About MBCT

Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression is an 8 week course focused specifically on the prevention of relapse among those who suffer from chronic depression. MBCT draws from both the mindfulness meditation traditions, as well as from Cognitive therapy, to help develop skills that help students prevent themselves from sliding from one depression to another. (To skip straight to the research, click here.)

What is Mindfulness?

"Mindfulness" is a recent term for the core of many meditation traditions. Essentially, it is the practice of observing one's experience in a particular way, without reaction or judgment. Whereas we are usually having an experience and then reacting--"I like it," "I don't like it," "It's bad," "It's good"--when one is observing mindfully, then the response is, "Oh, this is happening." It's a stance of curiosity and acceptance.

The reason why mindfulness practice is so useful to folks suffering from depression is related to the habit of rumination. Depressed people ruminate. They go over and over the same terrain, trying to find some way to be in control of what they want or don't want. A negative mood arises, and the ruminative response is, "How do I make this go away? Maybe I can't. But I have to do something! What am I going to do?" and on, and on. We as humans are build to try to find a sense of control, but for managing one's mood, this kind of problem solving actually is not very helpful.

What the originators of MBCT realized is that skillful management of mood is not actually about control, but about surrender. In the same way that if you find yourself on a raging river, you don't try to swim back upstream, or spend a lot of time seeing how to control the river itself. You simply accept where you are, and go with the current, edging to the shore as you flow along. Trying to control depression directly is about as effective as trying to control that river--it generally leads to wasting your little energy and sinking under.

So the mindfulness practices learned in the MBCT course are about practicing "not fighting," and learning that such acceptance does not lead to the drowning that everyone with a history of depression is afraid of. It actually is the most skillful response, surrendering in order to float and exercise a more subtle control borne out of a clearer understanding of the nature of the river.

And many are surprised to find that, at times, this skillful surrender leads to at least curiosity, if not actually enjoyment of the experience of depression.

What is Cognitive Therapy?

Cognitive Therapy (also often referred to as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, CBT) is a psychological tradition that focuses on how negative thoughts lead to negative emotions. In MBCT, CBT is used in focused exercises to help students notice and pay attention to how their thoughts link up to their emotions, the connections that underlay the pattern of rumination.

For instance, say at work your supervisor sent back a report with corrections to be made. You start reading through the comments, and before you know it, your heart is racing, your anxiety has shot through the roof, and you start hearing yourself saying, "What's the use of trying, anyway?"

What's happened is that the chain of events--the actual events, and then the thoughts, emotions, and body sensations--all shot by so fast that you didn't have a chance to notice and "unchain" them.

Say, instead, the same event happened, and as your reading through the corrections, you notice your a thought pops into your head: "I'm in danger of being fired." Then, you notice that you get a clenching in your stomach, and your heart begins to race. Next is the thought, "I'm getting overwhelmed," and then another increase in heart rate, till the thought "What's the use of trying, anyway?" arises and is followed by a deadening of your sensations, a drop in energy and attention--i.e., a rush into depression.

CBT is the practice of catching the gaps between those links in the chain. Imagine that you had the presence (through practicing this kind of noticing) to see the space between "I'm in danger of being fired" and the sensation in your stomach. That very noticing means that part of you--the observing self--is not caught up in the chain of events. From this position you can step out of the cascade and actually check yourself: "Hmm, is that true?" Your rational mind can step in and think, "Well, no, my last performance evaluation was very positive, and my boss and I have a good relationship. Actually, these comments are all constructive and to the point." This, too, is a thought, but more reality and present centered, and therefore it leads to a different emotions (relief, sense of safety).

So in the MBCT class, through written homework and in-class exercises, this skill of "thought noticing" will become stronger and more habitual, breaking the automatic chains of events that leads to the chronic quality of depression.

Research

Below you will find links to numerous studies (both academic and for the lay person) of MBCT and meditation in psychotherapy:

Research on MBCT

General research/articles on mindfulness and psychotherapy

Fees

Please click here for current fees.