among the very first topics we elected to study with the tools of modern neuroscience. And over the past 6 years we, along with a cadre of young scientific explorers, have begun for the first time to seriously study the neural and behavioral correlates of mental training to cultivate compassion.

We have learned that training as little as 30 minutes a day for 2 weeks is sufficient, in complete novices, to change the brain and induce more prosocial and altruistic behavior. These changes have been observed in rigorous, randomized, controlled trials in which we treated the compassion training in the same way other researchers might treat the evaluation of a new pharmaceutical. We have also learned from this corpus of new findings that compassion is not empathy. While compassion and empathy each activate some of the same circuits in the brain, there are important differences. Compassion activates circuits that have been associated with positive emotion and reward, while empathy does not necessarily include the activation of those circuits. Moreover, compassion leads to prosocial behavior more systematically than empathy.

The wonderful insights, vignettes, and wise teachings sprinkled throughout this book will be of great benefit to any clinician who wishes to incorporate compassion practices in his or her work. Determining the most effective strategies for consolidating these insights into enduring change remains an important task for the future. It will also remain critical to rigorously assess what exactly the benefits of self-compassion training are for therapeutic outcomes. If there are measureable, objective changes in therapeutic outcome as a consequence of the types of practices described in this volume, it will have very important implications for psychotherapy training. The increased availability of these practices and the receptivity of the field to the integration of contemplative approaches with modern psychology bode well for a more informed and integrative approach to psychotherapy in the future.