后记：剖析同情心的内在机制
后记：解构同情之心
这本书是对同情聚焦疗法(CFT)的一个极好的入门指南。CFT属于认知行为疗法家族中的情境形式之一，关注诸如自我友善、对他人的同情、正念以及基于价值观的行为等问题。这些新方法的具体理论和技术各不相同，但它们显然是相互联系的。因此，尽管我不是CFT的专家，我很荣幸被邀请为本书撰写一篇简短的后记，我想重点讨论的就是这些相互联系。
我认为，总体而言，基于证据的疗法，特别是认知行为疗法(CBT)，很快将更多地被视为解决问題和促进人类繁荣的基于证据的过程和程序，而不仅仅是与综合征相关联并旨在消除症状的命名治疗技术包。随着这一转变的发生，我预计情境治疗的形式将越来越多地将其部分基于证据的变化原则与从进化、学习、情绪、认知和文化等更基本科学领域角度考虑的同情联系起来。因此，在我看来，CFT的核心愿景很可能具有非常长的生命力。
通过像这样的书籍，治疗师可以迅速看到这些问题在治疗中的核心地位。它们之所以重要，部分是因为现代社会本身。人类心智并不是为了今天的世界而演化的。现代科技不断涌出图像和声音，形成了人类语言的消防水龙。想象中的任何事物都在这条流中，但由于商业和媒体的偏见，传达勇气、爱和连接的信息被那些传播痛苦、恐惧、批评和判断的信息压倒了。如果它出血，它就领先。痛苦卖座。
实际上，喧嚣无处不在。离我不远处有一个电视遥控器，我的iPhone就在几英寸外，我在笔记本电脑上打字，报纸放在椅子旁的地板上。不用起身，我就可以告诉你，代表Subway三明治店的人因猥亵儿童而入狱；新闻记者詹姆斯·福莱被斩首已经一年了；一个婴儿在他父亲开车时被看到殴打他之后死亡；七月是有记录以来最热的一个月；一位脱口秀主持人想把非法移民安置在帐篷里并出租他们作为奴隶；一名58岁的无家可归的拉丁裔人被一群声称唐纳德·特朗普关于移民的说法是正确的男人殴打并小便在其身上。
这只是其中一天，而我几乎没有开始。
人类是合作的灵长类动物，渴望被接纳以及精神上接纳他人的影响已经深深植根于我们的骨骼、语言系统和文化之中。我们能够合作并关心他人，这是为什么我们有一个文明社会的原因。这也是为什么我们会有电视、iPhone、笔记本电脑或报纸。
我们既不应浪漫化这些能力，也不应将其视为理所当然。要对他人表示同情，我们需要从他们的角度看问题，而不是在情感上难以承受时逃跑。同时，多层次选择理论告诉我们，我们在一定程度上是为了群体间的竞争而演化成合作的。在现代互联世界中，我们不能再依赖这种机制——对自己群体的支持和对外人的反对——来促进同情和关心。我们现在需要关心那个更大的群体，即“人类”。这对所有人都是一个挑战。
如果CFT的核心愿景会长期存在，那么所有基于证据的治疗师都需要认真对待这个愿景。这意味着深入研究关于变化过程的更具体预测，以及它们与同情相关的特定方法之间的联系。我们需要知道，而且很快就会知道，不仅是同情在一般意义上很重要，而且在特定领域中它是如何以及为何重要的，以及如何最好地针对这些领域。这需要一个非常大的团队进行大量的合作和努力，才能在合理的时间框架内获得这些知识。对同情作为临床问题感兴趣的人和实践CFT的人需要参与进来。
由于所有这些原因，像这样的书是无价的。它向更广泛的治疗社区打开了CFT的思想大门，使对这些问题和方法的兴趣和参与能够继续扩大和发展。在现代社会，同情对我们来说太重要了，以至于我们不能做其他任何事情。
——史蒂文·C·海斯 内华达大学里诺分校基金会教授 ACT共同创始人，《走出你的思维，进入你的生活》作者
Afterword: Unpacking the Compassionate Mind This book is a wonderful beginning guide to compassion-focused therapy (CFT). CFT is part of a family of contextual forms of cognitive and behavioral therapy that are concerned with issues such as self-kindness, compassion for others, mindfulness, and values-based actions. The specific theo- ries and techniques that are part of these new methods vary, but they are clearly interconnected. Thus, even though I am not an expert in CFT, I am honored to have been asked to write a short afterword to this book, and it is those interconnections that I would like to focus on. I predict that evidence-based therapies in general, and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in particular, will soon be thought of more as comprising evidence-based processes and procedures for solving problems and for promoting human prosperity, than as named packages of therapeutic techniques linked to syndromes and the elimination of symptoms. As that transition occurs, I expect that process-oriented forms of contextual treatment will increasingly link a portion of their evidence-based change principles to compassion as it’s considered from the point of view of more basic scientific areas including evolution, learning, emotion, cognition, and culture. Thus the core vision of CFT, in my opinion, is likely to have a very long life indeed. Through books like this, therapists can quickly see for themselves how central these issues are in therapy. They are central in part because of the modern world itself. The human mind did not evolve for the present day. Modern technology, gushing a constant stream of images and sound, has created a fire hose of human language. Everything imaginable is there in the stream, but the biases of commerce and media mean that messages conveying courage, love, and connection are simply being overwhelmed by those spreading pain, horror, criticism, and judgment. If it bleeds, it leads. Pain sells. There is, in effect, no place that the cacophony cannot reach. I am a few feet from a television remote, my iPhone is inches away, I’m typing on my laptop, and the newspaper sits on the floor next to my chair. Without so much as lifting my rear end from this chair I can tell you that the man who long represented Subway sandwich shops is going to jail for molesting children; that it has been one year since news correspondent James Foley was beheaded; that a baby boy died after his father was seen beating him in a car while driving; that July was the hottest month in recorded history; that a talk-show host wants to house undocumented immigrants in tents and rent them out as slaves; and that a fifty-eight-year-old homeless Latino person was beaten and urinated on by men who said Donald Trump was right about immigrants. That is just one day, and I’ve hardly gotten started. Human beings are cooperative primates, and both the desire to be included and the effects of mentally including others are built into our bones, into our language systems, and into our cultures. Our ability to cooperate and to care about others is why we have a civilized society. It is why we even have television, or iPhones, or laptops, or newspapers. We should neither romanticize these abilities nor take them for granted. In order to have com- passion for others, we need to take their perspective and not run away when it is emotionally hard. At the same time, multilevel selection theory teaches us that we evolved to be cooperative in part because of between-group competition. In the modern interconnected world, we can no longer rely on that mechanism—being “for” our in-group and “against” outsiders—to foster compassion and concern. We need now to care about that much larger group called “humanity.” That can be a challenge to us all. If the core vision of CFT is here to stay, then it is up to evidence-based therapists across the board to take that vision seriously. This means digging into the more specific predictions about processes of change, and their linkage to specific methods relevant to compassion, made by the contextual forms of CBT. We need to know, and soon, not just that compassion is important in a general sense, but how and why it is important in specific areas, and how best to target those areas. It will take a lot of cooperation and effort from a very large group to acquire that knowledge in detail and in a reasonable time frame. Those interested in compassion as a clinical issue and those practicing CFT will need to take part. For all of these reasons, a book like this is invaluable. It opens up CFT ideas to the larger thera- peutic community so that the involvement and interest in these issues and methods can continue to broaden and grow. In the modern world, compassion is too crucial for us to do anything else. —Steven C. Hayes Foundation Professor, University of Nevada, Reno Cofounder of ACT and author of Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life