Compassion-Focused Therapy

Practise compassion-focused therapy across a whole treatment: de-shaming and the three systems, the formulation, the first compassionate mind training, the week the compassion is refused, working with the self-critic, and compassion into action.

What you practise

• De-shame with the tricky brain and the three systems, built from the patient's own examples.
• Read which emotion-regulation system the patient is in and validate threat before asking for insight.
• Build the CFT formulation collaboratively: fears, safety strategies, unintended consequences, self-criticism.
• Introduce compassionate mind training with consent and ask what the patient actually experienced.
• Help the patient notice and stay with warmth, and treat backdraft and grief as expected.
• Work with fears, blocks and resistances without pivoting to another method.

Who you can meet

• Malin, 36 — Knows the CBT model perfectly and cannot feel any of it. Malin is 36, an upper-secondary teacher on partial sick leave for the second time with depression and exhaustion, referred after a course of CBT that made sense and did not help. She is bright, articulate and ashamed of being in the room, and her inner critic corrects, compares and never lets her stop; she calls it her standards. Useful focus: build the three systems from her own week, find what the critic is for, and stay with her when warmth opens onto grief.
• Mattias, 44 — Came because his partner asked him to, and would like the breathing thing over with. Mattias is 44, a warehouse team leader, four months sober after a bad year, with chronic low mood and a contempt for himself and for therapy talk that he does not hide. Warmth from another person was, twice in his life, the moment before being hurt, and he watches the clinician for the tell. Useful focus: stay steady when he attacks the method, build the formulation from behaviour rather than feelings he will not name, and find what his critic is protecting.

What the feedback looks at

• De-shaming psychoeducation
• Working with the three systems
• The CFT formulation
• Creating safeness and pacing
• Compassionate mind training
• Cultivating and tolerating warmth
• Fears, blocks and resistances
• Functional analysis of the critic

Rated against: Dimensions are PsychBase's own, structured on the competency domain names of the CFT Therapist Competence Rating Scale (Horwood, Allan, Goss and Gilbert, 2020) and the CFT Competency Framework (Liddell, Allan and Goss, 2017), adapted for a text-based practice lab. No validated CFT competence instrument exists: the published scale has not been shown to work for a single rater, its full text is not publicly available, its middle score points carry no descriptors, and it carries no licence (Thorne, 2020; Brown and Ashcroft, 2025). Every anchor here is written in our own words; nothing is transcribed. Scores are generated by an AI reviewer for practice feedback and are not equivalent to rating by a trained human; nothing here is endorsed by any of these authors or bodies. Scores never gate progression.

This lab is for clinical training. The patient is generated by an AI language model from a written case; no real patient and no patient data are involved. Browsing is open; starting a session needs a free account.