The critic inside you formed before you had a choice about it.
Compassion Focused Therapy is for people who find it far easier to extend understanding to others than to themselves. People who have learned to be hard, demanding, and relentlessly critical toward their own experience, often without knowing when that started or why it feels so necessary. In-person in Miami, Gold Coast. Telehealth available Australia-wide.
Understanding something and being kind to yourself about it are different things.
Compassion Focused Therapy was developed by Paul Gilbert, drawing on evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, and neuroscience. The model identifies three emotional regulation systems that are relevant to almost everyone who walks into a therapy room. The threat system evolved to detect and protect against danger. The drive system evolved to pursue goals, achievement, and status. The soothing system evolved in the context of close social bonds: it is what comes online when we feel genuinely held, or when we can offer that quality of holding to ourselves. For a significant number of people, the first two systems are highly developed, and the third is either underdeveloped or actively associated with danger.
You can see it clearly in the person who can explain their childhood with precision, who understands their patterns, who has read the books and attended the workshops, and who still cannot stop being brutal to themselves when they make a mistake. The inner critic does not relent because understanding has arrived. It continues operating by a different logic entirely: one that says softness is weakness, that letting up means things will fall apart, that being hard on yourself is the price of functioning. These are not irrational beliefs so much as beliefs formed in environments where they were adaptive.
At this practice, CFT principles are integrated within a relational psychodynamic frame. The compassionate mind is not developed as a stand-alone technique, something practised in isolation between sessions. It develops in relationship, through a therapeutic encounter that is itself an experience of being met without judgment. That distinction matters. Technique can teach the concept. Relationship creates the conditions for it to become real.
The three systems.
The threat system evolved to detect and respond to danger. It is fast, vigilant, and biased toward negative predictions: better to over-respond to a threat that turns out to be nothing than to miss one that is real. The drive system evolved to pursue goals, resources, and status. It is activating, forward-oriented, and concerned with achievement and acquisition. The soothing system evolved in the context of close social bonds: it is what comes online when we feel genuinely held by another person, or when we can offer that to ourselves. For many people who arrive in therapy, the first two systems dominate, often because they were adaptive in early environments where safety was contingent on performance or vigilance. Soothing, when it was not reliably available from others, never became a resource that could be drawn on internally. The work of CFT is not to eliminate threat or drive, but to develop the capacity for soothing as something genuine, something that can be accessed without first having to earn it.
You would never speak to someone you care about the way you speak to yourself.
The person CFT tends to reach is the self-critical high-achiever who has never quite been allowed to not be fine. The perfectionist whose standards are impossible to meet and who responds to falling short with contempt rather than curiosity. The one who reads about self-compassion and finds it vaguely irritating or embarrassing, a kind of indulgence for people who have not yet understood that life requires effort. The one who genuinely believes that the inner critic is what keeps things together, and who is quietly terrified of what would happen if it stopped.
Inner child work, as it sits within this frame, is the process of connecting with earlier experiences of not being adequately met, soothed, or valued. Not to dwell in the past for its own sake. But because those early experiences are often where the inner critic first formed: the part of you that learned it was safer to find fault with yourself before someone else could, or that love and approval were things that needed to be earned through performance rather than simply extended. Understanding the origins of that critic does not dissolve it. But it changes your relationship to it, which is the actual work.
What changes through CFT is not the absence of the critic. Most people leave therapy with the critic still present, at least in some form. What changes is the relationship to it: the capacity to notice it without being entirely consumed by it, to see it for what it is rather than taking its assessments as unquestionable fact. And, alongside that, access to something warmer, something that does not require a perfect performance before it will activate. That is not a technique. It is a genuine shift in how you relate to your own experience.
Jackson Hill
MPsych Clinical · Griffith University 2018AHPRA Registered · Provider No. 5666808K
Member, Australian Psychological Society
I am a Clinical Psychologist based in Miami, Gold Coast. I use CFT within a broader integrative frame that includes relational psychodynamic and Transference-Focused Psychotherapy approaches. The specific shape of the work in any given piece of therapy is determined by what the person actually needs, not by a framework applied uniformly across every presentation.
My clinical background spans Veterans Affairs, the Gold Coast Academy of Sport, high-intensity trauma, brain injury rehabilitation, and acute inpatient settings. I keep a small caseload and work under ongoing clinical supervision: not because it is required at this stage of my career, but because the work demands it.
No referral required to book.
A Mental Health Care Plan from your GP reduces your out-of-pocket cost significantly through Medicare rebates, but it is not required to begin.
Per 50-minute session
Out of pocket · $145 Medicare rebate
Sessions in-person in Miami, Gold Coast · Suite 11, 2098 Gold Coast Highway · Telehealth available Australia-wide · Walk-and-talk sessions available locally
Questions people usually arrive with.
Compassion Focused Therapy is an evidence-based approach developed by Paul Gilbert, drawing on evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, and neuroscience. It works with three emotional regulation systems: the threat system, which evolved to detect danger; the drive system, which evolved to pursue goals and resources; and the soothing system, which evolved in the context of close social bonds and genuine safety. Many people who arrive in therapy have overdeveloped threat and drive systems, and a soothing system that has either been underdeveloped or that came to be associated with risk. CFT works to build genuine capacity in the soothing system, not as a technique to be practised in isolation, but as a real internal resource that can be drawn on without first having to earn it.
Inner child work refers to the process of connecting with earlier versions of yourself, particularly the parts formed in experiences where you were not adequately met, soothed, or valued. It is not about dwelling in the past for its own sake. In CFT, the connection to earlier experience is relevant because the inner critic often formed precisely in those environments: the part of you that learned it was safer to find fault with yourself before someone else could, or that worth and love were things that needed to be earned through performance rather than simply extended. Understanding where that pattern came from does not dissolve it, but it changes your relationship to it. That shift in relationship is the actual work.
CFT tends to help people who are significantly harder on themselves than they would ever be on someone they care about. The self-critical high achiever who has never been allowed to not be fine. The person who reads about self-compassion and finds it irritating or embarrassing, a kind of softness that does not apply to them. People carrying chronic shame, a persistent sense of inadequacy, or a deeply held belief that being relentlessly hard on themselves is what keeps things together. It is also well-suited to people who have a loud inner critic and very limited access to something warmer toward themselves, particularly those for whom that warmth feels unearned or even uncomfortable when it arrives.
CBT works primarily at the level of thoughts and beliefs: challenging distorted thinking, building more balanced interpretations, identifying cognitive patterns. CFT works at the level of the emotional tone you carry toward yourself, which is a different thing. You can know with full intellectual clarity that your self-criticism is disproportionate and still not be able to stop it, because the problem is not what you think, it is the emotional relationship you have with your own experience. CFT addresses that directly. At this practice, CFT principles are integrated within a relational psychodynamic frame, which means the work also attends to where those patterns came from and how they operate in the context of relationship, including the therapeutic relationship itself.
Yes. With a Mental Health Care Plan from your GP, Medicare rebates of $145 apply. Sessions are $225 and your out-of-pocket cost with a valid plan is $80 per session. No referral is required to book; the Mental Health Care Plan is optional but recommended if you want to reduce your cost. You can book directly and bring the plan along once you have it.
Not a test.
The first session is a genuine conversation: what is happening for you right now, what has brought you here, and what it would mean for something to be different. There is no requirement to arrive with a clear formulation of the problem. Relevant history finds its way in when it needs to. By the end, we will both have a clearer sense of whether this work is the right fit and what a meaningful course of treatment would actually look like.
Suite 11, 2098 Gold Coast Highway, Miami QLD 4220
jackson@jacksonhillpsychology.com.au · 0401 065 290
You do not have to have it figured out before you come.
Most people do not. A first session is a commitment to one conversation: nothing more.
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