Don't be so hard on yourself use compassion focused therapy as your guide It's often said that we're our own worst critics and it's true. Compassion Focused Therapy For Dummies offers straightforward and practical advice that helps you view yourself through a more sympathetic lens. This motivating text covers the key principles of compassion focused therapy, which guide you in caring for your wellbeing, becoming sensitive to your needs, recognising when you are distressed, and extending warmth and understanding to yourself. This transformative resource provides you with metrics that you can use to monitor your progress, including sensitivity, sympathy, empathy, and overall wellbeing. Initially developed to assist people experiencing high levels of shame and self-criticism, compassion focused therapy increases your awareness of the automatic reactions that you experience and motivates you to combat negative reactions with kindness and affection. Used on its own or in combination with other therapeutic approaches, the value of compassion focused therapy is supported by strong neuropsychological evidence. * Understand how to handle difficult emotions with greater ease and less stress * Transform difficult, potentially damaging relationships into positive aspects of your life * Encourage and motivate yourself to continually meet your goals, rather than criticise yourself for perceived failures * Stop being so hard on yourself, and appreciate yourself for who you are Compassion Focused Therapy For Dummies is a wonderful resource if you are seeing or thinking about seeing a therapist who utilises compassion techniques, or if you would like to leverage the principles of compassion focused therapy to manage your own wellbeing.

This collection of memoirs examines the relationship between daughters with academic degrees and their working-class parents. Each contributor explores the influence that higher education has had on her relationship with her parent(s), as well as their influence on her academic work. In writing that is akin to archeological work, each writer sifts through layers of experience and draws on the lessons and language of home to consider what working-class parents provide beyond food and shelter for their academically inclined child, and what personal cost is exacted of parent and child in the process. Their stories provoke anyone who has gone to college - woman or man - to consider the influence of their parents on their academic career. The themes in the collection fall into five broad categories: the value and power of bringing the lessons and language of working-class parents into the academy; the psychology of class learned from a parent; the ambivalence of love and pain associated with a parent's sacrifice and the process of becoming an academic; the balancing act of straddling the worlds of academia and home; and definitions of work that either complement or conflict with those learned from parents. The memoirs acknowledge in retrospect how each writer's understanding of her parent(s) shapes her views on education and work.