What is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy?
What is Mindfulness?
Feel the ground underneath your feet and the seat beneath you. Notice the placement of your hands, lengthen your spine, tuck your chin slightly, soften your jaw and lips, and relax the space between your brows. Now start to focus on the rising and falling of your chest.
These are all cues I utilize when guiding a client through the beginning of a mindfulness practice in session.
Mindfulness is a practice that focuses on moving into the present moment through techniques like breathwork and body scans. The intention is to observe your inner and outer environment in a judgment-free manner. Check out How to Start a Mindfulness Practice to learn more about mindfulness.
Mindfulness and Counseling
Mindfulness in counseling assists you in tapping into your breath, body, and emotions. Integrating mindfulness into a session can help you connect with your body and how you feel when you are stuck in your head with overwhelming thoughts or detached from your feelings.
What is CBT?
CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, primarily helps you examine the connection between triggers, feelings, perceptions, physical sensations, and responses. A CBT therapist then supports you in looking at those connections in a more profound way.
A superb reference to illustrate CBT is the Atlas of Emotions. The Atlas of Emotions shows how an initial trigger (a friend gets angry with you) can be influenced by a current context (you are low on sleep) and past experiences that impact the trigger (you’re reminded of a bully). This trigger leads to an emotional reaction (you feel angry), a physical response (your body becomes tense), and perceptions (you feel attacked), which then leads to a reaction (argue). By breaking down a process in therapy that often happens within a second, you can see if there are ways to look at those initial perceptions (you feel attacked) in a different light by reconsidering interpretations you created from past experiences. Creating alternative balanced perceptions can support developing more constructive responses in the world (instead of arguing, you choose to take a break).
Atlas of Emotions demonstrates the personal experience of triggers and how a situation is multilayered. For example, the same trigger (a friend gets angry with you) may have a different current context (reading scary news), an experience that impacts the trigger ( reminds you of abandonment), emotional reaction (fear), physical response (your heart pounds), perception (you expect them to leave), and reaction (imagine them leaving).
Atlas of Emotion shows the five primary universal emotions of anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and enjoyment. Below are examples of how the same trigger can have different current situations and prior experiences that influence the trigger, emotional reactions, physical responses, and reactions.
In the Experience section, when you click on a primary emotion (anger), you will see the different emotion words and intensities of the building up of that emotion (there are definitions for each one). The experience section helps you get in touch with the nuances of how you feel or feel during a trigger.
When you go to response, you can view many reactions that someone might have to an emotion (if you click on annoyance, you can see a potential response to suppress with a definition).
The Strategies section has some options to respond more constructively, including utilizing mindfulness as a technique!
CBT and the Atlas of Emotions demonstrate that you can choose how you react! This concept is revolutionary if you have long believed that situations are black and white and you cannot shift how you respond. Destructive reactions are often rooted in a lack of awareness of your triggers and unhelpful perceptions. Through CBT, you can become more conscious of your triggers and how to work through them, connect to your inner world of feelings, become more open-minded by considering alternative ways of thinking, and feel more empowered to make constructive choices.
Mindfulness Therapy vs. CBT
One of the distinctions between mindfulness therapy and CBT is that mindfulness focuses on openly embracing where you are in the present moment and what you are feeling without trying to resist or shut down your experience. In contrast, CBT focuses on reconsidering limiting beliefs from the past and developing alternative perceptions to potentially have new emotional and bodily experiences and responses in the future. Mindfulness is focused on the present moment, whereas CBT is focused on looking at how the past impacts the present moment and how this awareness can create change for the future. In other words, mindfulness = acceptance in the present moment, and CBT = past understanding for future change.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
While mindfulness and CBT may sound like polar approaches, a newer third-wave behavioral tradition called Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) focuses on recognizing thoughts, feelings, and bodily experiences with acceptance and without judgment. I think of MBCT as CBT wrapped in a warm cozy blanket. In Western society, there can be a lot of focus on self-improvement and the future and a rejection of you as you are now. Mindfulness reminds us that starting in the present moment and having self-acceptance for where and who you are now is the foundation for everything else. There is no self-improvement without first having self-acceptance. Sit with that statement for a moment!
Can Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Alleviate Anxiety?
You may be wondering if MBCT helps people feel better. MBCT is an evidence-based practice that can get you out of anxious spirals and overwhelming thoughts by focusing on your body and breathing in the present moment before gently reconsidering new thought patterns.
Can Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Alleviate Depression?
MBCT has been shown to improve symptoms of depression, including reducing rumination. Rumination includes perpetual negative self-evaluations. MBCT can support clients in having greater self-acceptance; through this self-acceptance, self-compassion can develop, and ruminations can decrease.
I encourage you to start a mindfulness-based practice and therapy for some higher-level support to alleviate your anxiety and depression! All of our therapists are specially trained in mindfulness and CBT and can implement MBCT into sessions. Our therapists would be thrilled to support you on your journey to less ruminating and worry and more peace and joy! Contact our Client Care Coordinator today to set up an appointment.
