Browsing by Subject "häpeä"

Borderline personality disorder is a mental disorder which is associated with high levels of subjective suffering and severe decline in everyday functioning. It is considered quite difficult to treat and it has been linked to substantially increased risks of self-injurious behaviour and morbidity due to suicides. The psychopathology and core symptomology of borderline personality disorder can be conceptualized through the feelings of chronic shame and having a shameful self-image. Shame is a highly aversive affect, which has many different unadaptive behavioural and cognitive consequences. Borderline personality disorder has been linked to many abnormalities in emotional processing of shame and in susceptibilies to experiencing affects of shame. Self-compassion is a theme adopted to western psychology from Buddhist traditions. Self-compassion has recently seen an increase of attention in the field of modern psychology. It has been linked to many positive psychological correlates and to reduced general psychopathology. Self-compassion constitutes of an attitude to oneself in which one accepts his/herself subjective difficulties with mindfulness and as an essential part of the common human experience. Self-compassionate attitude toward oneself, also includes the desire to alleviate ones subjective suffering. Based on intuition self-compassion seems to target the main difficulties behind the problems that are faced by people with borderline personality disorder and chronic feelings shame. The objective of this paper was to examine the empirical and theoretical data of the role of shame in explaining the symptomology of borderline personality disorder and the applicability of self-compassion in treatment of psychopathology stemming from intense feelings of shame. Randomized controlled trials, pilot studies of self-compassion based interventions, meta-analyses and systematic reviews were searched from common psychological databases and Google Scholar. Additionally articles were included in this paper after manual scanning of the lists of reference of the selected literature. Even though the information obtained from research on the applicability of self-compassion in treatment of borderline personality disorder and transdiagnostic shame has its limitations, self-compassion may have its unique additional offerings to the treatment of borderline personality disorder. Future research on the mechanisms of change in self-compassion and their neural substrates would be highly useful in order to understand the potential mediating effect of transdiagnostic shame in reduced psychopathology associated with developing a self-compassionate attitude.

Objective. Compassion is defined as a capability to experience one’s personal or another’s suffering and also feel motivated to relieve encountered suffering. Eating disorders are psychiatric disorders consisting of problems with food and eating-related behaviors which cause clinically significant distress. Eating disorder prevalence has seen a major surge in recent years. In addition, the disorders are quite often long-lasting, greatly reducing quality of life, and they are resistant to many of the commonplace treatment methods. The situation at hand actively motivates to seek and develop new and more effective treatments for eating disorders. Shame and self-criticism generally co-occur with eating disorders and are linked with greater psychopathology, while compassion works to some extent as an antagonist to them and is known to decrease psychopathology as well. Compassion can be learned and compassion-focused therapy (CFT, suom. myötätuntokeskeinen terapia) focuses on just that with its methods. The objective of this literature review is to examine the potential benefits and opportunities of compassion-focused therapy for the treatment of eating disorders. In addition, the focus is on the increased experience of shame that may be associated with eating disorders and the benefits of treating it. Methods. The literature for this review was gathered from PubMed-, Scopus, and Google Scholar - databases combining the search terms “eating disorders” and “compassion-focused therapy”. Results and conclusions. According to several studies, compassion-focused therapy has been found to be beneficial in treating eating disorders. The shame and self-criticism associated with eating disorders are alleviated with compassionate training, which reduces both specific eating disorder symptomatology and, more broadly, psychopathology, which promotes treatment response to conventional therapies. Promisingly, Compassion-focused therapy has been found to work particularly well alongside standard treatment, thereby reaching for traits of psychopathology, such as symptom-sustaining feelings of shame which are not directly reached by other methods.