Background and Aims:
Chronic pain is associated with significant emotional distress and self-criticism.
"Self-Compassion" construct is gaining attention due to its strong link to health. As Gilbert pointed, promoting self-compassion could help to cultivate self-care.
Neff and Germer developed a program to enhance self-compassion (Mindful Self-Compassion, MSC) that could be helpful in DM, HIV and also Chronic Pain.

Methods:
We collected data of 144 patients with chronic pain at Hospital Universitario La Paz. 
We measured Self-Compassion through Self-Compassion Scale (SCS, range 1-5), and conducted analysis to investigate how self-compassive patients with chronic pain are. 
We hypothesized that people with high self-compassion will show less anxiety and depression. We used the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) to measure this symptomatology. 

Results:
Our sample had a mean age of 48.86 years. Most of them were women (89.4%), lived in couple (68.1%), around a half were moderate-highly educated (58.1%), and 18.2% were employed.
Mean self-compassion total score was 2.76; means of self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness subscales of SCS were above 2.5. 
We found statistically significant correlations between self-compassion and depression (Pearson correlation= -0.343, p = 0,000); and anxiety (Pearson correlation = -0.22, p = 0.011).

Conclusions:
According to Neff, these scores indicate a moderate level of global self-compassion and also regarding its components in our sample.
Self-compassion was negatively correlated with levels of anxiety and depression. These results are promising because we can then hypothesize that if we train patients in self-compassion, depression and anxiety will decrease. However, we must take these results carefully because there may be other factors that are mediating this relationship.

SELF-COMPASSION IN A CHRONIC PAIN PATIENT SAMPLE