Mindfulness and Acceptance-Based Therapy
You don’t have to live everything you think or feel.
You can learn to see thoughts and feelings from a healthy distance.
What are mindfulness and acceptance?
Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. Acceptance means receiving things as they are – as opposed to how we wish they might be or think they could be.
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What types of mindfulness and
acceptance-based therapies do we offer?
MBCT
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, is an 8 session treatment that combines mindfulness with elements of CBT to help you change your relationship with your thoughts and feelings.
You learn to recognize prompts for depressive episodes and how to not fall when they come along. As your relationship with your internal world changes, you’ll no longer be caught and sunk when they take a downturn – you’ll stay the course and make it through!
ACT
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (pronounced ak-ht), is a really fun modality for working with various life problems. In it, you’ll learn acceptance as a way of approaching difficult thoughts, emotions, or circumstances.
You’ll also gain a framework that helps you commit to act in a way that is in line with your values and goals. Both of these help you love what you do and feel great doing it.
General
Mindfulness and acceptance are considered “third wave CBT”. What that means is, at first, CBT therapists were behaviorists. Then they learned that working with thoughts is powerful too. Now most CBT treatments will incorporate elements of both mindfulness and acceptance as well.
For example, someone with anxiety might benefit from a CBT approach and then add mindfulness to what they’ve already worked on. Or someone with ptsd might use PE for treatment with acceptance principles built in.
Who do they help?
By helping people gain a distance from their thoughts and feelings, mindfulness and acceptance-based treatments have been shown to help people struggling with mood and anxiety-based disorders.
MBCT in particular best helps people with a history of multiple depressive episodes by giving you a whole new soundtrack to play when life gets tough and thoughts turn nasty. By changing your relationship with your inner world, you ride through the challenges without getting caught.
What if can’t do mindfulness?
Are you human? Great, good news for you! You can do mindfulness.
Every human can pay attention for one moment, and all it takes to do mindfulness is one moment. Your mind may wander 100x in a 1 minute practice, and that is just fine, so long as you learn to catch it and bring it back. Each time you do that, you flex your mindfulness muscles and get them stronger and stronger. That’s what we’ll work on together.
So, just so we’re clear, we’re not worried.
I don’t want to accept certain things, and don’t think I should. Will I have to?
Let’s bust some acceptance myths here: acceptance does not equal approval. It doesn’t mean I agree that what happened or is happening or will happen is good or that I like it. It means I’m not fighting it.
Can I take my medication while I am in therapy?
If you are already working with a prescriber and taking medication for your symptoms, we’d like you to continue with that treatment exactly until you start to feel better from your work with us.
Once you start feeling better or having symptom relief in therapy, we may have a conversation together with your prescriber about lowering your dosage or going off medication entirely, depending on your preference and your current level of symptoms.
Many of our clients do choose to go off medication once they have eliminated their diagnosis and find that they don’t need it anymore.
There is one important exception to the above policy:
If you are taking an as-needed anxiety medication, you might find that it will interfere with treatment. We actually WANT you to feel all the feelings fully in this moment. So medication that interrupts those feelings is going to teach your brain the things we’re trying to undo. Because of this we would likely discuss with you and your prescriber not taking that medication on treatment days or during the treatment period.
Again, that would be in discussion with both you and the prescriber, and any decision we would come to would be together for your best long-term success.
How long will it take me to feel better?
This is a really reasonable question and we’re so glad you’re asking it! We can’t know in advance of meeting and treating you exactly how long it will take you to get better, but usually people see improvement within weeks, and complete treatment (as in they don’t need therapy any more) within months.
When we meet with you, coming up with your goals and personal timeline of check-ins on progress will be part of the plan. You have a right to see measurable results.
We also want to make sure that the changes we work on are sustainable. With any work we’ve done, it’s meant to be sustainable for a lifetime. That doesn’t mean that you may not have setbacks, but the work we do together should stand with you for the long-term.