Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) in Manchester
If you often feel “not good enough”, find yourself stuck in people-pleasing patterns, or live with a loud inner critic, you’re not alone. Many of the people I work with have spent years trying to achieve more, be better, or fix themselves—only to feel more disconnected, anxious, or overwhelmed.
Compassion is more than just learning to "Be Kinder to Yourself". It’s developing the courage to do the things that will help you in the long run. Even if it feels hard.
Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) helps you understand where those patterns come from and teaches you how to relate to yourself with more courage, warmth, and support. It’s not about pretending everything is fine or forcing “positivity”—it’s about learning how to understand yourself, building skills to help you tolerate the tough stuff and find the courage do what’s helpful.
What Problems Can CFT Help with?
CFT is especially helpful if you struggle with shame, self-criticism, or a harsh internal voice. It can also help if you find yourself stuck yo-yoing between striving and trying to make sure everything is safe or ‘just right’ and lacking motivation and shutting down avoiding and procrastinating.
CFT can be particularly helpful if you:
- Feel constantly anxious, guilty or overwhelmed
- Criticise yourself harshly with negative self-talk
- Struggle with self-worth; including low confidence or perfectionism
- Find it hard to say no and people pleasing
- Finding it hard to ask for help or being emotionally vulnerable with others
- Feel disconnected from others or emotionally numb
- Struggle to=understand and manage your emotions or find certain emotions too overwhelming or scary.
- Experienced childhood neglect, criticism, or emotional abuse
- Experienced parents who provided you with a stable home but were not very emotionally warm, leaving you finding it hard to connect with these sorts of emotions.
What to expect in a course of Compassion Focused Therapy?
CFT typically moves through these key areas. Unlike some other therapies, we don’t use a set procedure, protocol or standardised treatment plan. So, what does a compassion-focused therapy treatment plan actually look like?
Together, we work out what you want from therapy and the therapy tasks that will help. We move between different areas or modules depending on your needs and goals. We will have regular reviews to esure we are on track and work through any blocks or barriers. Here are some examples of the sorts of modules we may work through. Your therapy is individual to you. We won’t necessarily work through all of these steps or go in this order. But here’s a flavour of what you can expect.
Understanding your history: exploring how early experiences shaped your emotional patterns and emotional learnings.
Psychoeducation: learning about tricky brains, threat systems, and how compassion works.
Compassionate mind training: using imagery, breathwork, body or somatic and emotion focused techniques and visualisation to build up and strengthen the parts of your brain that are connected to kindness, care and courage.
Compassionate Thinking: Similar to CBT, we recognise threat brain thinking and help you to respond with more helpful supportive thinking. We aim to build your wisdom and commitment to doing what’s helpful.
Emotional Awareness: being able to tap into specific emotions and understand what these emotions may be trying to tell us and what we need to feel more settled. Together we learn how to manage and tolerate difficult feelings.
Exploring real-life challenges: Unpicking issues like people pleasing, procrastination, problems with boundaries, assertiveness, or burnout. This can also include processing trauma.
Chairwork and parts work: We all have different 'parts’, which can lead to us feeling ‘stuck’ or ‘torn’. (Have you seen inside out? It's a bit like that) We try to help the parts work together so you can get ‘unstuck’.
Compassionate action: finding small but powerful ways to live more aligned with your values.
Working with fears, blocks and resistance (FBRs) A big part of the work of CFT is recognising the times when you feel stuck and making sense of what’s going on and what you need.
What happens in a Compassion Focused Therapy Session?
CFT brings together practices from different types of therapy to suit your individual needs. We work together to understand your history, what you’re experiencing, the types of practices or skills that would be helpful for you.
A key part of CFT is Compassionate Mind Training (CMT) form of brain training – like taking your mind to the gym. With regular practice, CMT can create changes in your brain and physiology.
Some common techniques include:
Somatic therapy: Using your body to support your mind using posture, tone of voice, breath work and movement. CFT helps you to feel different, not just think differently.
Compassionate imagery: We use imagery, imagination and memory to help build your compassionate mind and to understand the past or help prepare for challenging situations in the future
Compassionate rethinking: This can be similar to CBT but with a different take, we aim to help you validate your struggles and give yourself words of wisdom, support and encouragement. (You won’t find any evidence for – evidence against worksheets here!)
Compassionate action: This is about taking therapy out of the room and into life. Developing ideas of things that you can try out between sessions.
Chairwork : Chairwork is a way of getting out of just ‘talking’ thing through. It’s a more hands-on practice that will get both of us moving around and being creative with how we do therapy. Gently exploring different parts of yourself—like the inner critic, the hurt part, or the compassionate part and giving it voice and movement.
Direct trauma work: CFT is used alongside my other trauma techniques.
Don’t like the sound of something on this list? That’s okay. CFT is about having a wide range of things that we can do together so we can find what works for you.