Loving-kindness and compassion practices in dialectical behavioral therapy for borderline personality disorder

In recent years many psychotherapeutic approaches have included Loving-kindness and compassion practices in their treatment agenda. Although empirical evidence is still scarce, these practices might lead to an amelioration of shame and self-invalidation, both related to borderline personality disorder (BPD). In the present article, we describe an intervention in loving-kindness and compassion developed for BPD subjects. The principal aim of these sessions is to help participants to develop a greater capacity for self-com passion. To this end, three sessions were added to the regular content of mindfulness and radical acceptance from dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) skills training. These sessions are based on practices coming from DBT and exercises from compassion-based interventions such as the Mindful Self-Compassion program developed by Neff and Germer or the Compassion Focused Therapy developed by Gilbert. In this article we describe both the theoretical rationale and the exercises used in each session.