Compassion Focused Therapy and the Fear of Compassion This talk will give a brief overview of the origins and nature of Compassion Focused Therapy. One of CFT key aims is to increase affiliative positive emotion to self and others. The talk will outline how these emotions evolved to become are powerful regulators of threat processing and emotional reacting, and how affiliative emotion is linked strongly to well-being. However, this talk will also draw attention to recent research that shows that many people with mental health problems can have a fear and resistance to this affiliative and compassion based positive affect. This has major implications for threat regulation. This talk will explore current research on this difficulty and how to address it in therapy. Paul Gilbert OBE is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Derby and Consultant Clinical Psychologist at the Derbyshire Health Care Foundation Trust. He has researched evolutionary approaches to psychopathology for over 35 years with a special focus on shame and the treatment of shame based difficulties - for which compassion focused therapy was developed. In 2003 he was president of the BABCP and an member of the first NICE depression guidelines for depression. He has written/edited 20 books and over 150 papers. In 2006 he established the Compassionate Mind Foundation charity with the mission statement To promote wellbeing through the scientific understanding and application of compassion (www.compassionatemind.co.uk). He was awarded an OBE in March 2011.