Supervision in primary care: support or persecution?
Jonathan Burton, John Launer in Supervision and Support in Primary Care, 2018
In the exchange described above, it emerged that my supervisee did not entirely trust me because she feared I was thinking critical thoughts about her work. But, how is it possible to engage in a process of true learning from experience without some element of critical self-reflection? One of the weaknesses of the conventional model of the ‘reflective practitioner’ is that it usually fails to engage with this delicate question, which is always lurking at the core of the supervisory experience. We all have a capacity for self-criticism, but this can take a more or less helpful form, depending upon whether it is a spur to self-examination and reorientation of our thinking about ourselves, or self-immolation and despair about our own worthlessness. Probably most of us fluctuate between these positions in relation to our experience of our own work. Recognising all of this, it becomes clear that the job of the supervisor is to constitute the supervisory relationship as a space in which supervisees feel safe to explore their practice experience without risk of feeling any more judged, persecuted or criticised than they are already liable to do by virtue of their own internal self-critical faculties. In a political and policy climate where ‘governance’ and ‘accountability’ become easily confused with the blaming and shaming of allegedly ‘failing’ institutions and their staff, such a model of supervision can sound almost subversive.
Compassion Focused Therapy for Neurological Conditions
Giles N. Yeates, Fiona Ashworth in Psychological Therapies in Acquired Brain Injury, 2019
CFT combines emphases on social psychology, positive psychology, evolutionary theory and neurophysiological models of affect regulation to understand our emotional experiences (Gilbert, 2005, 2009, 2010a, 2010b). The CFT approach argues that attachment and affiliative behaviours have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to regulate threat-based emotions and action tendencies. For example, when children are threatened, the kindness and affection of the parent calms them down because their brains are set up to be calmed by the compassion and kindness of others. This is an important evolutionary role of affiliation and attachment, which is key to CFT. CFT focuses on developing affiliative emotions (e.g., care, support, kindness, validation and encouragement) as part of the experience of these interventions. It is the ‘emotional textures’ of the intervention that are key. Core to CFT is the view that our relationships with ourselves can be helpful, kind, compassionate, understanding and validating, or we can become self-critical and self-undermining. Indeed, people high in self-criticism can experience mental health issues such as anxiety and depression whereas those who are self-compassionate are more resilient (MacBeth & Gumley, 2012). Hence, one simple approach of CFT is to identify self-criticism and help people refocus on self-compassion.
‘It's the best decision I ever made': success stories with weight loss surgery
Jenny Radcliffe in Cut Down to Size, 2013
As we saw in Chapter 6, our ‘old brain' uses emotions as a threat-protection system to alert us to threat, but our ‘new brain' – our ability to think, reason and project into the future – can get caught up in this emotional wave causing us to ruminate on worries. You may experience high levels of self-critical thoughts; telling you that you should have done things better, that you should be a different kind of person, that you should feel or behave differently or be more able to cope. Challenging your thoughts in a compassionate way is not the same as self-criticism as it accepts that we all have weaknesses and failings and that we also have a wish to improve. Compassionate thought-balancing53 emphasises growth, hopefulness and building on positives.
Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on self-criticism and feeling of shame in methamphetamine users
Published in Journal of Substance Use, 2020
Zahra Ghaleh Emamghaisi, Seyyed Hamid Atashpour
A number of theoretical and research evidence show that negative emotions and substance-dependent disorders are interrelated, i.e., individuals who experience more negative emotions are more prone to substances and alcohol use, as a coping mechanism (Measelle, Stice, & Springe, 2006). Self-criticism and feeling of shame are two negative emotions closely linked to substance use disorder. Research results show that self-criticism and shame play a prominent role in mood disorder, delinquency, alcoholism, personality disorder, and interpersonal problems (Gilbert & Irons, 2005; Gilbert & Procter, 2006; Whelton & Greenberg, 2005). Self-criticism is defined as an individual’s tendency to have high expectations of himself and to question his own performance. Self-criticism causes an individual to believe his performance is poor and set unattainable standards of behavior for himself, which prevent him from building relationships (Kannan & Levitt, 2013). According to Shahar, Kanitzki, Shulman, and Blatt (2006), self-criticism is highly correlated with lower levels of progressing toward goals ad future-goal expectations. Besides, it is negatively correlated with the internal motivation to achieve goals one of which might be abandoning substance use. Since it has been shown that substances addicts have a high self-criticism; therefore, they should be taught how to deal with it to be able to abandon substance use (Tangney & Dearing, 2004).
Roles of the metacognition and emotional systems in a categorization task for adults with moderate and severe learning disabilities
Published in International Journal of Developmental Disabilities, 2022
Suzanne Igier, Pennequin Valérie
The third hypothesis was that coping strategies could be linked to metacognitive experience. In particular, we hypothesized that some maladaptive coping strategies would be associated with negative metacognitive experiences. Our results show that self-criticism was a good predictor to explain some of the metacognitive performance before the categorization task (FOF). Consequently, the more people are conscious of their own difficulties and consider they could find a solution to this situation, the greater FOF is. We can suppose that this self-criticism can be linked to apprehension relating to the experiment, “An exercise… I will again be in difficulty”, without considering the task specifically, but perceiving the situation as anxiety inducing, as an assessment with an experimenter. Thus, self-criticism could be linked to a stress factor or to weak self-esteem.
Systematic review (meta-aggregation) of qualitative studies on the experiences of family members caring for individuals with early psychosis
Published in International Review of Psychiatry, 2019
Esther Yee Wai Mui, Sherry K. W. Chan, Pik Ying Chan, Christy L. M. Hui, Wing C. Chang, Edwin H. M. Lee, Eric Y. H. Chen
Our findings also suggest that caregivers’ trauma and psychological distress are often the consequences of their burden of responsibility. Psychological distress had been an important research theme (Harvey, Burns, Fahy, Manley, & Tattan, 2001; Hatfield, 1978; Kuipers et al., 2010; Smallwood, 2016). An avoidance coping style was found to be associated with distress and burden, even in the early stages of the illness among caregivers of individuals with FEP (Jansen et al., 2015). As found in this review, caregivers’ acceptance of their relative and their caregiver role led to emotional stability as illustrated by the themes of ‘realization and change’, ‘reconstruction of personal life’, ‘coping journey’, and ‘journey of integration with personal spirituality’. Caregivers who integrated their experience with their personal spirituality were able to develop compassion and a stronger sense of acceptance. This finding suggests that the use of compassion-focused therapy may be an effective intervention for the caregivers. This form of therapy involves training in developing compassion for self and others, and this might be helpful for caregivers (Gilbert et al., 2017; Gilbert & Procter, 2006). It was shown to improve psychological well-being in people with high self-criticism (Leaviss & Uttley, 2015). Multiple services are needed to address the different needs of the caregivers (Selick et al., 2017).
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