ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the concept of disgust and considers its links to anger, contempt, and hatred, and how these become recruited into the experience of self. It addresses compassion-focused therapy (CFT) as a treatment for self-criticism. Shame takes different forms with different attentional foci. In the case of external shame, the attention is focused on the mind of the other rather than on oneself. External shame, feeling shamed in the eyes of others, is highly linked to psychopathology, and negative self-evaluation. Freud described two sources of self-criticism. One was linked to the superego, the other to anger turned inward. One of the reasons that self-criticism can be so pathogenic is that it stimulates particular physical processes associated with threat. CFT specifically targets the internal emotional and feeling tones of how people think and talk to themselves—basically teaching people to change from hostile, critical, and disgust-based emotions in the process of self-dialogue to kind, supportive, validating, and understanding tones.
