CFT Essentials (Compassion-Focused Therapy training).
CFT Essentials is a 3-day course from the Association for Psychological Therapies (APT), a leading provider of Compassion-Focused Therapy training for professionals working in mental health and related fields in the UK and Ireland. CFT Essentials is the benchmark for professionals who want an excellent introduction to CFT which will enable them to understand it and use it straight away. It is also the gateway to further CFT training including APT’s CFT Masterclass.
It gives you APT’s level one Accreditation in CFT, with the option of sitting in exam to obtain level two (free of charge) and from there through more study right up to APT's CFT Masterclass and level four Accreditation.
Founded in 1981, APT has grown to become a trusted source of gold-standard training, from introductory through to masterclass level. Over 150,000 mental health professionals have attended APT’s post-qualification courses, commissioned by more than 120 NHS Trusts and all major independent providers.
APT’s CFT training uniquely combines built-in APT Accreditation with automatic access to our renowned post-course resources to help you support your clients. It is available for both teams and individuals, face-to-face or online, and can also count towards The APT Diploma in Psychological Therapies.
Executive Summary:
Compassion Focused Therapy provides an important new perspective on the therapeutic process. Of course therapists endeavour to be compassionate towards their patients, but compassion focused therapy is more about teaching patients to be compassionate towards themselves. This involves the therapist understanding the tug of war that takes place between the different systems and sections of the brain; understanding that everybody has competing fears, fantasies, ambitions, rules for how they should be, and so on. Such an understanding of what takes place in the brain enables people to take a more compassionate view of how they think, feel and behave as different times, and to move forward to overcome specific problems, whether this problems are of depression, anxiety, irritability, impulsiveness, or any other.
Therefore what this course does is threefold: (A) it teaches the understanding of what happens in the brain, so that people can treat themselves with more constructive compassion, (B) it highlights techniques that therapists may already be familiar with, which chime with compassion focused thinking, and (C) it teaches further techniques the therapist can use to be in line with this approach.
Who should attend?
People who attend this course normally fall into one of two categories:
1. Professionals who see patients in 1:1 treatment settings, have a significant degree of clinical skill, and wish to add CFT techniques to their repertoire.
2. 'Whole teams' (either in inpatient or community settings) seeking to develop a common approach.
The professional affiliations of people attending this course should include: mental health/psychiatric nurses, social workers, occupational therapists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, probation officers and others working in a variety of settings including: Adult Mental Health, Children and Adolescents, Older People, Substance Misuse, and Forensic.
The CFT Essentials course covers a great deal:
- The evolution of the brain: the old brain and the new brain, and their respective functions and interplay.
- The three emotion regulation systems: Threat and protection; Drive and excitement; and Contentment, soothing and social safeness. What they are and how they interact.
- Balancing the systems, and focusing on the social safeness/soothing system.
- Achieving clarity on what compassion is. Caring, Sensitivity, Sympathy, being able to tolerate one's own Distress, Empathy, being non-judgmental.
- The skills of compassion: the ability to show warmth, kindness and support in a range of situations. Compassionate attention, Compassionate reasoning, Compassionate behaviour, Compassionate imagery, and Compassionate feeling.
- The importance of self-compassion: teaching clients to be compassionate.
- Fear of compassion. Why some clients can be fearful of compassion, how this limits their behavior to others, and how it affects themselves.
- How therapy can – and maybe should - stimulate feelings of safeness, warmth and connectedness that have a direct soothing effect on the threat protection system.
What this Compassion Focused Therapy course will do for you:
- You will have the feeling of knowing what compassion - and compassion focused therapy – are all about, and understanding them.
- You will be able to work in a straightforwardly compassionate way: in a way that will stimulate feelings of safeness, warmth and connectedness in patients.
- You will feel - and be - more compassionate towards yourself.
- You will feel more compassionate to other people - to understand and feel for the struggles – and successes - they have.
- You will know how to instantly make what you already do more compassionate.
- You will understand how people – including yourself – can be 'your own worst enemy'. And your own best friend.
- You will be able to 'see things' in terms of the three emotion-regulation systems, and be soothed and excited by doing so.
What you receive as a result of attending the training:
You will be registered as having attended the course, thereby gaining APT's Level 1 accreditation, and receive a certificate to this effect. The accreditation gives you access to online resources associated with the course and access to the online exam if you wish to uprate your APT accreditation to Level 2.
Your registration lasts indefinitely, whilst your accreditation lasts for 3 years from the date of completion and is renewable.
Your accreditation is given value by the fact of over 150,000 people having attended APT training. See APT accreditation for full details.
Booking is easy...
|
|
Live Feedback Ratings.
Every delegate rates our courses for presentation and relevance and the averages below update automatically as each new course runs.
These live results also power APT’s acclaimed Accreditation System — so widely valued because it is evidence-based, drawing directly on the real-time ratings of professionals who have completed the training.
Face-to-Face*
Presentation:
Relevance:
Online Live*
Presentation:
Relevance:
Online Anytime**
Overall Rating:
* Feedback taken from the last 10 runnings of this course (each course has around 15 people attending).
** Feedback taken from the last 20 people completing the course. Delegates give a single overall rating to anytime courses.
If the course has run less than the stated number of times, the percentage score will be based on the number of times the course has been completed.
Reviews.
APT prides itself on the feedback we receive about our courses. Below are just some of the great comments the Compassion Focused Therapy course has received.
“One of the best courses I have ever attended. Very relevant to my current role.”
“The course has been excellent. It is very appropriate to my work setting and very informative with plenty of opportunities to practice using the techniques over the 2 days. I certainly will be using aspects of Compassion Focused Therapy in my work role and intend to feedback some of the ideas to the wider team. It will really benefit my clients. Thank you to the tutor for excellent delivery!”
