Dr Deborah Lee is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Head of Berkshire Traumatic Stress Service and Op COURAGE Integrated Services for Veteran Mental Health for the South East of England. Dr Lee has worked in the field of trauma for 32 years and specialises in the treatment of PTSD and Complex PTSD. Her clinical and research interests include working with shame and self-loathing in the context of interpersonal trauma. She has pioneered the development of compassion focused therapy for trauma and complex PTSD and authored the best selling self help book, The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Recovering from Trauma and PTSD: Using Compassion-Focused Therapy to Overcome Flashbacks Shame, Guilt, and Fear (2013). New Harbinger, New York.
Specifically, she is interested in using compassion focused therapy to enhance existing exposure-based trauma memory techniques such as EMDR, prolonged exposure, enhanced reliving, imagery rescripting. More recently she has developed a group-based intervention called ‘compassionate resilience’ to be delivered as part of phased based treatment approaches for CPTSD. The approach is being used as part of a current RCT treatment trial evaluating phased and non-phased cognitive therapy for CPTSD.
Deborah’s talk will explore our understanding of compassion as a motivation, an antidote to shame states, as it fosters a physiological state of safeness as well as orientating the mind to be care giving as opposed to self-loathing. She will discuss how we can foster clients’ basic motivation to be compassionate to enhance compassion for self and others, and explore how we can then use compassionate states of mind to de-shame trauma memories, promote grief process, and facilitate emotional processing of trauma experiences. Dr Lee will present some preliminary quantitative and qualitative data related to service research in this approach.
UKPTS Bites is a series of short, online seminars on leading topics from the world of traumatic stress and beyond.
