Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT)

Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) is an integrative, evolution-informed biopsychosocial psychotherapy developed by Paul Gilbert for distress maintained by shame and self-criticism, in which compassion — “a sensitivity to suffering in self and others, with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it” — is cultivated through compassionate mind training in order to strengthen the affiliative-soothing affect regulation system relative to an overactive threat system (Gilbert, Psychology and Psychotherapy). In nutritional psychology, CFT is relevant because shame, self-directed hostility, and fear of self-compassion are recurrent maintaining factors in disordered eating, body dissatisfaction, and restriction-overeating cycles, and adapted forms such as CFT-E for eating disorders and CFT-OE for overeating show promising but still developing evidence for reducing eating psychopathology and increasing self-compassion (International Journal of Cognitive Therapy).