Showing you care for others is a critical feature of all relationships, both those that are romantic and those involving friends and family. However, this ability doesn’t come easily to everyone. Perhaps you sometimes feel that all you can focus on is your own problems, much less take on those of others. You wonder if you’re just selfish, or if there is something else going on. Why can’t you open your compassionate valve and let the care come streaming out?

Some people fear showing their compassionate side to avoid looking weak or vulnerable. They feel they have to “tough it out” to show others just how strong they are, even when someone else is clearly in need of comforting. A friend confides in you that her closest relationship is on the rocks. Rather than simply listening to her story, you come back with a judgmental remark about her soon-to-be ex that only makes her more miserable than she was already.

Compassion can also be directed not only toward others but to oneself. Fearing self-compassion, you find it hard to forgive yourself for your foibles. Perhaps you stubbed your toe while walking barefoot in the hallway. You blame yourself for your clumsiness and with each step, can only think of how you’ve been this way your whole life and will probably always be this way forever. It doesn’t dawn on you that maybe all this was due to your being preoccupied at the moment with thoughts about how to plan your day.

Fear of Compassion and Attachment Style

A new study by University of Queensland Brisbane’s Deanna Varley and colleagues (2025) suggests that fear of compassion is more than a simple inability to feel empathy for others or even yourself. Instead, it is linked to a number of negative mental health consequences because it prevents people from experiencing “feelings of safety, reassurance, and soothing in social and affiliative contexts, including in close interpersonal relationships.” These “affiliative contexts,” in turn, “are a key mechanism for regulating feelings of threat, stress, and social isolation.”

People who are most harmed by fear of compassion are those, the Australian authors go on to note, who have an insecure attachment style, meaning that they either become anxious at the prospect of closeness with others or avoid closeness altogether. Putting the two together should, Varley et al. propose, place individuals at significant mental health risk.

As an approach to lowering fear of compassion, an intervention known as compassion-focused therapy (CFT) is an evidence-based treatment that should, Varney et al. suggest, be particularly effective for people with an insecure attachment style. By cultivating their own sense of compassion, including toward themselves, they can develop the missing piece in their approach toward relationships known as the “secure base.” From these, they can build out more positive inner representations of themselves and others, remedying the fears that kept them from seeing the world, and themselves, in a more stable light.

CFT works by using “compassionate imagery exercises” in which individuals are encouraged to mentally create scenarios in which they act, behave, and think more compassionately. The assumption is that it’s easier to let yourself become more compassionate if you first imagine that state of mind before actually going out and showing more of this care and concern for others, not to mention yourself.

Testing a Portable Version of Compassion-Focused Therapy

The goal of the U. Queensland study was to test CFT’s effectiveness in people characterized by insecure attachment style with the additional proviso of seeing how well CFT could be adapted to an easily transportable format. The insecurely attached may not show up on the therapist’s door on their own, so if they could try this out without having to see a clinician, it could provide a more practical route for an intervention.

The version of the CFT imagery exercise that the authors developed was extremely straightforward. The 125 participants in their study (divided into an intervention and a waiting-list intervention group) received take-home materials with instructions to “cultivate the compassionate self” once daily for 7 days.

The exercise, which you can try out yourself, consists of establishing a grounding body posture (shoulders back, chest open, feet flat on the floor) while engaging in soothing rhythm breathing. While in this state, imagine yourself embodying qualities of compassionate motivation. This consists of a committed desire to be helpful and relieve suffering in the self and others, use wisdom to understand your experiences, and bring out the strength to act compassionately. Then, go on to imagine what you would do in this state and how you would act.

The research team was able to track the number of times participants downloaded the audio accompanying this exercise as a measure of quality assurance. Prior to and after engaging in these daily exercises, participants also completed measures of attachment style and fear of compassion to allow Varney et al. to test the impact of the guided imagery on people varying in these two theoretically relevant qualities. The fear of compassion scale assessed fear of compassion toward others and toward the self, as well as fear of being treated compassionately by others.

Turning to the findings, the intervention proved effective in reducing all three forms of fear of compassion, a pattern that was the same across attachment styles. Because insecure attachment is associated with higher fear of compassion, this universal effect of the intervention was particularly impressive. The authors believe that this was precisely because the imagery exercise promoted feelings of soothing at an inner, physiological level. In their words, “more insecurely attached individuals sometimes benefit less from cognitive therapies because they struggle to feel comforted by adaptive thoughts generated to counteract maladaptive thoughts.” There was no need to think about their thoughts because all they had to do was put themselves in an imaginary state that would be linked to reducing their physical feelings of stress.

Putting Imagery Exercises to Work for You

This small but intriguing study suggests that without having to do too much work, you could just take a moment during your day to put yourself in a compassionate state of mind. While doing so, you gain the benefit of a mini-moment of relaxation, which itself can be beneficial (your smartwatch may even prompt you to do this from time to time). That specific focus on being motivated to be compassionate and then acting that way also presents a low-risk scenario in which you can play with a new way of relating to others and yourself.

To sum up, tapping into that compassionate mental tank of yours need not take a lot of work nor a lot of time. As the authors conclude, this exercise can have “positive flow-on effects” for more fulfilling relationships, including the one you have with yourself.