The Compassionate Kitbag: A creative and integrative approach to compassion-focused therapy.

Many patients with ruptured and/or traumatized early attachment relationships can find more traditional talking therapies difficult to access. Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) can offer an evolutionary-based understanding of interpersonal difficulties which can be helpful for such patients. Creatively harnessing and utilizing multi-sensory and non-linguistic social signals in CFT is key to exercising the care-giving and care-receiving social mentalities that facilitate compassionate flow. There is considerable evidence to support the use of a multi-sensory component to the therapeutic work to help patients cultivate and facilitate their capacities for compassion. The Compassionate Kitbag can be a way of supporting patients to create concrete representations of compassion in the context of the compassionate mind training component of the therapeutic work. Some of these objects can become transitional objects which can aid the therapeutic work.