← Compassion in a T-Shirt
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A
Hi, I'm Dr. Stan Steindl and welcome to Compassion in a T Shirt, where we explore the science and practice of compassion and how it can genuinely transform lives. Today's conversation touches on a really important and very modern challenge, the experience of shame following online sexual harm and how that shame can keep people stuck in silence, self blame and isolation. It's an area that many young people are navigating, often on their own, without
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the support they need.
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In this episode, I'm joined by clinical psychologist Dr. Eve Da Silva, whose recent research explores whether a brief online self compassion program can help reduce self criticism, ease psychological distress, and importantly, open the
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door to help seeking.
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Her work brings together compassion focused therapy, digital interventions, and a deep understanding of shame and vulnerability. This is an important conversation about how compassion can help people begin to relate differently to themselves, especially in moments where
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they might feel most alone.
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A
And so I bring you Dr. Eve Da Silva.
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Doctor Eve Da Silva, welcome to Compassion in a T shirt.
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C
Thank you for having me.
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B
Online sexual experiences and you can carry a lot of shame and secrecy, especially for young people. I suppose I was interested, first of all, what first drew you to this area of research and perhaps what were you noticing, maybe clinically or in the literature too, that made compassion feel like it could be helpful there?
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C
Thank you for asking. I actually completely came upon it because of my clinical work. So a few years ago I was working as a CBT therapist. That was my original training and I was just working in a kind of IAPP service and improving access to psychology therapy service here in the uk. And so you see all different kinds of presentations and people generally come for, you know, anxiety disorders or low mood that's quite calm. And I found this, I was kind of caught of guard, I think, by noticing a theme in some of my clinical work where it would start off as like a social anxiety presentation and then after a few sessions, the typical kind of cognitive kind of model for social anxiety. It wasn't just really taking, we weren't really finding the results we were looking for in the work. And then it would turn out there were actually these underlying experiences that people had had that they, they didn't. Either they had too much shame to share or they weren't even quite sure counted or mattered to bring to therapy. That's what I found really fascinating, that clients were kind of sharing that, oh, well, that's just something that happens, it kind of doesn't count. But they also felt very shameful about it. And there would be these online sexual experiences, like having a picture, a nude image of themselves sent around publicly, for example, or having viewed kind of content, pornography content online that had left them feeling really kind of confused or a bit disturbed. And so these kinds of experiences were just. I didn't feel like my therapy training, my CBT training had really given me any preparation for normalizing or talking about it in the same way that it did around, like, sort of general kind of traumatic experiences. Because of the digital aspect, I felt like we didn't really have a lot of information about how these digital intimacy issues were impacting people. And so I did, like, like a lot of therapists do, like, you know, especially if you've got, you know, you're kind of working, you kind of quickly jump onto Google and you go, okay, let me find a resource for my clients. Something that's deshaiming or destigmatizing. Let me find a nice handout or something that just kind of gives them a sense of validation and helps them see that they're not alone. And I just couldn't find anything at that point. There was just nothing that was sort of like, oh, this is what happens. This is common. This is something that could be a bit like destigmatizing for you. But I kind of learned as I went then and started integrating compassion focused therapy in my clinical work to help with the shame. And that seemed to help a lot because, you know, people who are very shameful tend to have very high self criticism. And obviously, you know, that's one of the things that compassion focused therapy is really brilliant for, is helping people combat self criticism and self blame. And I was fortunate at the time that I did have Deborah Lee as a supervisor on some PTSD cases. So I was getting some really, really good supervision and teaching on, like, kind of applying cft. So I put it there. I kind of got that experience. And then when I got onto my clinical training for, for the doctor in clinical psychology, I was really passionate about, well, what if we could create a resource or at least research this a little bit. I just thought it'd be great if we could get something out there that people could access so that the next therapist who wants to do that quick, Google, can find a resource and go, here you go. Right. So that's kind of what got me into it. And it became a bit of a passion project for me.
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B
Yes. Yeah. I can't wait to hear more about the intervention itself. Something you said there really hit home. There's a sort of a sense of ambivalence in some way that people really felt on the One hand almost like this is just what happens online or there was a kind of a dismiss the part of their mind was kind of dismissing the experience almost in, in a sort of invalidating way of themselves, you know, that it was just what happens and, and so on and so forth. And then at the very same time, these really painful feelings of shame were associated as, associated with it as well. And feeling torn across those two bits. I wondered if you could unpack the first half first. This, this sense from people that it just happened online, that that's how the online world is maybe, or that, you know, I, I, I don't deserve to, to look, look into that differently or to, to sort of, you know, even speak about it. Yeah. What, what, what was that side of that ambivalence like?
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C
Well, when this is the thought, I think it's fascinating because it speaks to how we, this is currently kind of culturally and socially constructed that, you know, young people are across generally depends on the location of course, but generally are given these kind of keep safe online sort of messages and sort of teachings where they're told, you know, these are the risks, don't fall prey to them, you know, don't send your nudes, you know, be careful of how you interact. But at the same time, the kind of, the reality on the ground is that kind of the digital technology does mediate intimacy quite a lot of the time. The reality on the ground is that, you know, young people are often navigating quite complex social rules about what's acceptable to share when you're falling in the line of, you know, being a prude and, or when you're falling in the line of being a slut. And so there's all this kind of the same kind of social, socially constructive norms around sexual behavior that we have offline. There is a whole set that's been played out online and young people are learning to navigate those norms mediated by technology. And sometimes they will find themselves in a position. So for example, it's quite common for a young person to perhaps find themselves in a position where they're getting close to someone, they're starting to have more intimate conversations, sort of sexting back and forth. Sexting isn't necessarily in and of itself a kind of a bad thing. It just has some risks associated. And I think probably there's a little bit of a gap that what happens for some young people is that when things go wrong, they feel this immense sense of self blame, of I should have known better, I should have known better, I behaved in this kind of kind of terrible way. That's why this happened to me. And so they absorb the self blame the same way that somebody might absorb the self blame in an offline boundary crossing situation. But I think the kind of combination of sexual things tend to have a lot more shame and stigma associated anyway for lots of reasons. And so the way that the kind of digital intimacies are navigated and negotiated carries a whole extra layer. There's intergenerational differences between young people and their parents and the way that their parents may understand what an older generation may understand. So it's very complex. And another thing that I think is also really interesting is the what gives you a sense of belonging or exclusion as a young person. So I don't know if this is still the case at this exact moment in time, but there's a lot of research into how masculinity is kind of being affected by, you know, the norms around sharing nudes, you know, in a group of, of young men sharing pictures that they've gained from girlfriends or from young women with each other as a sort of form of social capital. And that's very complex for them as well because it gives them a sense of status which protects them within a social group. And this makes a lot of sense in like Paul Gilbert's social mentality theory. These become sort of status signifiers and give them protection. But simultaneously it often like goes against some inner value or core value that they have or a different social mentality that they have around being respectful, being caring, being ethical. And so sometimes young men find themselves navigating this moral ambiguity and can kind of find themselves feeling a lot of shame and confusing guilt for having been adjacent to these types of behaviors. And they don't even know how to talk about that because it's normal within the group that they're in. But it's actually much more complex within the wider society.
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B
Yes, one real truth that you've said is that it's complex. It does sound very complicated. But there are sort of messages coming in sort of top down in a way about be careful of this, be careful of that and don't do this or that and so on. But then there's the sort of the peer inter peer related cultural norms and pressures and various other competing motives from a social mentality theory point of view for all parties probably. And so it becomes a little bit like it is normal amongst the peers and friends and people are trying to navigate all that the best they can and then something goes wrong or there's a harm really. That happens, you know, and the harm might be something that another person online does or, you know, but then all of a sudden, I guess that's when we make the jump to the shame side of it, where there's the self blame and those feelings. And sometimes the guilt or shame might be for both parties too. The person whose image was shared, but the person who did the sharing and everyone's feeling, you know, kind of a lot of these, A lot of this negativity. What happens there from the shame point of view in terms of then people being or feeling reluctant to, to share what they've gone through or to, to sort of seek help maybe, or seek some conversation about it, or that's sort of. That might tend to hide or withdraw or as you say, blame themselves.
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C
I think, you know, the, the understanding that I take of, of shame again comes from kind of Paul Gilbert's definition of shame, where he kind of differentiates between external and internal shame. And it. There's a lot of correlation between the kind of cons, the concept of the construct of shame and the concept and constructs of stigma. You have these, you know, the shame itself, you know, as an emotion. The idea is that it has a kind of evolutionary kind of message that it sends to the person who's experiencing it to detach from the group, to hide and to sort of separate or isolate. Because shame says to you you're bad. Like there's something about you that's kind of a contaminant now to the rest of the group. And so things that kind of signal shame we could understand as being like kind of stigmatized characteristics or things that society or group or culture has kind of labeled as being unacceptable or being in some way wrong or strange or bad. And that's the, you know, the really important distinction between guilt and shame is that guilt is just like, I did a bad thing or some, I've harmed somebody or something's happened and I'd like to correct the behavior. But it doesn't go to the core of my self concept, where shame seems to go to the core of people's self concept. And so I think on a physiological level that the level of threat mode that it puts people into really makes it kind of very difficult to articulate or verbalize, to feel safe enough to articulate or verbalize what the characteristic is, because their whole system is signaling to them that they're going to be rejected and ostracized for it. And if they've got internal shame, they're already rejecting and ostracizing themselves for it. That's the self criticism, the kind of really dramatic and difficult, painful internal messages that they kind of are repeating to themselves. So you've got that mind that's attacking itself and expecting attacks from others based on that particular topic or that particular experience.
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B
And sometimes it is such a public experience, I guess when things are shared and so on and so forth. And yeah, there's sometimes not sure what it would be called, but sort of active shaming that's happening.
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C
Yes.
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To the person.
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Things are being part of the trauma. 100%. 100.
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Yeah.
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Part of the trauma is the, is the public shaming. Especially if it involves that kind of, you know, the sharing of non consensual, the non consensual sharing of needs. Sometimes they call it non consensual pornography. That is just one example of the kind of harm that can happen. But absolutely, that's so public. It's a sort of public shaming trauma that people can experience.
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B
Yeah. Yes. Feeling very exposed, very vulnerable threat system. But in this way that then gets turned inward as well in the self attack and the self criticism and that internal shame. It's, it's sort of, well it's, it's devastating, isn't it really? It's upsetting to even think about, you know, that yeah, young people are going through all of this, such a, an added burden. It feels a little bit, I suppose as you say, there are parallels between in real life kind of experiences that people might have as well. But there is something about the online kind of version of it that that feels, feels really tough. So I love that you felt inspired because you, you went online to see if there were resources there for people and kind of found that there wasn't really. And so you've gone ahead and developed this online self compassion program. So. Yeah, maybe just, could you just walk us through it, I guess like what, what the intervention actually involves and what participants, you know, might be invited to do over that time.
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C
Sure, sure. So originally I, yeah, I, originally I sort of was like, okay, what are the core change techniques? You know, what, what do we need to, to, to use what are like our fundamentals that we need? And you know, I, I just was very, very kind of lucky because Deborah kind of gave me her time and Paul gave us a bit of time as well. And so we really sat and worked out together. Really. It's, you know, Paul and Deborah provided which, which aspects of the intervention to use and provided the scripts as well for the intervention. So we, we settled on the idea that we needed to teach some soothing system kind of activation techniques. So we set it on soothing rhythm breathing and safe space imagery as our two kind of core settling so people could have a choice. And then we settled on the idea that we wanted to make it accessible to people. So, you know, obviously, so people have different learning styles and engage with different things differently. So we included compassionate writing exercises, compassionate journaling as an option. And we also included the one thing that we made specific to online sexual experiences was we created one. One meditation, kind of. One kind of mindfulness kind of process where it was the compassionate friend. The compassionate friend for having had what your compassionate friend might say to you. So if you could at least spend some time in your mind imagining yourself sitting with a compassionate friend who might sit, give some very sort of safe, sensible, wise, courageous, strong statements to you about what's happened. And there were a few prompts that we put in there. We did, you know, I actually just did a little survey around some colleagues and asked them, know, what would you say? You know, what would you say to somebody if you heard this? And this. People just put in anonymously some really nice, compassionate prompts. And we included some of those. Deborah kind of gave a couple herself. So we just had a few really nice, compassionate statements that we included. Things like, this is not your fault. It's. I think one that really was quite nice was, it's really painful when you feel like you've been tricked. That doesn't make it your fault that this has happened. There was another one which was really lovely, which was, we can feel sad or upset about the experiences that we've had, but we don't have to be defined by the experiences that we've had. So we included some of these statements as prompts either for the journaling or within the compassionate friend practice. And then we also had a compassionate self practice just to help people kind of overcome some of their potential blocks to compassion and. And spend some time sort of generating what it feels like to embody their compassionate self. And the idea with the intervention was, well, I. I took it to some focus groups with some young people first and got them to help me iterate on it. And the feedback that I got on from the focus groups was, you know, try to make it esthetically pleasing. You know, don't. Don't make it look like a, you know, boomer PowerPoint presentation was my original, original feedback, good advice. They were like, sorry, we're not. We're not a fan of whatever's going on there. You need to go do go make it a little bit more pretty and a bit more pleasing to the eye. So that was important to them. But also they were saying, you know, give us choice, let us have choice. So I tried to kind of create as much choice as possible, possible choice of different voices for people to choose from, the choice of the different practices and then just to try and give it some coherence. What we asked was that people then kind of followed a bit of a methodology. So practice everything at least once, get a sense of it. And then you can choose either do your soothing rhythm breathing today or do your safe space imagery. And so, you know, letting people have the choice between the soothing or the, the breathing or the imagery as a settling and then giving them a chance. So it was self guided so people could kind of go in and just follow the instructions. Every day there was a little prompt. Today's job is to do some soothing rhythm breathing or some safe space imagery. And the next day, today's job is to do yourself, yourself, compassionate self practice. And then the next day it might be. And today's job is to perhaps write one reflection in your journal prompt of a compassionate thing you might say to a friend. So it was a bit like that you'd follow these, this process and we, I built it up so that people at least had a chance of the general soothing for a few days before building up to the compassionate friend for the experience. And then asked them to choose between the compassion do the compassionate friend ones and then choose between compassionate self, a compassionate friend. And the idea was that was a 14 day program. So try to do 14 days. If you miss a day, just pick it up the next day. It doesn't have to be very rigid, but just try and do these 14 days worth of practices around 10 to 15 minutes a day. And then the final day of the intervention was to write yourself a compassionate letter. And there were lots of prompts around writing yourself this compassionate letter about what you might say to yourself about the experience. So, you know, it's, it's. What was very interesting to discover was that our very first little group of participants in the, we had an embedded pilot. The very first little group gave some feedback and said it feels a bit impersonal. And there was just a slight more dropout. You know, we didn't, I think we didn't quite meet our threshold. I think we had like a, we wanted at least, you know, 50 or 60% of people to keep going. And I think we had like 40 something percent in the, in the early group that and this is a group of bucks, maybe eight people. It's quite a small group. But the thing was it feels a bit impersonal and it would be nice if we had a little bit more check in or something like that. So we thought, well, let's offer that. So we added, we redesigned and just added a offer of a 20 minute check in at the beginning and a check in 20 minute checkout at the end and to just pop an email through if you wanted, if you had any questions. And what was fascinating was people took advantage of the 20 minute check in and said yep, some people did, but the, the job part was improved. We went over, it was more acceptable to people so we had better adherence with that model. But a lot of people didn't actually ask for the check in. I think maybe only one or two out of my 37 participants actually asked a question or once at the check in. But I think people like, just like to know a real person was there and that it wasn't just a fully automated kind of AI thing because the actual amount of human effort that had to go into being part of the check in wasn't really like it, it wasn't really demanded or asked for. I think it was just the idea of there being a mind there that seemed to be helpful.
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B
Yeah, yeah, that's. Well, there's a lot of really, really wonderful bits there. I love how you sort of created a kind of focused, compassionate friend exercise I guess, which really helped them to focus in on the experience itself perhaps and also giving them some, some lovely options or at least some prompts there in terms of what, what they could use. I think that's a great idea. I, I did have a question too about fears, blocks and resistances and, and given shame and self criticism which are often such a source of, you know, blocks for, for self compassion. You know, I kind of was curious about that, but then I wondered. Yeah. That just, just knowing that there's another mind there is important perhaps. And maybe I wondered whether there's even a crossover there between some of the blocks that could arise and knowing that someone is there or available helps to ease those blocks a little bit. But yeah. What are your thoughts about some of those things?
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C
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting hypothesis and it would have been nice to be able to test it, you know, and to kind of know what, why people. Whether it did help with the blogs. I was, I'm just having a quick look because I did, I did a lot of outcome measuring within the study and we did do fears of compassion as one of our pre and post scales. So. Yeah, what did we find? We did have a decrease. We had a significant decrease in fears of compassion. Now obviously bear in mind like, you know, the stats of the study are that it was powered, but it was still very small, a small sample of 37 people. So these are not like very big dramatic results that are easy to generalize. But at least for the purposes of our sample, what's interesting is that we did have a significant, a statistically significant decrease in fears of compassion pre to post. So that 14 day intervention for our participants did result in something about. It helped them to overcome some of their blocks and resistances to compassion and have and report lower fears to compassion at the end and they had at the beginning.
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B
Are those changes in fears of compassion across different flows or like for example self compassion?
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C
Yeah, so I think we did, yeah, we did to break it down. So the flow from compassion from others, there was a significant decrease in fears of compassion from others and there was a significant decrease in fears of compassion from self towards self.
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B
I mean this is, it's giving me little shivers up my spine Eve, because if you think about the whole impetus for you to actually develop this, it was the way that shame and stigma was causing people to just feel unable to share this stuff, you know, for fear of what might happen and, and keeping it inside, you know, and, and it does it. It's really kind of very sort of a beautiful kind of outcome to think that, you know, as you say, like it's research and there's those various little research limitations or things like that. But across that group, yeah, people started to feel more able to open up to receiving compassion and they started to feel a more comfortable to, to give compassion to themselves as well. What about some of the other key outcome measures?
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C
So we also did attitudes to seeking help because I guess my, my curiosity was would you know, this isn't the therapy, but this could be the gateway for the people who need it to potentially be more able to seek the help they need. And there was a significant increase in positive attitudes towards help seeking as well. So that, that was nice to see because I think that compassion focused, you know, short, short term or brief compassion focused interventions to support help seeking could be really, really valuable in lots of domains. And you know, there are existing studies that predate mine that I kind of used to kind of inform the way that I thought about mine that looked into help seeking for other kind of highly self critical groups like around eating disorders for example, and how Sort of brief self compassion exercises were helping people to be a little bit more open to seeking help just by doing a bit of the self help first. And so to me, I think this kind of thing could really even support people on wait lists, for example, who have managed to get their. Themselves to ask for the help to get on a list, but who might be in danger of disengaging while they're waiting, or who might actually still be feeling quite ambivalent. We could potentially be offering brief self compassion interventions to people and that help them feel more able to think that it's a really helpful and positive thing that they're doing to come into therapy.
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B
It's hard, but it's helpful. And so you're sort of the self compassion piece is really about having that strength and courage to take those helpful steps, I guess, even if they are difficult ones.
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C
You measured view it positively rather than just being kind of fueled by self criticism.
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B
Yeah. So what happened with self criticism in your sample? Or did you measure shame as well?
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C
Yeah, so we did. We, we did go. We did, yeah. Also a lot of different questions of my clients, bless them. So we did do, we did do self criticism and self reassurance. So we measured those. So what we found was that. See if I can find it. The. Yeah. So the post intervention score was significantly lower than the baseline score for our self criticism measure. So people were less self critical at the end than they were at the beginning and also they were significantly more self reassuring. So you know, there. That kind of the scale that we used was the forms of self criticizing, slash attacking and self reassuring scale. So you can kind of see both. And yeah, people were sort of a little bit less self critical, a little bit more self reassuring, more open to compassion, more open to seeing seeking help as a positive thing. And we did do a psychological distress measure. We used the PHQ8 and people were significantly less distressed at the end than they were at the beginning. So that's nice to see too, that maybe people. I think we can have a lot of fears and we need to be very careful about, you know, ethically delivering self help because obviously, especially if you're thinking about difficult content or traumatic experiences, there could be lots of contraindications to managing it on your own. But I think it's an early nice initial sign that for some people at least it could potentially help them feel less distressed to, to engage in some self compassion, even though it's hard.
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B
Yeah, the, the thing that always strikes me when I'm working with people is, is that they find it very easy to know how to self criticize, but they find it very difficult to work out what this idea of self reassurance even is. You know, like it sort of baffles them I think sometimes. And it's sort of, it's such an unfamiliar idea for a lot of people. And, and so I, I really like the way that you had just plenty of little prompts and examples and trying to, to, to sort of demonstrate or show or, or you know, role play a little bit. The kinds of things that one might do or say, you know, to self reassure. I think that was very clever.
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C
Yeah, I think this is nice. I got some qualitative feedback from participants and one of the quotes is it gave me a lot of ideas and inspiration on how to shift my perspective to myself. It helped me clear ways of thinking that seem automatic and how it is, but it can actually be changed. So I think that, yeah, that kind of just being able to see a shifting perspective be introduced to a shifting perspective and I guess that's why we do what we do. You know, that's what, what that impulse that led me to go to Google when I was a CBT therapist and go, is there another perspective I can just give to a client that would help them to, you know, challenge this belief that, you know, they, they, you know, deserve to feel so shameful because they made a mistake on the Internet, basically.
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B
I imagine that working in this area raises some pretty complex ethical sorts of dilemmas, emotional kind of questions and responding and, and all of the, the online stuff, you know, that we're grappling with these days. What did you learn through, through all this about, you know, like how we can support young people maybe who have experienced some sort of online sexual harm, but just, just sort of navigating the, the online world that has become so normal for them, but in a compassionate, you know, non judgmental way. You know, how do, how, what are your thoughts about those sorts of questions?
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C
It's a really good question. I think, you know, there's some really great research out there there by, you know, people like Jessica Ring Rose and Emily Seti who, you know, they're doing a lot around, you know, really there's a lot of qualitative research out there on asking young people for their perspectives, where they've gone and they've really carefully interviewed young people and got some really good information and that helps us to understand what young people are navigating. And for me that, that was kind of instrumental to my, me kind of formulating My understanding of all of this because in order to create a society and a con and a space, whether it's like in the microcosm of the therapy room or whether it's in a school system or whether it's in our wider, that's really safe for young people to be developing and exploring their sexuality online or offline. They need to really be seen and sort of treated with so much respect and in a way that really understands that, you know, they are literally still developing like they're still learning. And part of learning is making mistakes. Part of learning is, also involves taking safe risks sometimes. And so it's not, it's not, not their fault, it's not, you know, it's not the fault of an individual young person that we have all these systems that are really new and fast paced and developing in a way that we can't even get our heads around sometimes. And so I think the thing that helps a lot is just to be very open minded and curious and to listen and to always try to come back to that core principle of who's who's been harmed and how can we mitigate that harm and how can we help young people to have the resilience to navigate relationships, not to navigate how they use their phone, but to actually navigate the usual things that we need relational skills for, like setting boundaries, knowing when something doesn't feel right for you, how you assert yourself, likewise, you know, knowing how to kind of develop sense of a sense of safety and confidence in getting close to somebody, all of those things effectively having a kind of a safe caregiving system, being able to draw on a safe caregiving system. That's the resilience that can help buffer a lot of these risks.
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B
Yeah, beautifully said. I wonder whether something similar to your program would be a useful adjunct to more the preventative end of things as well. That self compassion be at the front end of learning a bit about how to navigate this new world and the role that it might play there rather than that, you know, don't do this, don't do that type of top down thing that we were saying earlier. But, but more this compassionate non judgmental sense of, you know, like yeah, boundaries and the various other things you mentioned.
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C
And I think that's why, you know, some people are starting to put a lot of thought into really delivering really good quality sex ed for young people where sex education really gives them more than sort of just the safety tips. Because the unintended consequence of the safety tips is that when something does go wrong or if there is a, an unintended thing that happens. There can be this like felt sense of, well, they did tell me how to stay safe and I didn't, so it must be my fault. Whereas there's so many other skills that are needed to actually successfully navigate intimacy. And a lot of, you know, sex education lets people down about what those skills are.
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B
Well, it's a, it's a wonderful project that you've completed and, and boy, the, the results were very, very promising. And I think the program itself itself is still available online.
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C
Yeah. So I've, I've kept the website alive. I, I've kept the domain and all the resources are there free to use for anyone who wants them. So yeah, I'm happy to kind of share. I've got kind of the link on my social media platforms and I'm happy to share it with whoever wants it. If, you know, if you want to send that link. You know, I'd like to develop probably needs, you know, to be accessible in other formats. I'd love to one day be able to maybe make it into an app or make it a little bit more accessible in different ways. But for now it operates as a web based platform and it works pretty well on mobile as well. And people can just scroll and click on the different practices that they want to complete and they can read the prompts they want to read.
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B
Yeah, yeah, I'll definitely be including the link in the description below. You mentioned your social media stuff. Yes. You're sort of sharing things on Instagram and so on. Actually you shared something maybe a few days ago about micro anchors. I think one of the things you seem to have a bit of a passion for but also, you know, use just practically is, is you know, just sort of really embodied but little gestures of, of grounding and self compassion and, and so on and so forth. What, what's this micro anchors idea that you were sharing?
- [42:31]
C
Yeah, so, so I suppose this links a lot to when we're teaching people self compassion. I found, you know, this is something that you know, is kind of advised in, in like in Deborah Lee's book for example. She'll say like, you know, you might want to get a shell or a stone and kind of hold that when you're doing your safe space imagery practice. And likewise I've also come across this in schema therapy training or in schema therapy teachings where they'll say, you know, have an object and use it as a transitional object, like allow your client to attach some meaning to an object that links them to a therapy room or links them to it. The healthy adult part, for example, if you've been doing healthy adult work. And I think it's fascinating because we're meaning making creatures. Yes. And we, we're so creative and we really, really do well with play. And I think it's so interesting because it links very well to our ideas in CFT about the soothing system. I think there's something that just sort of seems to stimulate the attachment system and that sense of play and that sense of soothing when you can include that really core part of being human, which is to have an object that means something to you or an object that has some kind of association to a feeling of calm or an association to a feeling of feeling cared for. And it's going to be different for everyone. You know, for one person it might be a shell. Another person it might be a little fidget toy or a little kind of stress ball or cube. In some ways, it's the idiosyncratic nature of these objects that makes it so exciting and special because it is creative. It's sort of like, you know, and a little bit magical. It's like a totem. You know, you've got this little magical thing that you can really hold on, like physically hold on to that reminds you of something good when perhaps everything around you is feeling quite dark or quite bad. And I think that's really special.
- [44:42]
B
Yeah. Yeah. When I did the. It was actually mindful self compassion. Back in 2014, we all selected a little stone from a big bowl of, of stones and they sort of referred to it as a here and now stone that one can have on their person and, and sort of feel grounded by, and still have it sitting there, you know, kind of all these years later. It is funny how we create relationships with, with inanimate things sometimes. The, the way that I do the compassionate friend exercise is at, at some point along the way, the compassionate friend gives you a material object. Is that part of your script as well?
- [45:24]
C
I didn't do that. We didn't do that in our intervention script. But that would have been lovely. Like, I think that's wonderful.
- [45:31]
B
It just taps into this idea. Yeah. And it's actually quite interesting because often the person will come up with something, you know, like their grandfather's watch or the sort of the book they. That they were given or their cross around their neck or something like that. And they can actually then, you know, just comes to mind in the imagery. But then they can actually find that thing and do exactly as you're saying in terms of these micro anchors. So that sounds. Yeah, that sounds like a really good, good way to go.
- [46:03]
C
Absolutely.
- [46:03]
B
All right, well, what. What's next for you? You're. You're doing more research, are you, Eve, or what's happening next?
- [46:11]
C
Yeah, maybe. I haven't. I haven't put anything together yet for my research. I need to get this. This research published. I need to finish up the submission for a journal and find the. Find the resilience to go through the next round.
- [46:27]
B
Exactly.
- [46:28]
C
The next round of. Of that stuff. So I think that's probably next. What's next for the project? And yeah, I'm kind of interested in. I'm interested in the kind of intersection between creativity and art and what we do and kind of play and nature and all those things as well. So I'm not sure where that's going to take me next, but I feel like that's where I'm being pulled towards.
- [46:52]
B
Wonderful. Well, this was a great study. I do think it needs to be out there. For sure. It had some very, very positive effects that you summed up beautifully earlier. So well done on all of that. And thank you, Dr. Eve de Silva. Thank you for speaking with me on Compassion in a T shirt.
- [47:10]
C
Oh, thank you for having me, Steve.