Posted by mattdds on June 2, 2003, at 1:55:30
In reply to Re: Found Psychological Babble - ready to babble; » Squiggles, posted by Larry Hoover on June 1, 2003, at 23:14:11
Larry,
I have been reading some cutting edge stuff in CBT by Adrian Wells, who is faculty at the U of Manchester in the UK. This seems like some really scholarly stuff, I wonder if you've heard of it, and if so what your opinion is on it.
In his book, "Emotion and Metacognition", he introduces the idea of metacognition in the context of cognitive therapy, which I have found fascinating, and I've been trying to incorporate it into daily life.
As I'm sure you can deduce, metacognition is the awareness of your own cognition.
Wells emphasizes the importance of developing a "metacognitive mode" of processing, in which we become passive observers of our negative thoughts and or symptoms. In this mode, thoughts themselves become just like any other neutral event in the universe, rather than absolute truths. He suggests attentional training and mindfulness meditation to get into this type of mode.
He also describes an "object mode" of thinking, which means a state of full or nearly full belief in thought intrusions. This is the destructive kind.
Once you get into this mode of thinking - this metacognitive mode - it frees up mental resources. It allows you to step back, and be able to see more than one schema, or way of seeing things. It also, according to Wells, allows information that is likely to disconfirm existing destructive beliefs to sink in. Is this sounding like secularized Buddhism yet? To me this is great stuff!
He also goes on to talk about rumination, in relation to depression. He led a study which showed that rumination was positively correlated with increased depth and duration of depression. So the idea is to reduce rumination. He also showed that attention training activities can help to reduce rumination, as can mindfulness meditation training.
The amazing thing is how few therapists are aware of cutting edge things like this. I mean the gap between the scientist and the clinician is HUGE! (Most) clinicians are still practicing CBT of the dark ages. Even worse, some practitioners advertise as CBTers but really are doing some nondirective eclectic mess.
I wonder how much better the response rate would be if people were doing REAL CBT? Am I making any sense here?
Take care,
Matt
poster:mattdds
thread:230572
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20030529/msgs/230717.html