Workshop Description
Self-compassion is an important inner resource that increases resilience during challenging and difficult times. It involves the capacity to comfort and soothe ourselves, and to motivate ourselves with encouragement when we struggle, fail, or feel inadequate. Burgeoning research shows that self-compassion is strongly associated with emotional wellbeing, better coping, healthy habits, more satisfying relationships, and lower levels of anxiety and depression. Developing this resource is especially important now, as people are growing weary after months of dealing with changes, uncertainty and losses related to the pandemic.
Many helping professionals have been introduced to the concept of self-compassion, but they may not have been taught how to explicitly integrate this knowledge into clinical practice. Self-compassion can be integrated into clinical work by (1) how clinicians relate to themselves (compassionate presence), (2) how clinicians relate to their clients (compassionate relationship), and (3) how clients relate to themselves (home practice).
In addition to helping clients increase resilience, self-compassion is a powerful resource for clinicians. It enables clinicians to maintain emotional balance in the midst of challenging clinical work, to enjoy their work and their clients more fully, to be fully present and attuned with their clients, and to prevent caregiver fatigue.
This two-part interactive workshop will offer clinicians core skills and practices to cultivate self-compassion as a foundation for therapeutic relationships, self-care and to teach to clients.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe key principles for integrating self-compassion into clinical practice
- Identify unique challenges and opportunities for trauma survivors in compassion-based treatment
- Enhance the therapeutic relationship through compassion and self-compassion practices during the clinical hour
- Describe the neurobiology of empathic distress and apply self-compassion to alleviate empathy fatigue.
- Identify the emotion of shame in psychotherapy and apply a positive, compassionate-based approach to working with shame
- Teach clients self-compassion techniques for home practice that emerge seamlessly from therapy and can be practiced at home
Who Should Attend?
Helping professionals who have already been introduced to the practice of mindful self-compassion and the research to support it, either through attending one of Kristin Neff's self-compassion workshops, attending a mindful self-compassion (MSC) group or training, or equivalent.
About the Presenters
Dr. Christopher Germer, PhD is a clinical psychologist and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is a co-developer (with Kristin Neff) of the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program, which has been taught to over 100,000 people around the globe, author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion and co-author (with Kristin Neff) of Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program and The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook. He is also a co-editor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy and Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy. Dr. Germer is a founding faculty member of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy as well as the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion, Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School. He teaches and leads workshops internationally on mindfulness and compassion, and has a private practice in Arlington, Massachusetts, USA specializing in mindfulness and compassion-based psychotherapy.
Dr. Shari Geller, PhD, is an author, teacher, and clinical psychologist. She is the founder of the Therapeutic Rhythm and Mindfulness Program and is a trained teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC). Her publications include: A Practical Guide for Cultivating Therapeutic Presence and Therapeutic Presence: A Mindful Approach to Effective Therapy (co-authored with Leslie Greenberg). Dr. Geller serves on the teaching faculty in Health Psychology at York University and in the Applied Mindfulness Program at the University of Toronto. She is the co-director of the Centre for MindBody Health (CMBH), in Toronto, Canada.
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