Clients who have experienced abuse or neglect often struggle with shame and self-criticism. These difficulties can contribute to the development of mental health disorders like anxiety and depression. They may also have patterns of unhealthy relationship patterns, trouble regulating their emotions, and feeling safe. Keep reading to discover 16+ Compassion-Focused Therapy techniques and interventions to use with your clients.
Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) is a therapeutic approach that can introduce clients to skills that foster self-compassion and compassion for others. While this is a newer therapeutic approach, research has shown that it can be effectively used with clients struggling with mood disorders, anxiety, and behavioral concerns stemming from self-criticism. Studies have found that CFT participants experienced improved self-compassion and self-reassurance as they worked through any fears about self-compassion.
CFT incorporates Compassionate Mind Training (CMT), which focuses on teaching 6 compassion-focused skills. This includes imagery, attention, feeling, behavior, reasoning, and sensory skills. With CMT, clients learn to use these compassion-based skills with themselves and toward others. Additionally, CFT can help clients develop their natural soothing system through mindfulness and CMT techniques. CFT can be integrated into treatment using CBT, ACT, DBT, and trauma-focused therapies.
For more valuable resources, view our Compassion-Focused Therapy Tools and Resources hub
10 Compassion-Focused Therapy Techniques
Compassion-Focused Therapy techniques are specific practices or exercises that you can incorporate into your sessions. This can include individual, group, couples, or family sessions. You can incorporate CFT techniques to teach your client specific tools that can help them make healthy changes in their lives. Examples of commonly used CFT techniques include:
1) Soothing Rhythm Breathing (SRB)
Soothing rhythm breathing is a core CFT technique that can help your clients calm their nervous system and activate their soothing system.
What It Is: SRB is used to slow breathing while remaining mindful. This is often combined with a compassionate intention.
How It Helps Clients: SRB can help your clients shift from “fight or flight” mode and activate their parasympathetic nervous system. This can change their physical experiences, allowing them to incorporate compassion- based thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
How To Do It: For this activity, encourage your client to find a comfortable posture, often sitting. Direct them to take a deep inhale lasting 4 counts, followed by a longer exhale lasting 5 to 6 counts. This can be repeated multiple times until the desired effect is reached.
2) Compassionate Image Development
Compassionate image development is a guided imagery activity that can help clients visualize an inner compassionate self.
What It Is: This CFT intervention will ask your client to think of a real, imagined, or symbolic representation of wisdom, strength, and warmth without judgment.
How It Helps Clients: This intervention allows your clients to process experiences through a new lens. This can help them feel supported and safe while stimulating their soothing system.
How To Do It: Begin by asking your client to visualize qualities like posture and tone of voice. Focus on incorporating their senses with this visualization, and encourage your client to use it often, including during moments of distress.
3) Multiple Selves Exercise
This CFT intervention helps clients learn more about their conflicting inner parts.
What It Is: With this intervention, you will help your client gain awareness of their different selves, such as their “angry self” or “critical self.”
How It Helps Clients: This exercise promotes emotional awareness and reduces internal conflict. Clients can begin incorporating compassion and control of their inner parts.
How To Do It: Begin by having your client name each part. Focus on exploring its fears, motives, and other characteristics. You can then ask your client to be compassionate as they mediate between their different parts.
4) Compassionate Letter Writing
Letter writing is an expressive intervention that allows clients to show themselves compassion in a new way.
What It Is: Your client’s letter can acknowledge their past difficulties and validate their emotions. They can also use this as an opportunity for encouragement.
How It Helps Clients: Letter writing allows your client to externalize their compassion, making it easier to express. Since they are including their compassion in a letter, it’s difficult to provide counterpoints like internal criticism.
How To Do It: Encourage your client to write a letter to themselves as their compassionate self. If they’re unable to access this part of the self, they can write as if they were someone else. Clients can focus on providing validation, encouraging themselves, and cultivating a sense of understanding in their lives. Encourage your client to hold onto their letter and reread during moments of distress.
5) Compassionate Dialogue Chair Work
Chair work is an experiential technique that can help your client access and express different internal voices.
What It Is: Chairs are used to allow your client to physically move as they represent different areas of their safe. This can include their critical self and compassionate self.
How It Helps Clients: Having the physical separation with the different chairs can help reduce the intensity of your clients’ emotions and increase their emotional insight.
How To Do It: After identifying the two inner selves with conflicting ideas, ask your client to move between two chairs as they work through their critical thoughts. Have them respond with compassion and empathy.
6) Functional Analysis of Self-Criticism
This CFT technique explores the protective function of self-criticism and shame.
What It Is: A structured examination of when self-criticism shows up, what triggers it, and what it is trying to accomplish (e.g., protection, motivation, avoidance of rejection).
How It Helps Clients: Clients begin to see self-criticism as a threat-based safety strategy rather than evidence of personal defect. This reduces shame and creates space for compassionate alternatives.
How To Do It: Help your client identify a recent triggering event. Map out: trigger → threat activation → critical thoughts → emotional/behavioral consequences. Then explore what the criticism is trying to protect them from. Introduce the compassionate self as an alternative regulator.
7) Fears, Blocks, and Resistances to Compassion
This technique directly addresses barriers to compassion.
What It Is: An assessment and exploration exercise focused on fears of self-compassion, receiving compassion, or offering compassion to others.
How It Helps Clients: Many clients experience compassion as unsafe or weak. Identifying these fears prevents avoidance and strengthens engagement in compassion work.
How To Do It: Ask questions such as:
- “What concerns you about being kinder to yourself?”
- “What might happen if you stopped criticizing yourself?”
Normalize these fears as protective threat responses and gradually introduce exposure to compassion practices.
8) Compassionate Attention Training
This CFT technique strengthens the ability to intentionally shift attention toward safeness cues.
What It Is: An attentional retraining exercise where clients practice noticing warmth, kindness, and neutral-to-positive cues in their environment or memories.
How It Helps Clients: Clients with high shame or threat activation often have an attentional bias toward danger and criticism. This technique strengthens the soothing system through repeated redirection.
How To Do It: Invite your client to recall a memory of warmth or kindness. Guide them to focus on sensory details (tone, facial expression, physical sensations). Practice redirecting attention back to these cues when the mind shifts to threat-based thinking.
9) Compassionate Memory Recall
This experiential exercise uses past experiences of care to stimulate the soothing system.
What It Is: Clients intentionally recall moments when they felt cared for, supported, or safe.
How It Helps Clients: Reactivating memories of safeness can physiologically stimulate the soothing system and increase emotional access to compassion.
How To Do It: Ask your client to identify a moment of genuine support. Encourage detailed sensory recall. Reinforce staying with the bodily experience of warmth or safety.
10) Behavioral Compassion Practice
This technique extends compassion into real-world action.
What It Is: Intentional behavioral experiments where clients act from their compassionate self rather than their threatened or critical self.
How It Helps Clients: Compassion is strengthened through repetition and behavior, not insight alone. Acting from the compassionate self reinforces identity change and emotional regulation.
How To Do It: Collaboratively identify a situation where the client typically responds with avoidance or criticism. Develop a plan for how their compassionate self would respond instead. Process the outcome in the next session.
6 Compassion-Focused Therapy Interventions to Use in Sessions
Compassion-Focused Therapy interventions are therapeutic strategies that incorporate CFT techniques. CFT interventions can help clients develop compassion for themselves while reducing any shame they may be carrying. You can also help your clients learn to regulate their automatic threat responses with CFT interventions. Continue reading for an introduction to common CFT intervention focuses.
1) Psychoeducation: Three Emotion Regulation Systems
Psychoeducation can help your client understand threats, drives, and soothing systems.
What It Is: This knowledge can help your client gain insight into how these three concepts developed and how they can cause distress.
How It Helps Clients: Knowledge is power. Psychoeducation can be used to reduce shame and increase awareness. Your client can understand the role that learned patterns have in their everyday life.
How To Do It: Use a diagram to visually represent these three systems. Ask your client to identify which system is the most problematic for them and how this causes distress. Help your client understand what they can do to strengthen their soothing system.
2) Compassionate Self-Development
This is a CFT intervention that focuses on creating a stable, regulated, and compassionate identity.
What It Is: Clients can work to build a compassionate internal identity that helps alleviate some of their distress. Multiple techniques can be incorporated, including soothing rhythm breathing and compassionate imagery.
How It Helps Clients: This intervention can help clients shift from reacting as their “threatened self” and begin responding as their “compassionate self”. This can include strengthening their soothing system, creating a secure internal base, improving emotion regulation, and building resilience.
How To Do It: Begin with psychoeducation, then include regulation training, the development of their compassionate identity, and daily practice to reinforce their compassionate self.
3) Shame Reconstruction Intervention
Shame restructuring is a compassion-focused intervention that focuses on chronic shame by incorporating compassionate understanding.
What It Is: This CFT intervention highlights shame narratives and reprocesses them in a developmental, relational, and evolutionary context. This can include letter writing, reframing, imagery, and chair dialogue techniques.
How It Helps Clients: This intervention can help clients separate behaviors from their identity and normalize their emotional responses. Over time, this decreases their threat system activation, avoidance, and withdrawal.
How To Do It: Begin by asking your client to identify their core shame beliefs and explore the protective purpose of the shame. You can emphasize that suffering is a universal experience, not a personal flaw. Introduce compassionate reinterpretation and encourage the client to use compassionate responses in triggering situations.
4) Compassionate Mind Training (CMT)
This is a structured CFT intervention designed to systematically strengthen the soothing system.
What It Is: A multi-session training protocol incorporating soothing rhythm breathing, compassionate imagery, embodiment practices, and compassionate behavioral rehearsal.
How It Helps Clients: CMT builds emotional regulation capacity over time. Rather than relying on insight alone, clients train their nervous system to access compassion more consistently.
How To Do It: Introduce psychoeducation on the three systems. Begin regulation training (SRB), then develop compassionate imagery and embodiment practices. Assign daily repetition to strengthen neural pathways associated with safeness and warmth.
5) Compassion Flow Development (Three Flows of Compassion)
This intervention strengthens the different directions compassion can move.
What It Is: An intervention that assesses and trains the three flows:
- Compassion for others
- Compassion from others
- Compassion for self
How It Helps Clients: Clients often have uneven compassion flows (e.g., kind to others but harsh toward themselves). Strengthening blocked flows improves emotional balance and relational functioning.
How To Do It: Assess which flow feels most difficult. Explore fears associated with that direction of compassion. Use imagery, behavioral practice, and chair dialogue to gradually strengthen that flow.
6) Evolutionary and Social Mentality Formulation
This intervention uses evolutionary theory to contextualize shame and threat.
What It Is: A formulation approach that explains self-criticism, shame, and social comparison through evolutionary and social rank theory.
How It Helps Clients: This reduces personal blame by reframing suffering as part of the human condition. Clients understand their “tricky brain” as a product of evolution, not failure.
How To Do It: Provide psychoeducation on how human brains evolved for survival and social belonging. Explore how threat responses were once adaptive. Link current difficulties to these systems and reinforce that compassion is a regulatory skill that can be developed.
Other Helpful CFT Therapy Resources
CFT is a valuable therapeutic approach to draw on with clients who struggle with compassion. Because of its flexibility, you can blend CFT interventions with other therapies promoting whole-person care. Before you get started using CFT interventions and techniques, we encourage you to review other CFT resources available at TherapyByPro.com. TherapyByPro is a trusted professional resource offering evidence-based worksheets, resources, and documentation templates tailored to your clinical niche.
Examples of helpful CFT resources include:
Final Thoughts on Using Compassion-Focused Therapy in Sessions
Compassion-Focused Therapy interventions and techniques can provide you with a structured framework to help clients who struggle with shame, self-criticism, and some trauma-related stress. By targeting the soothing system and helping clients recognize the shared experience of human suffering, clients can improve their relationship with themselves. With practice, CFT interventions can help clients experience noticeable changes in their identity, self-perception, and relationships.
A key benefit of CFT is that it can be used alongside other therapies to deliver personalized, effective care. You can learn more about using CFT as a primary model or as an integrated approach with continuing education and training opportunities within your clinical setting.
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References:
- L.A. Millard, M.W. Wan, D.M. Smith, A. Wittkowski, The effectiveness of compassion focused therapy with clinical populations: A systematic review and meta-analysis, Journal of Affective Disorders, Volume 326, 2023, Pages 168-192 ISSN 0165-0327, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2023.01.010.
- Millard LA, Wan MW, Smith DM, Wittkowski A. The effectiveness of compassion focused therapy with clinical populations: A systematic review and meta-analysis. J Affect Disord. 2023 Apr 1;326:168-192. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.01.010. Epub 2023 Jan 14. PMID: 36649790.
- Sussex Publishers. (n.d.-b). Compassion-focused therapy. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/compassion-focused-therapy