When we sit down with a client for the first time, our main job is to create a shared understanding of what's going on for them. A Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) formulation isn't just a case summary; it's a collaborative map we build together, one that looks at their struggles through a compassionate, non-blaming lens.
We’re moving away from asking "what's wrong with you?" and instead, we’re exploring how your brain and life experiences have shaped the ways you’ve learned to cope. The whole point is to make sense of why you feel the way you do, framing it as a perfectly understandable response to the challenges you’ve faced.
Getting to the Heart of a CFT Formulation
Unlike some other approaches that might jump straight into challenging thoughts or behaviours, a compassion focused therapy formulation begins with deep empathy. It's built on a fundamental idea that many of our difficulties—like persistent anxiety, shame, and that relentless inner critic—are not our fault.
They are, in fact, the predictable result of our "tricky brains," which evolved over millennia for one primary purpose: survival, not happiness.
We have to remember that we’re all walking around with a brain designed to be a threat-detection machine. It’s our evolutionary inheritance. From the moment we’re born, our early life experiences, family dynamics, and the social pressures we encounter start training this threat system on what to look out for. Over time, we all develop safety strategies to manage these perceived dangers. For many of us, this looks like harsh self-criticism, perfectionism, or avoiding anything that feels risky.
So, the formulation isn’t about diagnosing a disorder. It's about taking the shame out of the experience. It helps you see that these painful patterns are just your brain's well-intentioned—but often unhelpful—attempts to keep you safe.
The Three Circles of Emotion
A cornerstone of the CFT model, and a brilliant way to make sense of our inner world, is the three-circle model of emotion. A good formulation will map how we move between these different systems:
- The Threat System (Red): This is our old-brain survival system. It’s responsible for emotions like anger, fear, and disgust and is designed to protect us from danger. It fires up whenever we feel unsafe.
- The Drive System (Blue): This system is all about motivation, achievement, and getting things we need. It gives us those feelings of excitement and pleasure when we pursue and hit our goals.
- The Soothing System (Green): This is the system linked to feelings of contentment, safeness, and connection. Regulated by hormones like oxytocin, it’s activated when we feel cared for and provides the foundation for developing self-compassion.
A CFT formulation often shows that people wrestling with self-criticism have an overactive threat system and a seriously underdeveloped soothing system. The work, then, becomes about finding a better balance. We focus on intentionally strengthening our capacity for soothing and self-compassion. For a deeper dive into how this all comes together, you might be interested in learning more about Dr. Chris Irons' leading work in Compassion Focused Therapy.
The central insight of a CFT formulation is this: Your struggles are not a sign of personal failing. They are a reflection of a sensitive brain doing its best to navigate a difficult world with the tools it was given.
The table below breaks down the key elements that make a CFT formulation unique.
Key Components of a CFT Formulation
| Component | Description | Therapeutic Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Evolutionary Lens | Views psychological distress as an outcome of our "tricky brains" evolved for survival, not as a personal defect. | De-shame and normalise the client's experience by explaining the evolutionary roots of their struggles. |
| The Three Systems | Maps emotions and motivations onto the Threat, Drive, and Soothing systems to identify imbalances. | Help the client see how an overactive threat system and underdeveloped soothing system contribute to their difficulties. |
| Safety Strategies | Identifies protective behaviours (e.g., self-criticism, avoidance) developed to cope with threat. | Reframe unhelpful strategies as understandable (but outdated) attempts to stay safe, not as character flaws. |
| Collaborative & Non-Blaming | The therapist and client build the map together, fostering a sense of shared understanding and curiosity. | Create a safe, non-judgmental space that reduces self-blame and encourages compassionate self-inquiry. |
This foundation of understanding is what allows genuine therapeutic work to begin.
Why This Perspective Is So Important
Taking this non-blaming stance is absolutely crucial for creating psychological safety. When we can finally stop seeing ourselves as broken or flawed, we open up the possibility of approaching our pain with curiosity and kindness instead of judgment. This shift in perspective is the first, essential step toward healing. It reframes that harsh inner critic not as a character flaw, but as a learned safety strategy that has simply outlived its usefulness.
This compassionate approach is especially powerful in contexts where there’s been significant early-life adversity. For instance, in the UK, about 3,000 children are adopted from care each year, many with backgrounds of trauma and attachment difficulties. With post-adoption breakdowns affecting between 3% and 9% of families, the vulnerability is clear. CFT’s focus on building safeness and reducing self-blame offers a vital pathway for these families to heal and connect. You can find more insights on pre-adoption disruptions in England and how compassionate approaches could help.
Ultimately, the formulation becomes our shared roadmap, guiding the entire therapeutic journey with compassion right from the start.
How to Build the Formulation Together
Think of creating a compassion focused therapy formulation less like filling out a form and more like a shared, gentle process of discovery. It’s about sitting together and piecing together the story of how a person came to be who they are, but crucially, without any blame or judgement.
The whole point is to build a coherent, compassionate narrative that makes sense of their struggles. We’re aiming to shift the perspective from “what’s wrong with me?” to a much kinder, more curious “what happened to me, and how did I learn to survive?”
This collaborative exploration is truly the heart of CFT. As a therapist, my role is to guide this process with curiosity and kindness, making sure the space feels safe enough to explore memories and feelings that might be painful. We're not digging for trauma; we're simply looking for understanding.
Beginning the Journey Inward
The first step is always to ground the process in the core CFT idea of our 'tricky brains'. We often start by exploring early life, not to point fingers, but to get a feel for the emotional environment they grew up in. What was it like to be them as a child? Who did they turn to when they were scared or upset?
We gently ask about key relationships and memories to see how their attachment style developed. These early experiences are so important because they shaped the blueprint for their threat, drive, and soothing systems.
A helpful way to start is by visualising how our evolutionary inheritance—our old brain's survival instincts—interacted with our personal history to create the patterns we see today.
This flow really helps illustrate how our innate brain design, when faced with social threats, leads to the development of protective safety strategies. This is a core dynamic we map out in the formulation.
Mapping Your Emotional Systems and Influences
Once we have a sense of their early emotional world, we start mapping the specifics. This means looking at several interconnected areas. I find it’s best not to follow a rigid order, but instead, let the conversation flow naturally from one area to another as we gradually build the complete picture.
The key areas we explore together usually include:
- Early Life and Attachment: We’ll talk about memories of caregivers, school, and friendships, focusing on the emotional tone of these experiences. Did they feel seen, safe, and valued? Or was there a sense of pressure, criticism, or neglect?
- Core Memories and Beliefs: We look for specific memories that stand out as particularly formative. These often reveal the origins of core beliefs about themselves, others, and the world (e.g., "I must be perfect to be loved," or "Showing vulnerability is dangerous").
- Unmet Needs: We identify the fundamental compassionate needs that may have gone unmet in childhood, like the need for care, protection, validation, and belonging. This really helps to explain why certain situations today feel so threatening.
The formulation process is an act of translation. It translates confusing feelings and self-critical thoughts into a story of survival, highlighting a person's strength and resilience in the face of adversity.
This collaborative mapping helps them see their patterns not as personal flaws, but as intelligent—albeit outdated—strategies for emotional survival.
Identifying Threats and Safety Strategies
This is where the formulation becomes incredibly practical. We connect their history to their present-day struggles by pinpointing what activates their threat system now. These are their triggers—the situations, thoughts, or feelings that make them feel unsafe.
From there, we explore the safety strategies they developed to cope with these threats. These are the behaviours and thought patterns they automatically turn to when that threat system is firing.
Some common safety strategies are:
- Self-Criticism: Attacking oneself to motivate improvement or to pre-empt criticism from others.
- Perfectionism: Striving for flawlessness to avoid judgement and feel a sense of control.
- Avoidance: Staying away from situations that might trigger shame, anxiety, or a sense of failure.
- People-Pleasing: Putting others' needs first to ensure acceptance and avoid conflict.
For instance, a client I worked with struggled with imposter syndrome. We realised their threat was a deep-seated fear of being "found out" as incompetent. Their safety strategy? To over-prepare for every single meeting (perfectionism) and avoid speaking up unless they were 100% certain they were right (avoidance). This gave them short-term relief but just kept reinforcing the underlying fear.
Seeing these links is often a major 'aha!' moment for clients. It clarifies exactly why they feel stuck in cycles of anxiety or shame. The formulation shows them that their self-criticism isn't the real them; it's a safety strategy their brain learned a long, long time ago.
Bringing It All Together Visually
The final part is to draw it all out. Creating a visual map—often with circles, arrows, and short notes on a whiteboard or piece of paper—makes all these connections tangible. This map then becomes a shared reference point we can return to again and again throughout our work.
We literally draw the lines connecting their early experiences to their core fears, their fears to their safety strategies, and those strategies to the unintended consequences that keep them stuck (like more anxiety or loneliness).
This simple visual tool makes complex psychological processes clear and easy to grasp. It's no longer just a vague, overwhelming feeling; it's a system we can understand and, eventually, change with compassion.
Seeing the Formulation in Action
It’s one thing to talk about the theory behind a compassion focused therapy formulation, but it’s something else entirely to see it come to life. This is where the magic really happens. When you start mapping out a person's history, their fears, and the survival strategies they've built, abstract concepts suddenly click into place, forming a tangible, personal story of resilience.
Let's dive into two detailed case studies. These will show you exactly how this collaborative map gets built, piece by piece, and how it provides profound insights that genuinely shape the therapeutic journey.
Case Study One: Shame and Self-Criticism
First, let's meet Sarah, a 32-year-old graphic designer who came to therapy wrestling with intense social anxiety and a relentless inner critic. In her words, she felt like a fraud at work and was constantly on edge, worried about being judged. It got so bad she started avoiding team projects and social gatherings altogether.
As we gently explored her early life, a clear pattern began to emerge. Sarah grew up in a home where love and praise felt conditional—something to be earned through achievement. While her parents meant well, they often compared her to her higher-achieving older sibling, which baked in a constant pressure to be perfect.
She shared a key memory of bringing home a brilliant school report, only for her father to immediately point out the one subject where she "only" got a B. That moment said it all.
This background became the bedrock of her formulation map.
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Early Environment & Unmet Needs: We identified an environment of conditional worth. This left her with a deep, unmet need for unconditional acceptance. Her soothing system never really had a chance to develop; instead, her drive system was always firing, pushing her to seek that elusive approval.
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Core Threat: Rooted in these early experiences was a primary fear: the threat of being seen as "not good enough" and, ultimately, being rejected.
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Safety Strategies: To cope with this threat, Sarah developed some powerful safety strategies. Her most prominent one was harsh self-criticism—a preemptive strike to attack herself before anyone else could. Another was perfectionism. She’d work tirelessly to make her designs flawless, hoping to head off any negative feedback.
We drew this out visually, connecting the dots from her critical upbringing to her fear of rejection and her perfectionistic habits. Seeing it laid out like that was a lightbulb moment for Sarah. She realised her inner critic wasn't a reflection of her true self but a fierce, misguided protector trying to shield her from the pain of failure.
"For the first time, I saw my self-criticism not as a flaw in me, but as something my brain learned to do to protect me. It was still painful, but it wasn't my fault."
This single insight shifted her entire relationship with her anxiety. Instead of fighting it, we could start cultivating a 'compassionate self' to soothe that frightened part of her, thanking it for trying to help while gently showing it new, kinder ways to feel safe.
Case Study Two: Anxiety and Imposter Syndrome
Next up is Ben, a 45-year-old project manager who had just been promoted. Despite his obvious success, he was drowning in imposter syndrome, utterly convinced he'd be "found out" at any moment. This anxiety fuelled chronic overworking, micro-managing his team, and a complete inability to enjoy his accomplishments.
Ben’s formulation journey took us back to his family. When Ben was a teenager, his father lost his job, an event that plunged the family into financial hardship and chaos. From this, Ben internalised a powerful message: security is everything, and any mistake could lead to disaster. He slipped into the "responsible one" role, becoming hyper-vigilant to potential threats.
Mapping this out helped connect his past directly to his present-day struggles.
Key Formulation Elements for Ben
| Element | Description |
|---|---|
| Early Environment | Experienced sudden financial instability and parental distress, creating an atmosphere of unpredictability and fear. |
| Unmet Needs | His need to feel safe and secure was profoundly unmet. He learned he had to be the source of safety for everyone. |
| Core Threat | The primary threat was failure, which he equated with catastrophic consequences—letting everyone down and losing everything. |
| Safety Strategies | He developed hyper-vigilance (constantly scanning for problems) and over-preparation (working excessive hours to control every variable). |
The formulation clearly showed how his overactive threat system was a direct legacy of that family crisis. His drive system was locked into a relentless pursuit of security, leaving no room for his soothing system. He simply didn't know how to rest or feel content because his brain was always on high alert.
In one session, Ben said, "I've been running from that feeling of helplessness my whole life. I thought if I just worked hard enough, I could outrun it." The formulation helped him see this not as a personal weakness, but as a survival mechanism that had worked for a time but was now causing more harm than good.
Our work then pivoted to intentionally activating his soothing system. We used exercises like soothing-rhythm breathing before big meetings and compassionate imagery to help him connect with a feeling of inner safeness—something he’d never really been able to access before.
These examples highlight how the compassion focused therapy formulation moves beyond a simple diagnosis to create a rich, de-shaming narrative that makes sense of suffering. This is especially vital when working with younger people from unstable backgrounds. For instance, in the UK, where around 35% of children in foster care face mental health challenges compared to 10% in the general population, a compassionate, non-blaming framework is essential. While studies show mixed results from the adolescent perspective, caregiver reports often note improvements, suggesting the model's value in building understanding and connection. You can explore this further in the research on post-adoption support and interventions for families.
By externalising the problem as a set of understandable, learned patterns, the formulation empowers both client and therapist with a clear, collaborative path forward.
Putting Your Formulation to Work
A compassion focused therapy formulation is so much more than an interesting map of your past; it’s a living, breathing guide for taking action right now. Creating this shared understanding is the crucial first step, but its real magic lies in how it points us directly to what will help, bridging that tricky gap between insight and meaningful change.
Think of the formulation as our compass. It shows us precisely where we need to build skills to soothe your threat system and cultivate a kinder inner world. It highlights the exact leverage points where compassionate practices will have the biggest impact, moving therapy from just talking about problems to actively building the resources to heal them.
Instead of trying out generic exercises and hoping for the best, we can be much more deliberate, selecting targeted strategies that speak directly to your unique patterns. This personalised approach makes sure every step we take is relevant and purposeful.
From Map to Actionable Steps
With the formulation in hand, the targets for our work together become crystal clear. The aim is to shift from understanding the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of your struggles to actively practising the ‘how’ of compassionate change. It’s all about building new emotional muscles, not just accumulating intellectual insight.
So, how do we translate those insights into specific actions? Here’s what it often looks like in practice:
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Targeting an Overactive Threat System: If the map clearly shows a dominant threat system—think high anxiety, fear, or a constant feeling of being on edge—one of the first things we’ll introduce is soothing rhythm breathing. It’s a simple but incredibly powerful practice that directly activates your parasympathetic nervous system, sending a powerful signal of safeness to your brain and body.
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Countering the Inner Critic: When a harsh inner critic shows up as a key safety strategy, our focus will turn to cultivating your ‘compassionate self’. This isn’t just positive thinking; it’s an embodied practice. We’ll use exercises to help you imagine and connect with a version of yourself that is wise, strong, and deeply caring, learning to direct that kindness inwards when you need it most.
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Addressing Shame: If shame is a central theme on the map, compassionate imagery becomes an essential tool. This might involve visualising a compassionate figure, a safe place, or a warm colour to generate feelings of warmth and acceptance, creating a new internal experience to counteract the cold, isolating nature of shame.
Structuring a Session Around the Formulation
The formulation isn't a document we create once and then file away. It becomes a constant reference point in our sessions. A great way to start a session is to look at the map together and simply ask, "Where do you feel you are on this map today?" This keeps our work grounded, focused, and responsive to what’s happening for you in the moment.
This gives us a clear structure, ensuring each session builds on the last. Let’s say a client comes in feeling overwhelmed by self-criticism after a tough week at work. We can pull out the formulation and immediately validate their experience. We can see, together, that this is their threat system and that old self-critic safety strategy kicking in, just as we mapped out.
The formulation gives us a shared language. It allows us to step back from the immediate distress and say, "Ah, this is that old pattern we talked about. Let's practise a compassionate response to it right now."
This collaborative process demystifies therapy, empowering both of us with a clear roadmap for healing. It ensures the interventions we use aren't just random techniques but are precisely aimed at rewiring the specific patterns we’ve identified.
The importance of accessible and effective support can’t be overstated. In the UK, statistical evaluations of mechanisms like the Adoption Support Fund (ASF) highlight this. Between late 2018 and early 2020, a survey of 1,008 adoptive parents showed high engagement with these services. A follow-up survey maintained a strong 78% response rate, reflecting a deep need for and commitment to improving support. You can read more in the official evaluation of the ASF and its findings.
Using CFT Principles for Self-Help
The insights from a compassion focused therapy formulation aren't just for the therapy room. They are genuinely powerful tools for your own personal growth and self-discovery. You can absolutely adapt these principles to explore your own inner world with more kindness, helping you move away from that harsh inner critic towards a more supportive relationship with yourself.
The whole process starts by applying the same non-blaming, curious lens to your own life experiences. Instead of instinctively asking, "What's wrong with me?", you can begin to gently shift the question to, "What has happened to me, and how have I learned to cope with it all?"
This simple change in perspective is huge. It opens the door to greater self-understanding without just piling on more shame.
Creating Your Own Compassionate Map
You can start to sketch out a simplified self-formulation by just reflecting on a few key areas. Think of it less like a clinical assessment and more like a gentle journaling exercise. The goal isn't to diagnose yourself, but to make compassionate sense of your patterns.
Try starting with these reflective prompts:
- Early Environment: What was the emotional flavour of your childhood? Did you generally feel safe, seen, and supported? Or was there a lot of pressure, criticism, or unpredictability in the air?
- Key Fears: When you feel anxious or stressed today, what’s the core fear underneath it all? Is it a fear of failure, of being rejected, or of simply not being good enough?
- Go-To Safety Strategies: How do you typically react when that fear gets triggered? Do you tend to beat yourself up, work even harder (hello, perfectionism!), avoid the situation entirely, or maybe try to please everyone around you?
Just by connecting these dots, you can begin to see how your past experiences shaped your brain's protective strategies. For a more structured approach, you might find some really valuable resources and exercises in our guide to compassion self-help practices.
A personal formulation is an act of self-kindness. It’s about creating a narrative that honours your resilience and recognises that your unhelpful patterns were once your best attempts to stay safe.
A 'CFT-Lite' Approach for Coaches
These principles are also incredibly valuable for coaches working with clients on things like performance anxiety, self-doubt, or imposter syndrome. A 'CFT-lite' approach can help clients understand their patterns without crossing over into clinical territory.
For instance, a coach could help a client map out:
- The Threat: The intense fear of failing a big presentation at work.
- The Safety Strategy: Procrastinating for weeks, then over-preparing in a last-minute panic.
- The Unintended Consequence: Sky-high stress levels and reinforcing the belief, "I only succeed when I'm under immense pressure."
By externalising the pattern like this, the coach can help the client see it as a system to be understood and modified, rather than a deep personal failing. The focus stays squarely on building compassionate awareness and developing wiser, more effective ways to manage those performance-related fears. This kind of responsible adaptation makes these powerful psychological tools accessible for broader personal and professional development.
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Your Questions About CFT Formulation Answered
When you first hear about a compassion focused therapy formulation, it’s natural to have a few questions. I find clients are often curious about what the process actually looks like and what their role in it will be. It’s a great question, and one of the most common is about how much they’re expected to contribute.
The short answer? A lot. This isn't a process where I, as the therapist, sit back and deliver an expert analysis. It's a genuine collaboration. We're co-creating a map of your inner world, and your lived experiences, memories, and feelings are the essential landmarks. We piece it all together, side-by-side.
Another thing people often ask is whether this approach is only for self-criticism, or if it can help with things like pervasive anxiety or deep-seated depression.
How Formulation Works for Different Struggles
The real beauty of a CFT formulation is its flexibility. It's not just looking at the surface-level symptoms; it dives into the underlying emotional systems that drive them. So, whether you're wrestling with anxiety, a persistently low mood, or the echoes of trauma, the core idea is the same. We’re essentially mapping out how your threat system may have become over-sensitised and why your soothing system might feel a bit harder to access.
With anxiety, for instance, the formulation might trace a line back to early experiences of unpredictability, showing how hypervigilance became a necessary safety strategy. For depression, we might see how a background lacking in warmth or connection left the soothing system without the resources to manage life’s inevitable pain, leading to a state of shutdown.
What I love about this process is its power to create a non-blaming story. It reframes psychological struggles not as a personal failing, but as a deeply understandable, human response to the challenges life has thrown your way.
This adaptable framework means we can really tailor the entire approach to your unique history and what you need right now.
How CFT Formulation Is Different From Other Models
So, how does this all stack up against something like a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) formulation? While both are wonderfully structured and collaborative, their focus differs. A classic CBT formulation is fantastic at linking your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours in the here and now.
A CFT formulation takes a step back and asks why those thoughts and feelings are there in the first place. We trace their roots back to our shared evolutionary programming and your own personal history. There's a huge emphasis on de-shaming these patterns and actively building compassionate resources as the true engine for change.
- CBT Formulation: Tends to focus on identifying and challenging unhelpful thought patterns and behaviours.
- CFT Formulation: Focuses on understanding the protective function of those patterns and cultivating self-compassion to create a sense of inner safety.
Both are incredibly valuable, of course, but that compassionate lens is what really sets the CFT process apart. For more answers to common queries, you might find it helpful to explore this list of frequently asked questions about therapy.
