Multiple Selves in CFT
Compassion Focused TherapyCompassion Focused Therapy uses a technique called multiple selves. Now many psychodynamic therapies recognize that the mind is full of conflicts, some of which are conscious, some of which are not. Multiple selves is a way of bringing out conflict in the mind, particularly conflict between different motives and different emotions. The way that multiple selves is done is to explain to clients that sometimes when we experience traumas or difficulties or threats, we can have a whole range of different emotions and thoughts all turning up at the same time, and those emotions can be in conflict with each other.
So what we do is we invite the client to slow down and explore these emotions to a particular event individually, to take them out as it were and just look at them individually. So we would look at, for example, angry mind, anxious mind, and sad mind. An example that we might use is imagine that you've had an argument with somebody you care about. What is your angry self thinking? What is it paying attention to?
Where is your anger in your body? What does your angry self want to do? And typically, of course, people notice that when they're in angry emotion, they have angry thoughts, and they have different kinds of behaviors. There are three types of behaviors to look out for. Anger, one is escalation, just becoming more and more angry. The second one is called cutoff. That's it. I don't wanna talk about this.
I'm storming out. And the third one is what we call passive aggression, where people sort of give in, but then they sulk or they are resentful of having to give in or they're planning their vengeance. So we explore in detail the dynamics of anger to this event. And then we say, Okay, now move your attention to the part of you that was very anxious about having an argument with somebody you care about. And we'd go through the same again, the thoughts, the behaviors, where it is in the body, and so forth.
And then, thirdly, we would then, let's look at the part of you that was sad that you had this argument with somebody you care about. And once again, we look at what the sad part was paying attention to. So this enables clients to begin to do what we call differentiation, the differentiation function, beginning to separate out these different kinds of emotion. And then we invite the client to think about how do these parts of you get on?
What does angry self think of anxious self? And typically, the client say, oh, angry self doesn't like anxious self because it sees it as a wimp. And what does anxious self think about angry self? And the class says, oh, no. It doesn't like angry self because it knows that if anger gets going, it can say hurtful things and harmful things. So you look at the relationship between these different emotions and how they work, and this enables the client to recognize that often when we get into states of threat or conflict or whatever, that we have a lot of different things going on in our mind. Now, Dan Siegel uses the idea that we're teaching clients or showing clients to move from being a smoothie to a fruit salad.
Because a lot of our clients, it's such a rush and such a combination of different emotions. They're very difficult to separate out what this part is thinking, what this part is thinking, what this part is thinking. And therefore, they kind of bounce around between these conflicting emotions, multiple selves. There's a way of showing them that they do have conflict and that they can focus on each one of those individually so they begin to mindfully track these different emotions that allows differentiation, that allows tolerance.