Mindfulness versus CBT

Hi Jennifer,

I wonder if you can tell me how the mindfulness approach is different from general CBT?

Steve

 

Hi Steve, as I mentioned in a recent post, I am a big believer in any treatment/management tool that "helps" the person with tinnitus! Many great programs have been developed to help people manage the symptom but unfortunately there is not one treatment that works for everyone. I have developed MBTSR to be another tool that can be used for healing.

Most probably due to the attention given to a person’s thoughts and cognitions, mindfulness is often erroneously categorized as a form of CBT. While both involve an aware- ness of thoughts and their content, there are distinct differ- ences between these two practices. CBT is often specifically aimed at treating symptoms such as anxiety or depression, and is a directive and structured type of psychotherapy with the goal of recognizing and correcting maladaptive ways of thinking (Beck et al. 1979). Mindfulness, on the other hand, is not a structured psychotherapy, but rather a discipline to be cultivated throughout a person's life. It involves a willful shifting of one’s attention or a systematic building of aware- ness to bring one's attention to where the mind is at any given time. Thoughts, body sensations, and emotions are seen as mental events not to be analyzed or manipulated but rather to simply be noticed as fleeting events in the mind's field of awareness. These mental events then recede from awareness, and the mind is brought back to the present moment. Other mind–body interventions such as relaxation techniques have the goal of bringing about a state of relax- ation. Mindfulness practice, in contrast to CBT and relaxa- tion training, posits a non-striving stance towards a particular outcome: it simply allows whatever is in one's field of awareness to be witnessed without judgment.

Warmly,
Jennifer