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Dr Chris Irons is a clinical psychologist, researcher, author and trainer. He
is co-director of Balanced Minds (www.balancedminds.com), a London-
based organisation providing compassion-focused psychological
interventions for individuals and organisations. He is the author of a number
of books, including The Compassionate Mind Workbook.
 ROBINSON
Published in Great Britain in 2019 by Robinson
Copyright © Chris Irons, 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Important Note
This book is not intended as a substitute for medical advice or treatment.
Any person with a condition requiring medical attention should consult a
qualified medical practitioner or suitable therapist.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission
in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a
similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-47210-456-4
Robinson
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk
www.littlebrown.co.uk
 For my Dad, Paul Irons (MBE!).
Thank you for being an inspiration to so many people,
and a role model for me in how to be a dedicated, caring
person in the world.
Love you pops
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Why are emotions important?
What are emotional difficulties?
Difficult emotions: A personal story
How can compassion help with difficult emotions?
How to use this book
Practice
Case examples used in the book
Section One
Learning about emotions
1 What are emotions?
Definition of emotion
Beyond definitions – emotions organise
the body and mind
Tracking the ‘story’ of emotions
What’s the difference between emotions and feelings?
What’s the difference between emotions and moods?
Are there some emotions that are healthy or good, and some that are
unhealthy or bad?
Key reflections
2 Why do we have emotions?
Emotions evolved to help us
Emotions serve our motives
What are the functions of our different emotions?
The three system model of emotion
Exercise: Anxiety vs anger
Built for us, not by us
Key reflections
 Section Two
How and why we struggle with our emotions
3 Evolution and our tricky brain
Our brain has inbuilt glitches
Loops in the mind – when new and old collide
Loops in the mind – not our fault
Key reflections
4 Emotions are shaped by life experiences
Difficult emotions – shaped for us, not by us
How have your emotions been shaped?
Caring, attachment and distress regulation
Exercise: How have your relationships shaped your three systems?
What can compassion, and CFT, do to help?
Key reflections
5 Emotion regulation problems
What is emotion regulation?
What is emotion dysregulation?
Difficulties in regulating emotions – the emotion regulation model
(ERM)
Section Three
What is compassion, and how might it help with my difficult emotions?
6 What is compassion, and how can it help with difficult emotions?
What is compassion?
First psychology of compassion – engagement with distress
Second psychology of compassion – alleviation of distress
Bringing the two psychologies together
Compassion, shadow and difficult emotions
The benefits of cultivating a compassionate mind
The three flows of compassion
Key reflections
7 How to develop a compassionate mind
Starting the process – motivation
 Exercise: Compassion-based motivation – why do I want things to be
different?
Is it possible to ‘feed’ our brains?
Getting the ball rolling – practice
Key reflections
8 Compassionate mind training – attention and mindfulness
Foundations of a compassionate mind: Attention, mindfulness and mind
awareness
The power of attention
Exercise: The nature of attention
A restless mind
Exercise: Our restless mind
Strengthening attention: Mind awareness and stability through
mindfulness
Ways to be mindful
Before you start – five steps of preparation
Core mindfulness practices
Exercise: Mindfulness of sound
Exercise: Mindful body scan
Exercise: Mindfulness of breathing
Difficulties with mindfulness
Mindfulness in daily life
Exercise: Mindful walking
Exercise: Mindful eating
Key reflections
9 Compassionate mind training – building the soothing system
Body posture
Exercise: Developing a grounded, stable body posture
Soothing rhythm breathing
Exercise: Soothing rhythm breathing
Exercise: Learning to slow down – how to slow your breathing
Facial expression
Exercise: SRB with friendly facial expression
 Voice tone and inner talk
Exercise: Soothing rhythm breathing with inner speech and caring
inner voice tone
Memory and imagery
Exercise: Soothing memory
Exercise: Soothing system imagery – creating a safe place
Key reflections
10 Compassionate mind training – developing your compassionate self
Creating a compassionate mind
Core qualities of the compassionate self
Cultivating the compassionate self
Exercise: Compassionate memory
Developing your compassionate self – acting techniques
Exercise: Compassionate self
Embodying your compassionate self – bringing the virtual into reality
Exercise: Bringing your compassionate self into daily life
Ideal compassionate other
Exercise: Creating your ideal compassionate other
Key reflections
11 Fears, blocks and resistances to compassion
Misunderstandings about compassion
The compassionate ladder
Key reflectioms
Section Four
Using your compassionate mind to manage your emotions –
compassion-focused emotion regulation
Example: Helpful emotion regulation
12 Compassion-focused emotion regulation skills (CERS) – awareness
of emotion triggers
1. Developing attention and awareness of triggers of difficult emotions
Exercise: Learning from the past
Exercise: Increasing awareness of external triggers
Exercise: Noticing internal triggers to difficult emotions
 2. Modifying triggers/emotionally stimulating situations
Exercise: Using your compassionate mind to modify trigger
situations
3. Wise selection of situations
Exercise: Wise selection of situations
Key reflections
13 Compassion-focused emotion regulation skills (CERS) – awareness
of emotions
Emotion patterns
Awareness of emotion
Mindfulness of emotion
Exercise: Mindfulness of emotions – noticing their shape and pattern
Key reflections
14 Compassion-focused emotion regulation skills (CERS) – labelling
emotions
Present moment labelling
Exercise: Present moment emotion labelling
Exercise: Emotion daily review
Range of emotional experience
How often do you experience different emotions?
Memory and emotion labelling
Exercise: Labelling emotional memories
Discriminating between emotions
Recognising mixed feelings
Exercise: Labelling mixed emotions
Key reflections
15 Compassion-focused emotion regulation skills (CERS) –
understanding emotions
1. Validate
Exercise: Using the compassionate self to validate emotions
Receiving validation from someone else
Exercise: Using memory and imagination to validate your feelings
 Exercise: Validation of emotion from the image of your
compassionate other
2. Mentalising and understanding our emotions
Exercise: Mentalising from the compassionate self
3. Listening to what our emotions are telling us – the wisdom of
emotions
Exercise: Listening to the wisdom of emotions
4. Recognition of, and working with, what maintains difficult emotions
Key reflections
16 Compassion-focused emotion regulation skills (CERS) – coping with
and using emotions
16a: Coping with emotions – tolerating and accepting
Tolerating difficult emotions
Mindfulness
Exercise: Mindfulness of emotion – distress tolerance
Stability of mind and body
Exercise: Distress tolerance – soothing breathing
Compassionate intention
Exercise: Compassionate self – supporting distress tolerance
Accepting difficult emotions
Exercise: Compassionate acceptance of difficult emotions
Working with ‘emotions about emotion’
Key reflections
16b: Modifying the intensity of emotions
Modifying the intensity of emotions
Decreasing the intensity of emotions
Increasing the intensity of emotions
Exercise: Turning up the volume of emotional intensity
Exercise: Using writing to increase emotional intensity
Developing your skills further – online material
Key reflections
16c: Coping with emotions – expressing emotions and assertiveness
Exercise: Exploring difficulties with emotional expression
 Exercise: Managing fears about expressing emotions
Three steps to emotion expression
Emotional expression – learning to be assertive
Key reflections
16d: Working with multiple emotional ‘selves’
Exercise: Multiple selves
Step 1: Listening to the angry part of you
Step 2: Listening to the anxious part of you
Step 3: Listening to the sad part of you
Step 4: How do the different parts relate to each other? Emotions about
emotions
Step 5: Bringing compassion to the party
Exercise: Bringing compassion to the situation
Compassion for my angry self
Exercise: Compassion for your angry self
Compassion for the anxious part of me
Exercise: Compassion for your anxious self
Compassion for the sad part of me
Exercise: Compassion for your sad self
Key reflections
16e: Managing shame and self-criticism
What is shame?
Why do we experience shame?
The shape of shame
What impact does shame have on our other emotions?
Shame can disconnect us
Compassion – an antidote for shame?
Exercise: Bringing compassion to shame
Self-criticism – shame’s best friend
Why do we become self-critical?
Self-criticism and feared emotions
Bringing your compassionate mind to help your self-critic
Exercise: Using our compassionate self to work with self-criticism
 Key reflections
Section Five
Deepening your emotion regulation skills
17 ‘Turning up for yourself’ – the compassion PDA (Pre, During and
After)
Exercise: Your compassion PDA
Key reflections
18 Cultivating positive emotions
Pay attention to positive emotions
Recalling positive emotions
Exercise: Connecting with positive memories
Exercise: Memory writing
Gratitude and appreciation
Exercise: Three good things
Key reflections
19 Compassionate letter writing
Before writing – engage your compassionate mind
Exercise: Compassionate letter writing
After writing – compassionate reading
Key reflections
20 Using compassionate thinking to manage your emotions
Understanding the way we think
Taking perspective – not your fault
The relationship between threat emotions and thinking patterns
Thought monitoring
Threat system thinking vs compassionate thinking
Developing compassionate, balanced thinking
Exercise: Thought-emotion form
Key reflections
Section Six
Compassionate futures – sustaining your compassionate mind
21 Sustaining healthy emotion regulation
Continue to work out!
 Deepening emotion regulation skills – online chapters

Conclusion
References
Index
Acknowledgements
I’ve been supported in writing this book by so many wonderful friends and
colleagues. I’m indebted to the input of Tobyn Bell, Syd Hiskey, Dennis
Tirch, Roisin Joyce, Rachel Egan, Shelley Kerr, Jed Shamel, Chris Winson,
Christine Dunkley, Sunil Lad, Brett Grellier and Sam Thompson.
Special thanks to Paul Gilbert for all your input – not just on this book, but
throughout the twenty years I’ve been lucky enough to know and work with
you! It’s been quite a journey, and a real privilege to be part of how this
wonderful approach to life has developed and grown.
I’d also like to extend my thanks to the many clients I’ve had the honour to
work with, and who have shown great courage in sharing their emotional
difficulties, and wisdom in teaching me how compassion can be a powerful
way of alleviating distress.
A massive thanks to my wife, Korina. Without your ongoing support and
encouragement, this book would have never seen the light of day. But even
more than that, I’ve really appreciated discussing the ideas, structure and
flow of this book with you, and you’ve helped to shape it in a wonderful
way. Thank you!
And finally, to my son, Idris – you might only be a few months old, but
you’re teaching me so much about what love and compassion are about.
Foreword
Emotion gives texture and colour to our lives. Imagine what our lives would
be like without emotions, if we were just run by logic. We would not
experience joy, sexual desire, excitement, hope, fascination, humour,
wonder and awe. These would be great losses. Some researchers believe it
would be almost impossible for us to make decisions or have intuitions,
while other researchers think that emotion is a basis of consciousness itself.
On the other hand, we would also not experience intense anxiety, rage,
vengeance and hopelessness. When you think about it, we spend a lot of our
lives trying to create the feelings we like and avoid or get rid of the feelings
we don’t like. The problem is that our gene-built brains and socially
choreographed minds did not build emotions into us just for the pleasure of
experiencing emotion. Evolution built capacities for emotions that would
direct actions that aided the struggle for survival and reproduction.
Evolution did not build emotions to make us happy and many of them don’t
(although some do). Emotions are there to do a job. What emotion we may
feel depends on how we need to act in certain contexts. Dr Irons offers
masterly guidance in exploring the importance of understanding the
evolutionary roots of our emotions. It is often said, that in biology and
psychology, nothing makes sense without an evolutionary function analysis
and Dr Irons does that expertly here. He also presents his unique model for
understanding emotion.
Most, but not all, of the emotions that cause us trouble are linked to what
we call ‘threat processing’. These are the emotions we experience when
there are dangers or obstacles and setbacks; when we fail rather than
succeed; when we get rejected rather than accepted; when we become ill
rather than stay healthy. The big four threat emotions or emotion states are:
anxiety, anger, disgust and sadness. Although we might like to get rid of
these emotions, because evolution has built them into us it’s not possible to
somehow take them out of our brain; we can’t remove them like we might
an appendix or cyst. Of course, this doesn’t mean that people don’t try to
directly alter their brains so they don’t have to feel certain emotions.
Billions and billions are spent on drugs to control anxiety, depression or
anger. And, of course, people also use drugs to help them feel good such as
amphetamines, cocaine and heroin. And a substance that many use to
change their emotional state is alcohol. The problem with all these methods
are that they have a dark side linked to addiction, harmful behaviours,
withdrawal and short-termism.
As Dr Irons describes, there are many reasons why we want to try to
regulate some of our emotions. For example, we may find the unpleasant
ones are too frequent and easily triggered in us, are too intense, seem to last
for too long, or are difficult to recover from. We can also have beliefs about
emotions that make them more difficult to deal with. For example, we may
think that other people don’t feel emotions as intensely as we do or that the
emotions are intolerable and will overwhelm us. We might feel ashamed of
our emotions or desires. We might not understand them so we don’t know
why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. We might experience many different
emotions at the same time that seem to be in conflict with each other,
causing us confusion. One emotion might block another, as, for example,
when individuals feel rage to hide from grief or are comfortable with
feeling sadness but not rage. All of these can orientate us towards trying to
get rid of and avoid emotions rather than working with and through them.
However, if we are to take the journey of working with and through
unpleasant or frightening emotions then clearly we need a way of doing
that. As Dr Irons indicates, this is where compassion comes in. Compassion
is a basic motivation to tune our attention to the things that are difficult or
cause suffering and to try as best we can to be helpful and alleviate and
prevent unnecessary suffering in the future. Compassion is not an emotion:
it is a basic motive that will help us with our emotions. Part of the reason
for this is because caring behaviour and compassion were designed by
evolution to be soothing and down-regulate threat processing in appropriate
circumstances. As Dr Irons explains, compassion helps us find the
resources, the courage and the wisdom we need to be able to work with
difficult emotions.
This leads to the core question of how we cultivate and utilise those
compassionate circuits in our brain to help us with difficult emotions. This
is where compassion focused therapy comes in because this is precisely
what this therapy seeks to do: to stimulate the psychological and biological
processes, associated with caring behaviour, that are wired in to threat
processing and can help regulate it. Luckily, Dr Irons has been at the
forefront of compassion focused therapy for over twenty years. He is an
international compassion focused therapy trainer.
In this book, he brings his extensive experience and wisdom to help
navigate us through the tricky territory of understanding our emotions and
how compassion can be a wise guide. In the first section he takes us through
the up-to-date research on what emotions are. Emotions are not static. Our
emotions can depend on our background state: if we’re already anxious then
getting more anxious might be easy; if we’re already in an irritable state,
quite small things can upset us which perhaps they wouldn’t if we were
more relaxed – in a ‘just returning from holiday’ state, or having won a lot
of money! So there may be no direct link between a situation and an
emotion. How we express emotions may depend on the context. While we
might be okay with expressing certain emotions to somebody we know, we
might not be to somebody we don’t know. Some emotions we might
express to our close friends but not to our boss.
Dr Irons highlights the fact that emotions are partly built by our genes and
therefore our potential and capacity to feel certain emotions is not our fault.
We are all built by our genes to feel and want to do certain things; that’s
what makes us human and a representative of the species. It’s called our
common humanity. Without that, we would struggle to understand other
people’s emotions, and empathy would become strangely difficult. While,
of course, there are important differences between the textures of emotions
different people around the world may feel, it’s important that we realise
other human beings have the same feelings, wishes and needs that we do.
They are not aliens and should not be treated as such. And today there are
major debates on whether animals feel emotions and what that means for
the (shocking) way we treat them.
Dr Irons also uses the insights from understanding the evolutionary roots of
emotion to explore how and why we should not fuse our sense of self with
what we feel. Because we have certain emotions, fantasies or thoughts, that
doesn’t make us a good or a bad person. Remember these potential feelings
have been in existence for millions of years in millions of brains – you
didn’t build them or create them so don’t claim them as ‘yours’ in a
shameful way. Try, instead, to note them so you can stay with the
compassionate living style of trying to be helpful, not harmful. As Dr Irons
outlines in the book, we can take a step back and become a mindful
observer of our emotions, a mindful observer of the shifting patterns of
emotion of which our brains are capable. Then we are less caught up in
them, less rushed along by them, and less fused into them. Then we can
become more discerning, choosing whether to act on them or not, or even to
act against them. For example, there are many times when we might wish to
override anxiety. We might get anxious the day we take our driving test, but
we override anxiety to take it anyway; or we go for that important job
interview or we ask that particular person out for a date. We can also
override anger. We choose not to act harmfully because that’s important for
us even though we may wish to.
Being mindful and aware of the nature of emotion and how it plays through
us because of the way our brains are built is a step towards learning
emotional tolerance. Probably one of the greatest strengths that will help us
is developing emotional tolerance because then we need not be frightened
of an emotion. Rather than feeling we ‘must’ get away from an emotion
because it’s so awful, emotional tolerance helps us no longer fear it, even if
we don’t like it.
In addition, within that tolerance we may learn new things about ourselves.
For example, in tolerating anger we may begin to recognise unmet needs
that we can seek out in other ways, or see that our anger is a mask for
sadness and grieving. We can also learn that sometimes we can make our
emotions worse by the way we think or ruminate. Although tolerance of
emotion is important, it needs to be purposeful. Learning to tolerate
emotions that are being generated by unhealthy ways of living or thinking is
not purposeful and so it would be good to change them.
For example, I’m anxious about my weight but I’ll just learn to tolerate the
anxiety and not do anything about it. So compassion tolerance comes with
compassionate wisdom for helpful action. This takes us into the territory of
how to work with intense emotion, emotions that are too frequent or
emotions that come on in the wrong context. For all these aspects of
emotion, Dr Irons is a wonderful guide.
The book will also explore specific kinds of emotions, such as anger and
anxiety, and how to create more positive emotions in your life. It is filled
with up-to-date ways of mindfully tending to your emotions and generating
compassionate ways of containing, holding and working with your
emotions.
It is a great pleasure for me to recommend my esteemed colleague of many
years who is one of the world’s leading teachers of compassion focused
therapy (for more, see www.compassionatemind.co.uk). This book comes to
you textured by many years of clinical experience as well as working with
general compassionate mind training groups.
Paul Gilbert
Introduction
First up, thanks for reading this book. I hope it will be a helpful guide for
you. In the coming sections and chapters, we’ll explore how and why we
struggle with emotions, and introduce ideas and practices that might help
you to find new ways of addressing common difficulties in life. But let’s
start with why this book is focused on emotion in the first place.
Why are emotions important?
Take a moment to think about the best moment in your life. Where you
were, what you were doing, who you were with. Allow yourself a minute to
connect with the memory as best as you can.
Now, if you’re willing, bring to mind a time in life that was more difficult, a
time that you’re pleased is long in the past. If you can, allow yourself a
minute or so to connect with that memory.
Now, with both of these memories in mind, consider how they’re similar.
Given their differences, what binds them together?
There has always been something inherently contradictory about emotions;
we are both drawn to them, but at times, do our level best to avoid or stay
away from them. We recognise that they are central to our life, bringing
colour and texture to experiences, and that much in life would be drab and
grey without them. But for many of us, given a choice, we would turn them
off quicker than a light switch if it meant that we didn’t have to feel – didn’t
have to feel the pain, discomfort, and heaviness that emotions like fear,
sadness and shame can bring.
We can experience many joys in life: moments with close friends or family
members, the birth of a child, falling in love, succeeding in a test or project
that is important or meaningful for us. In contrast, we can face many
struggles in life: poverty, loss of loved ones, failures and rejections,
bullying, criticism or abuse, and a host of physical health problems,
illnesses and diseases. What translates these events from being just
‘experiences’ to something that connects us with distress, suffering or
happiness is often emotion – sadness, fear, anger, shame, joy or excitement
that go with these experiences.
What are difficult emotions?
Sadly, rather than being confined to discrete situations and experiences, it is
emotion that often causes us ongoing difficulties in life. In my work as a
clinical psychologist, in one way or another, all of the clients I work with
have some struggle with emotion. Sometimes this is someone battling with
feelings of anxiety and panic, unable to speak up in meetings at work, go on
dates, or attend parties with friends. Sometimes it’s a person constantly on
the edge of anger and rage, lashing out at loved ones and strangers alike,
pushing people away and causing themselves and others pain. Sometimes
it’s someone weighed down by overwhelming sadness and grief, shut down
to life following the death of a loved one or end of a relationship.
Sometimes it’s a person burdened with feelings of shame, caught up in
painful memories of things that happened to them in the past, or crippled by
feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. And for some people, it’s the absence
of emotion that is causing problems. For example, someone who is unable
to experience anger, and therefore blocked to asserting and sticking up for
themselves at work and with their partner. Or the person who is unable to
express sadness or distress, and consequently struggles to allow others to
get close to them and share meaningful relationships. Or finally, someone
who is unable to experience excitement, contentment and happiness, and
whose life is stripped of many of the pleasures and joys that can come with
relationships, hobbies and learning.
So, this is a book that is for anyone who experiences difficulties with
emotions – whether that’s experiencing certain emotions too often or
strongly, or if you’re blocked to certain emotions that it could be helpful to
experience more of. It’s designed to help you understand more about what
emotions are, why we experience them, and how they can cause us distress.
We’ll look at various models for working with emotions and learn how
cultivating skills in mindfulness and compassion can help to bring a
healthier emotional balance in your life.
Difficult emotions: A personal story
Although emotions often form the centre of what I encounter in other
people’s struggles, this book is partly a reflection of my own experience
with emotional difficulties. Growing up, I was often described as a happy
and laid-back person – and I guess in many ways, I was. What I struggled
with was acknowledging, validating and expressing certain emotions –
particularly those that were unpleasant, such as anger, anxiety and shame.
My strategy – although I was not doing this consciously – was a ‘keep them
suppressed at all costs’ approach. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get angry (ask my
brother – we had some good arguments and fights growing up!) or anxious
(I remember very clearly avoiding taking part in a football competition
because I was scared of failing). Rather, I wasn’t able to acknowledge that I
was feeling how I was feeling, and if I did express these emotions, it was
only at the level of an action or behaviour (for example, getting aggressive
or avoiding something scary). Crucially, I found it very difficult to manage
my emotions effectively. I found it difficult to tolerate and experience my
anger in a way that could lead to expressing it in an assertive and helpful
way. I also found it hard to tolerate my anxiety enough, and to seek help
from others, so that I could have the courage and support to compete
without getting overwhelmed with worries about failing. There are lots of
reasons why I managed my emotions in these ways, many of which are
linked to my history, relationships and experiences growing up in life. And
to a certain extent, my strategy of suppressing unpleasant feelings was
helpful at times; however, it also led to difficulties, and contributed to
unhappy friendships and relationships, mismanagement of opportunities in
life, and more generally, a sense that it was difficult to get my own needs
met.
Over the years, I’ve worked hard to make progress in these areas. I spend
less time suppressing and keeping feelings to myself (although I’m still
quite good at this!) and am learning how to tolerate emotions like anger and
shame, and try to bring compassion to my experiences in a helpful way. I
still feel like I’ve got a distance to travel, but this is the beauty of
developing your compassionate mind – getting to the destination would be
great, but the main thing is that I’m heading in the right direction, I’m in the
flow of the journey.
How did I do this? Well, like many things in life, there were multiple
factors – friends, family, partners and mentors, as well as the ups and downs
of experiences in life. But it turns out that many of the other things that
helped outside of these people were linked to the ideas and skills of
Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). CFT was developed by Professor
Paul Gilbert, initially to help people experiencing distress commonly
associated with high levels of shame and self-criticism. I was lucky enough
to start working with Paul on some of the ideas linked to CFT in 1999. So,
it was through applying these ideas to clients that I saw how they also
applied to me, and I started to make changes to the way I approached my
own emotions.
How can compassion help with emotional difficulties?
In the last two decades or so, there has been an increasing interest in how
training our minds in compassion can change the way we think, feel and
behave. We’re also learning through an increasing number of research
studies that practising compassion can have a significant effect on our body,
gene expression and immune response.
One of the difficulties with compassion can be the word itself. One of my
clients used to say to me, partly with a smile on her face but also with a fair
bit of anger, ‘You’re not going to talk about that f*cking C word again, are
you?!’ I never did find out if she was equating compassion with one of the
most feared illnesses (cancer), or a word often seen as the most unpleasant
of swear words in the English language! For some people, compassion can
bring to mind weakness, fluffiness and just being ‘nice’; for others, it
evokes a sense of letting others (or themselves) off the hook, or indulgence.
But it turns out that compassion is none of these things. Compassion is the
motivation that spurs a person on to risk their life as a firefighter or to
dedicate their career to being a doctor or nurse. When a loved one, friend or
even stranger is distressed and suffering, it’s compassion that motivates us
to pay attention to this and try to do something to help. So, the definition of
compassion that we’ll use in this book is: ‘a sensitivity to the suffering of
self and others, with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it’
(Gilbert, 2014). This is a commonly used definition and suggests
compassion requires certain qualities of mind. First up, we need to develop
a desire to pay attention to and engage with things that are difficult, such as
painful or overwhelming emotions, without turning away, avoiding,
switching off, or turning towards the next chocolate bar or alcoholic drink.
So, to help here, we need to develop the strength, courage and ability to
tolerate our own distress and painful feelings, and those of others. Second,
we need to cultivate understanding and wisdom to guide our desire to be
caring and helpful; we also need to build a variety of skills that help us to
work with our own difficulties and distress, so that we can find a new, more
helpful way of working with this.
Throughout this book I’ll help you to learn how to prepare your mind for,
and in, compassion; and how by doing this, you can use your
‘compassionate mind’ to better manage difficult emotions. We will draw
upon training exercises taken from Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT)
that are known as compassionate mind training or ‘CMT’. The key thing
here is that you don’t have to be in therapy, or feel that you need to be, to
benefit from these. They’ve been developed from a variety of contemplative
traditions and psychotherapeutic approaches, and are helpful for managing
a range of life difficulties and emotional problems.
How to use this book
The book is divided into six sections. In the first section, we will explore
what we mean by emotion, and why we experience them. In section two,
we will explore the CFT model, and help you understand why you might be
struggling with emotions in the way you are. The third section will outline
what compassion is, what it involves, and how it can help with managing
difficult emotions. We’ll also explore a model of emotion regulation that
will guide us later in the book. There are different ways of understanding
what emotion regulation means, but for the purposes of this book, it refers
to our ability to influence the type of emotions we have, when we have
them, how we experience them, and how we express or use them.
Section four will focus on compassionate mind training and we will work
through a series of exercises in mindfulness, breathing, imagery and
compassion. Section five will return to the emotion regulation model
introduced in section three, and in combination with the compassionate
mind skills developed in section four, we will consider how these can help
to bring balance to our emotions. The final section will focus on how we
can sustain our compassionate mind going forward.
It’s also worth noting that there are some extra, online materials that you
might find helpful that supplement the chapters in this book. These go into
more detail about specific emotions that you might struggle with, including
anger, anxiety and sadness. You can access these at
https://overcoming.co.uk/715/resources-to-download.
If you can, move through the book by section, taking your time to reflect on
each chapter and, if it helps, making notes along the way. Although it is
tempting to jump straight to the later sections that focus on working more
specifically with difficult emotions, I would recommend holding off if you
can until you’ve had a chance to work through the earlier sections first. It is
through these initial chapters that you will learn how to develop the skills of
your compassionate mind, and through doing so, be best placed to work
with the ideas and exercises that come later in the book.
Practice
As you move through the book, particularly from section three onwards,
you will be introduced to a variety of compassionate mind training
exercises. These are evidence-based practices that are designed to help you
learn to manage difficult emotions in a helpful way. You can find audio files
for many of these at www.balancedminds.com to guide you with your
practice.
Case examples used in the book
All case examples are amalgamations of real people that I’ve worked with
in therapy or know personally. Any identifiable characteristics (e.g. name,
gender, age, ethnicity) have been altered to protect anonymity.
 SECTION ONE
Learning about emotions
In this first section, we’re going to explore what emotions are, how they’re
defined, and what happens when we experience them (for example, to our
attention, thinking or behaviour). We’ll also look at why we experience
emotions and learn about how they evolved to help us manage and tackle
various challenges that we face as human beings.
1 What are emotions?
What is an emotion? Take a moment or two to think about it – to really
think about it. How would you describe an emotion to someone who, for
whatever reason, had no understanding about emotions? If an alien came
down to earth and asked you what an emotion is, what would you tell them?
At first, this might seem a simple thing to explain. However, you might
have noticed that, actually, it’s harder than it initially appeared. Now, if you
struggled to answer this, you are not the only one; it turns out that the same
question has been causing philosophers, scientists, psychologists and
therapists headaches for thousands of years! Given that we have landed
people on the moon, discovered cures for deadly illnesses, and even
mapped our genome, it’s interesting that there is no consensus on what
something so ‘normal’ and ‘day-to-day’ as emotions actually are. As a
former client of mine said: ‘Describing my feelings and emotions in any
detailed way is like trying to use a nail to pin down water.’
The word ‘emotion’ was first used in the English language in the sixteenth
century and replaced terms like ‘passions’ and ‘affections’ that had been
used by the Greeks and other civilisations for millennia before. The origin
of the word ‘emotion’ is actually from the French word émouvoir, which
means ‘to stir up’, and before that, the Latin word emovere, which means to
‘move out’ or ‘agitate’. So, in terms of the etymology of the word itself we
can understand emotion as being linked to energy, movement and a type of
physical tension.
Definition of emotion
There are almost a hundred different ways that psychologists have defined
and conceptualised emotions. As one set of researchers in the area
suggested: ‘Everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a
definition’ (Fehr & Russell, 1984, p. 464). Now clearly, we aren’t going to
try to outline all of these ways in this book. But this large number of
definitions tells us something that you probably already know, and have
intuitive wisdom about: emotions are very complex. And because they are
complex and difficult to define, maybe it’s no wonder that many of us find
it difficult to understand, recognise, describe or manage them.
Let’s take a look at a few definitions though. The online Oxford dictionary
suggests that emotion is ‘a strong feeling deriving from one’s
circumstances, mood, or relationships with others’ (Oxford Dictionary,
2018). Hoffman (2016), a well-known psychologist in the emotion field,
suggested that: ‘an emotion is (1) a multidimensional experience that is (2)
characterised by different levels of arousal and degrees of pleasure-
displeasure; (3) associated with subjective experiences, somatic sensations
and motivational tendencies; (4) coloured by contextual and cultural
factors; and that (5) can be regulated to some degree through intra- and
interpersonal processes’. While this is very thorough and captures how
emotions are a complex combination of different components, it’s probably
true that for most of us, this isn’t an easy or accessible definition of what an
emotion is. In that sense, it’s unlikely to be that helpful for our purposes of
understanding and working with emotions. Given this, let’s look at another
way of understanding what emotions are.
Beyond definition – emotions organise the body and
mind
It might be helpful to sketch out an example of how emotions, as defined
above, can play out in real life. Imagine walking down a road, heading to a
restaurant to meet a good friend. You’re feeling excited about seeing this
friend, and thinking about what you’re going to eat and talk about. You are
walking quickly, as it’s been a long time since you’ve seen your friend, and
you’re eager to catch up. However, as you walk along the road, a car
swerves to miss a young child who ran into the road, and is now heading
straight for you. You suddenly shift from feeling excited, to fearful. This
new emotion drags your mind to a new concern (your physical
safety/preservation), focusing your attention on the car and motivating you
to move quickly to one side. A moment later, once you’re safe, you feel
angry as you recognise that the driver was on his mobile phone, rather than
watching the road. This angry feeling directs your attention to the driver
(your current ‘concern’), and you tell him, in no uncertain terms, what you
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