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.
.png)
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.