What is CBT?

The way we think often affects our emotions and behaviour and CBT or Cognitive Behaviour Therapy helps people with such conditions as anxiety and depression change the content of unhelpful thoughts and their maladaptive ways of coping, such as avoidance or addictive behaviour.

MiCBT: Integrating Mindfulness and CBT

MiCBT is a 4-stage therapeutic approach which integrates mindfulness and some of the basic principles of CBT in order to help people improve the way they feel and change unhelpful behaviours. However, MiCBT helps people make changes in a different way to CBT. While CBT attempts to change maladaptive behaviour by modifying people's unrealistic thoughts and beliefs, MiCBT tries to help people learn to develop control over the processes that maintain the unrealistic thoughts and beliefs through mindfulness training. MiCBT helps change the process of thinking, not just the content of our thoughts.

Changing Reactive Habits 

Like CBT, MiCBT draws on the principles of exposure and desensitisation to help us change habitual unhelpful reactions or coping strategies.However, unlike other models of cognitive-behaviour therapy, MiCBT regards learned reactive habits as being the result of our own way of reacting towards the body sensations that result from our judgemental thoughts. Preventing such reactions, while remaining fully aware and accepting of bodily experiences, leads to rapid change in our habitual feelings and behaviours. We feel emotionally relieved.

Interpersonal Mindfulness

MiCBT can not only help people change distressing thoughts, feelings and behaviours, it can also help people change their relationships with others. The skills we learn in MiCBT can help us not to react to others and foster a greater understanding and acceptance of ourselves and others. This usually culminates in more harmonious relationships and helps prevent relapse into habitual moods and behaviour. This is explained during Stage 3 of the program.

Mindfulness and the Power of Empathy

The fourth stage of MiCBT teaches people to use their own resources for empathy towards themselves and others. The three previous stages lead to the realisation that we are the first beneficiary of the emotions we produce, whether this is a positive or negative emotion. A deep sense of empowerment, acceptance and change usually takes place at the end of Stage 4, which is the last stage of the MiCBT program.

Program Duration

The MiCBT program generally requires about 8 sessions, but it may vary between 6 and 12 sessions, according to the problem we intend to address.
Sessions are best held weekly or fortnightly for optimum progress...<< PREV