Over the last, I'd say about ten years, in our CFT consultation groups, we have consultation teams in CFT, similar to consultation teams in DBT. I've been lucky enough to work with a lot of highly expert DBT practitioners like Nancy Ring, Carrie Diamond, Beth Fear, lots of people who have a great DBT experience. And I've been lucky enough to train with people and do trainings with people like Shereen Rizvi, where we were working with how CFT and DBT would work specifically with shame. And one of the areas that CFT can be really helpful for DBT practitioners is helping them to understand the nature of shame, to understand the nature of shame as a response to social hierarchies, to social threats, and to have a specific intervention that can allow people to respond to shame with greater compassion for themselves and others.
To understand shame as a social threat that narrows people's range of emotion, narrows people's attention, narrows people's behaviors. There's one other really important area that CFT and DVT overlap, and that has to do with relational trauma. You know, a better way of understanding borderline personality disorder, and I always wince when I say that phrase, that name a little bit. We really need, as a field, to come together and have a less laden, stigma laden term for people who struggle and suffer with these problems, because this is really a response to relational trauma, chronic trauma, often chronic abuse.
And one thing that CFT therapists understand and train in is how our attachment histories shape our ability to regulate emotion. So if our emotions of threat, including shame and social threat and anger, if those emotions are regulated by our attachment experiences, right? If we down regulate excessive threat through the experience of warmth, care, and soothing, and that is how we learn to regulate those emotions. But what happens when we have caregivers or trusted others who are abusive or chronically belittling or negligent?
We learn to pair the experience of soothing and caring and stabilization with the experience of threat and danger. So it's as if the brakes and the gas on a car were connected. Every time I wanna slow down and feel loved or supported or emotionally safe, I'm so scared of intimacy, I'm so scared of empathy, I'm so scared of attachment that I become very on guard, and I never really learn how to tolerate these difficult states of emotion. My own emotions become terrifying, as well as my own inner attachment system. So I'm living in a world of threat. I want so badly not to be abandoned. I want so badly not to be lost and to be separate and alone, and I don't want it to happen again.
Trauma memories and people with these kind of histories have this experience of, God, it's happening again. I'm abandoned again. I'm lost again. What a terrifying experience for so many of us humans, right? And focused therapy recognizes that and recognizes that what people in that situation often need is a gradual exposure to caring affect. They need to learn how to hold secure attachment dynamics. They need to learn what it's like to be safe, how to be safe being safe, how to be safely embodied, as Deirdre Fay, our buddy Mike describes it, in a way that doesn't cause more panic.
Now often, you know, they teach you in grad school to be empathic and attuned and have these good therapist qualities. So somebody comes in with a difficult attachment history and they're terrified of of caregiving feelings, And you as the therapist are caregiving and connected, and they're suspicious of you. Maybe they leave therapy. They have therapy interfering behaviors. They act out. And then the therapist, the young therapist, feels they're bad.
I'm a bad therapist. I screwed up. I did the wrong thing. And a seasoned DBT therapist, CFT therapist, and particularly like a like a somebody who has both of those, you know, like a one two punch of CFT and DBT, can help someone with all of those repertoires of skills building for emotion regulation. And then it can also help the supervisee and the client contain, hold the shame, the threat, the panic around relating, even interrelating. And then the compassionate mind training exercises are gradual, challenging, but not overwhelming ways to train the mind to be able to have stabilizing secure attachment dynamics. Now I have some clients who had, like, lifelong problems with BPD and emotion regulation issues and many, many hospitalizations, and CFT's really helped them.
You know, it's helped them to find a way to feel safe, a way to feel like they matter. You know, it's really beautiful working with DBT practitioners, actually.