Compassionate Focused Therapy (CFT)
CFT combines psychology, neuroscience, and mindfulness to help you understand how your mind responds to stress. Our brains naturally react to threat with fight, flight, or freeze, which is useful for survival but can make it hard to stay calm or kind to ourselves when we feel out of control.
CFT helps you strengthen your soothing system, the part of your brain that promotes feelings of safety, connection, and calm. When this system is active, it becomes easier to make healthy choices and approach challenges with balance rather than criticism.
How Compassionate Focused Therapy Works
CFT teaches practical skills to help you respond to yourself with warmth and understanding, especially during difficult moments. It uses gentle, guided exercises that focus on awareness, mindfulness, and emotional regulation.
During sessions, you will:
- Learn how your emotional systems (threat, drive, and soothing) influence your eating patterns and self-image.
- Recognise your inner critic and develop a more supportive, compassionate inner voice.
- Practise calming techniques and visualisations that promote relaxation and emotional stability.
- Explore healthier, kinder ways to motivate yourself toward your goals.
- Strengthen your ability to stay grounded and patient when progress feels slow.
CFT helps you connect mind and body in a more harmonious way, allowing weight loss to feel less like a battle and more like an act of self-care.
Benefits of Compassionate Focused Therapy for Weight Wellness
CFT offers powerful benefits that go far beyond food and dieting. It addresses the emotional roots of why we sometimes struggle to care for ourselves consistently.
Key benefits include:
- Reducing guilt and shame: Learn to respond to setbacks with understanding rather than punishment.
- Managing emotional eating: Recognise the emotions that drive your eating habits and create healthier ways to soothe yourself.
- Improving body image: Develop appreciation and acceptance for your body as it is, while working toward your goals with kindness.
- Lowering stress: Activate your soothing system to reduce stress hormones that can affect weight and wellbeing.
- Building emotional resilience: Feel calmer, more confident, and better able to manage life’s ups and downs.
- Encouraging sustainable change: Replace harsh discipline with self-compassion so that healthy habits last long term.
How CFT Can Help You?
CFT supports your journey to a healthier, calmer relationship with food and your body. It helps you understand that lasting change does not come from self-criticism but from self-compassion.
When you learn to treat yourself with the same kindness you would offer to someone you care about, you begin to feel lighter, both emotionally and physically. You start to make choices that come from love, not fear.
CFT is not a quick fix or a diet plan. It is a structured, therapeutic approach that supports genuine transformation from the inside out.
Begin Your Compassionate Journey
If you have tried to lose weight before but found yourself caught in frustration or self-criticism, Compassionate Focused Therapy can help you take a different path. One filled with understanding, patience, and emotional strength.
Together, we can work on creating calm, balance, and self-trust as you move toward your goals.
Click the button below to contact me today to find out how Compassionate Focused Therapy can support your weight wellness journey.