Delivering Compassionate Mind Training Groups - the power of common humanity

by Tiegan Holtham

In 2021, my colleague Sara Clarke and I became accredited facilitators of the 8-week Compassionate Mind Training (CMT) course developed by Dr Charlie Heriott-Maitland and Dr Chris Irons. Now we are currently three weeks into delivering our 5th course here in Darwin, NT, and enjoying every minute. Fortune and eagerness has allowed us to offer CMT across various populations – the general public, low income parents, and in-house for a NT Government department. Overall, the aspect I have valued the most has been the power of common humanity.

Running this course has been enjoyable and helped me to develop and strengthen my own knowledge and practice. It is skills-based and packs in a lot of content. Each week offers compassion related practices for participants to engage with, linked with core Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) theory. The central message is that with awareness of our tricky brains, we can stop judging ourselves and choose to develop a more compassionate self, which then changes the way we relate to ourselves and others.

As a CFT therapist, I have viewed compassionate mind skills as the practical and purposeful elements of the modality that sit alongside the relationship and the person-to-person work of the therapy. I would argue that the experience of receiving compassion from the therapist is a vital ingredient to CFT. The therapeutic relationship itself supports the client to build tolerance of their feelings, challenge unhelpful self-perceptions and develop acceptance that they are human; wonderful and fallible. The therapist holds the belief that the client can take responsibility for change, and this allows the client to trust and focus on building new skills.

These same outcomes are arrived at differently in group CMT. In the group setting we don’t require participants to share their past or explore their own formulation. Yet despite this, they gradually begin to do so with their fellow group members. Each week participants test the waters by sharing vulnerable personal information, and as a result trust and compassion grows steadily. Very quickly, even fairly routine conversations about how the home practice went between sessions highlights the group’s common humanity. Each participant feels seen, heard and accepted in their struggles, as those around them have different but similar experiences. As the group share their reflections, the common threads between them grow apparent along with a building sense of connection. While, as a clinician, I can tell you that others often feel the same, it is quite different to sit around a table of your peers hearing thoughts that mimic your own experience, especially those you’ve felt too unsure to even voice.

The authenticity of the three flows of compassion between group participants lands differently too. In individual sessions, it is not often a client can truly offer compassion to their therapist, however in the group setting compassion is intuitively and freely shared around. This allows group members to confidently recognise their prior skills in compassion, while also being called out for the resistances they may have to receiving compassion. Your fellow participants simply aren’t going to let you shut down or dismiss compassion after you’ve been dishing it out in spades to others for a few weeks. I could tell you this too of course, but it is easy to discount the compassion coming from your therapist. Ultimately the paid listener sitting across from you doesn’t have quite the legitimacy of a group of your peers.

At the end of each group we have run, it has been heart-warming to have participants ask to celebrate and mark the end of the group with a meal together, and to leave with discussions of ongoing friendships. There is something special about shared struggles in the way it brings people together. It’s as if we’re designed to bond through compassion and our sense of common humanity.