Chicago 2-day Self-Compassion Workshop for Caregivers: Deepening Skills

Teacher: Kristy Arbon

The Depression and Anxiety Specialty Clinic of Chicago is offering two days of mindfulness and self-compassion training to explore how to understand and work with shame and other difficult emotions. We’ll be exploring material from the Somatic Self-Compassion program and the Mindful Self-Compassion program. This workshop is specifically oriented toward professional caregivers who work with clients struggling with shame, self-worth and other difficult emotions.

Self-compassion is the emotional attitude of bringing kindness to ourselves when things go wrong in our lives. Most of us easily treat our friends and loved ones with warmth, tenderness and patience when they struggle, fall short or fail, but we have a much harder time bringing those same qualities of compassion to ourselves in the same situations.

Self-compassion can be learned by anyone, even those of us ​who didn’t receive enough affection in childhood or who find it embarrassing to be kind to ourselves​. It’s a courageous mental attitude that stands up to harm, including the discomfort that we unwittingly inflict on ourselves through self-criticism, self-isolation, and rumination when things go wrong. Self-compassion provides emotional strength and resilience, allowing us to admit our shortcomings, forgive ourselves, and respond to ourselves and others with care and respect.

Objectives

After participating in this workshop, you will be able to:

Understand the physiology of self-compassion and shame
Handle shame and other difficult emotions with greater ease
Take care of your own shame while also taking care of others experiencing shame
Teach simple self-compassion exercises to clients to help work with shame and other difficult emotions

Program activities include talks, meditation, experiential exercises, and group discussion. Participants will directly experience self-compassion and learn practices that evoke self-compassion in daily life.

Prerequisites

Participants will need to have:

attended a Mindful Self-Compassion training (taught by any MSC teacher);

or an MSC Core Skills training (taught by any certified MSC teacher);

or have completed particular sections of the HeartWorks MSC Workbook Online Companion as a prerequisite for this workshop.