Mindfulness-based psychotherapy

Mindfulness-based psychotherapy

There are many ways mindfulness complements traditional counseling and therapy approaches. Counseling and therapy involve cultivating awareness and insight into your life and the problems you face, exploring your thought patterns and your feelings and emotions as they affect you, and learning to deal with difficult thoughts and emotions.

Mindfulness helps facilitate these processes by slowing down your mind and using this calmer, clearer mind to get in touch with your inner wisdom and gain a new perspective and understanding about yourself, your life, and the issues you are dealing with.

Mindfulness also teaches you to deal with difficult and painful thoughts and feelings in new ways. Instead of becoming overwhelmed and desperate to escape, learn to deal with problems, pain and stress through mindfulness and understanding.

Incorporating mindfulness into psychotherapy is becoming increasingly common as research continues to demonstrate its effectiveness in helping people with a wide range of mindfulness issues. The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, has been used to help people manage stress, anxiety, depression, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, high blood pressure, and many other conditions.

Other therapeutic approaches that emerged from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and help people with depression and anxiety include Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), also based on mindfulness-based stress reduction, has been used to help people with borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and eating disorders.

Alternative practitioner psychotherapy

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