preview

Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Decent Essays
Open Document

Jon Kabat-Zinn is responsible for bringing mindfulness into the American mainstream and encouraging it’s integration into psychotherapy practices. Over the years, the benefits of mindfulness have been observed and empirically studied, and psychologists have developed specific treatments integrating mindfulness with behavior therapy. As such, these treatments have become part of what is known as the third wave of behavior therapy. Marsha Linehan, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Washington, integrated mindfulness with traditional behavior therapy and created Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a widely-used skills-based program for the treatment of borderline personality disorder, depression and suicidal behavior. Mindfulness …show more content…

DBT teaches mindfulness as being made up of the “what skills” and “how skills.” The what skills include: observation, description, and participation. The how skills include: non-judgmentally, one-mindfully, and effectively. In observation, the individual is invited to non-judgmentally observe what is happening both internally and externally. When describing, individuals are invited to non-judgmentally express what they have observed. Participation invites people to fully throw themselves into what they are doing and focus on that one activity. Being non-judgmental involves sticking to the facts of what have been observed (e.g. it is brown vs. it is ugly). The goal is to help people label their experience based on what they observed, described, …show more content…

It was developed by John Teasdale, Mark Williams, and Zindel Segal. MBCT is a hybrid of traditional cognitive behavior therapy and mindfulness, and is built on the idea that people who are depressed tend to have automatic negative thoughts and attach negative judgments to their experiences. The mindfulness aspect of treatment helps individuals become more aware of their automatic thoughts, and to simply observe them as transient events, rather than holding onto them. As individuals become more aware of their automatic thoughts, they develop the capacity to move from a perspective of reaction to reflection. MBCT is in part based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program and echoes much of the theory put forth in Kabat-Zinn’s program. The creators of MBCT developed it with the intention of helping people who have suffered from repeated bouts of depression. The MBCT program is taught over the course of an eight-week program, where participants are encouraged to use guided meditations to help them cultivate a more mindful way of

Get Access
Related
Get Access