Patrizia Collard

Teaching Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) to students: The effects of MBCT on the levels of Mindfulness and Subjective Well-Being

This study aimed to address the gap in the literature considering empirical evidence in support of the assumption that Mindfulness is the mediating factor in the positive outcomes of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programmes, and to further examine the link between Mindfulness and Subjective Well Being. The research question was whether MBCT would increase participants’ levels of Mindfulness and Satisfaction with Life and decrease participants’ level of Negative Affect. A Repeated Measures (Test–Retest) within participants design was employed and fifteen Counselling students at the University of East London provided data anonymously at the beginning and end of MBCT programme by completing the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI) (Walach, Buchheld, Buttenmuller, Kleinknecht, & Schmidt, 2006), Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener, Emmons, Larsen & Griffin, 1985) and Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) (Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988). The results indicated that by the end of the MBCT programme: participants’ level of Mindfulness significantly increased; Positive Affect remained unchanged; Negative Affect significantly decreased; a strong trend in the data indicated an increase in participants’ Satisfaction With Life but failed to reach a statistically significant level; Mindfulness and Negative Affect were significantly negatively correlated, while Mindfulness and Satisfaction With Life were not found to be associated. A longer practice time of Mindfulness during the programme was found to be significantly correlated with a higher level of Mindfulness at the end of the programme. The results were interpreted in support of the assumption that Mindfulness has an important role as a mediating factor in symptoms relief and positive outcomes following participation on Mindfulness programmes. The results also support of Brown and Ryans (2003) conclusion regarding the role of Mindfulness in enhancing Well Being. A Positive Psychology framework was applied in interpreting the data and it was suggested that there was ground to believe that Mindfulness can be integrated well, as a concept and as a therapeutic intervention, into the field of Positive Psychology.

Interview with Jeffrey Young: reinventing your life through schema therapy

What led me to adapt or expand cognitive therapy was the fact that the patients of Dr Beck’s centre were mostly research subjects who had been very carefully screened for major depression. But they weren’t in many ways typical of patients you see in normal practice. Cognitive therapy was very successful for 70–80% of patients because they were very appropriate for cognitive therapy, and most of them did not have long-term, lifelong problems—they suffered from acute depression. Then when I went into private practice around 1982 I saw a much broader range of patients and the success rate dropped dramatically to below 50%—the therapy wasn’t helpful for a lot of patients. Some did very well as expected, but a few would make no progress or only moderate progress and then slip back. With at least half the people I was treating, I wasn’t happy with their progress and nor were they really. I felt I had to do something else in order to deal with those patients who were not really responding very well. So I started by looking at what the patients who were not responding had in common, and it was, once I made the list, very obvious. The people who were not responding well were having chronic psychological problems, lifelong problems, such as that they had always been depressed—not always, but I mean all their adult lives; or even if they weren’t always depressed they were anxious at one point or depressed or Jeffrey Young

Interview with Petra Klein

When I began studying dance therapy I was well prepared through my background in psychology. I wouldn’t say it was absolutely necessary, but it is of great help. I already had a training in client centred psychotherapy with Reinhard Tausch, a student of Carl Rogers, and in many other methods of Humanistic Psychology such as Gestalt, Psychodrama, Bioenergetics, Transactional Analysis, communication therapy etc. . . . This wide-ranging background enabled me to evaluate the advantages of dance therapy in comparison to other psychotherapies.

Dance of Life

I met Petra Klein in December 2002 at her International Institute for Dance Therapy on Tenerife. When talking to her I immediately felt that here was a kindred spirit whose aim in therapy closely resembled my own: to get people back in touch with themselves and their inner world and to help them to be more vibrant, more functional and more alive. Her methodology in achieving those goals is aptly presented in her ‘trilogy’: Dance of Life CD (34 minutes, copyright (c) + (p) 1996 Petra Klein, 18) and the accompanying booklet: Movement Ideas for the music Dance of Life (36 pages, Dieter Balsies Verlag, Kiel, Germany, ISBN: 3-925594-41-8; 9) as well as in her video: Dance Therapy – The Path to Holistic Being (60 minutes, PAL and NTSC-VHS, copyright (c)+(p) 1995 Petra Klein, 59,-s). Klein, who studied psychology and psychotherapy in Germany and Dance Therapy in the US, created the Dance of Life idea and composed the accompanying music in order to ‘inspire our souls to express themselves’. She hopes that her work can help to liberate inner strength and ability for self-restoration thus reconnecting her clients with their joy and want for live itself. She introduces her work by saying: ‘DANCE OF LIFE is as diverse as life itself.’ (p. 5). Through dance we are encouraged to learn with ease how to experience ourselves as a harmonious unity of body, mind and soul. She emphasizes that she wants to reach everybody, not just those who are professionally used to working with their bodies. I experienced her work as being able to create a perfect balance between the rational (left) and the creative (right) side of the brain, a skill which many people have lost in our largely materialistic, goal-oriented society. Dance of Life taps into our childlike qualities and revives them. This helps us to attain more lightness in our approach to life, an important aspect that Freud already emphasized when recommending his clients to regress daily and be like a child in order to maintain or re-establish sanity. Klein endeavours to facilitate and accelerate psychotherapeutic processes through her work as much as assisting people to develop their personalities through self-expression. She considers music to be the language of the heart and, as such, she composed pieces that would gently lead us into a communication with our inner self and awaken our dormant self-healing powers. The CD consists of 10 pieces most of which flow into each other offering the ‘dancer’ to develop his movements without interruption. The first piece, entitled The Journey Within, starts softly, inviting us to close our eyes and sway gently. The music is like a gentle touch slowly introducing bells and drums. We allow ourselves to be moved by our inner impulses, rather like during a Buddhist Walking Meditation.

Patrizia Collard interviews Anastasios Gaitanidis—psychoanalytic psychotherapist

(1) Dr Gaitanidis you are originally from Greece, the western centre of ancient philosophy. What made you come to the United Kingdom to study Psychotherapy and in particular Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy? Although ancient Greece was the birthplace of western philosophy, modern Greece is a place where there is a distinct lack of public interest in both philosophy and psychotherapy. I decided to come to the United Kingdom to train as a psychotherapist, as there were very few university departments or private institutions who offered psychotherapeutic trainings. This is, of course, the explicit, conscious explanation for my decision. There are also unconscious motivations that contributed to this decision, which I have partly explored in my own therapy. (2) How do you think that Freud and his ideas can still be valuable in this day and age? I believe that Freud has transformed the way we think about ourselves and others to the extent that we cannot even begin to imagine how we could conceive of ourselves without his contributions. In this respect, his influence far exceeds whatever particular impact the therapy founded in his name may have. Additionally, Freud with his methods and central insight remains the progenitor of modern therapy. It is striking to see how new therapeutic models and methods feel the need to either completely discredit Freud in order to justify their existence or define themselves by reference to him, usually as a breakthrough past his limits. Through the years, thousand commentators have pronounced Freud ‘dead’ or expressed the desire to ‘kill’ him. Buried innumerable times, just as incessantly resurrected, the spirit of Freud continues to have an effect on contemporary therapy. Now, if there is a Freudian idea, which is still at the centre of every psychoanalytic work, a touchstone by means of which one can distinguish those working or thinking within some sort of psychoanalytic framework, it is the idea of the dynamic unconscious, that is, of a whole area of (usually sexual and/or aggressive) feeling and thought, which is inaccessible to consciousness and, indeed, is vehemently kept out of consciousness by defensive processes. Freud realised that we are unable to fully understand and explain our actions because there is this radical division in our psyche that makes us ‘strangers’ to ourselves. As he put it: ‘‘We are not masters of our own houses’’. Of course, this is also a disturbing realisation. Even in the context of present-day arguments, the suggestion that people do not necessarily know what they are doing, that they are driven by forces beyond their

Skillful means at the intersection of neuropsychology and the contemplative disciplines: Patrizia Collard interviews Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius

Richard: I’m a board-certified neurologist, also living near San Francisco, with a lot of training in EEGs and other brain-oriented technologies. My wife died after a long struggle with cancer, and I am now raising a teenager and two preschoolers. I too have been meditating for many years, and Rick and I both have a spiritual home with Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. Together, we have been presenting many workshops on what we call ‘‘applied neurodharma’’, as well as creating a non-profit institute and a related website

Interview with Dr Claudia Herbert

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this interview. My interest in trauma work goes back a long way. I guess it started as a result of my own childhood, which took place in post-war Germany, where I was brought up by parents who had both experienced World War II as children. I later followed up on this interest professionally, and became increasingly specialized in working with survivors of trauma. When I first started working clinically with survivors of trauma about 14 years ago, I was most struck by how little clients understood about their problems, and by the degree of severity with which their lives were often impacted upon by their traumatic experiences. I felt that much more needed to be done to educate clients to enable them to understand that their reactions were explicable, and that they could be helped to recover from these and reclaim their lives. Furthermore, I was struck by how little was known about the effects of trauma and its therapeutic treatment by health professionals, and how often clients were unfortunately misdiagnosed and incorrectly medicated. These were the motivations for writing my first self-help book for clients with trauma, which is called Understanding Your Reactions to Trauma and which was brought out by Blue Stallion Publications, Oxford, in 2002 as a newly revised edition.