Customer Reviews

Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition

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i found the other review of this book so perplexing, i felt i had to say something. this will be a very useful book to folks who are interested in how concepts of acceptance and mindfulness can be integrated with, or change for the better, cognitive behavioral treatments. if you have no idea what the previous sentence means, then you are probably not one of those folks!

It's been a long time coming, but mindfulness has gradually been recognized as an important element of living well. Marsha Linehan, originator of the very valuable Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) method and Stephen Hayes, originator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) are two of the editors of this volume, each representing a slightly different method of integrating mindful awareness with therapy.

Other authors who have done pioneering work on mindfulness and therapy include Dr.Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, developer of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, and psychologist Daniel Goleman who wrote about meditation thirty years ago, and more recently has pioneered work on "Emotional Intelligence."

"Spirit and Science are holding hands." I am compelled to give my review of this book because the information contained breaks so much ground for CBT therapy and expands "scope of practice" constraints into promising new dimensions. The great value of the contributions to this volume is that they describe, define, and critique nontraditional themes such as mindfulness, acceptance, and spirituality in the context of integration and enhancement of established traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The marketplace demand for "evidence based" practices has heretofor shunned the nontraditional/complementary approaches for lack of empirical majesty. This volume is a wondedrful encouragement to future focused behavioral technologies that go beyond outworn assumptions about "conditioning". The chapters address trauma, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse and couple conflict. But you get the feeling this is just a beginning. I am encouraged by this book to greet these new technologies openly and to eagerly anticipate further work in this very fertile field. Bravo! This book has invigorated my hope that Spirit and Science will not look weird to us; walking hand in hand.

There's a reason this book has held its value on the used market, and it's this: M&A is a classic. I'd come from what I'd thought to be a solid grounding in the psychodynamic, client-centered, cognitive-behavioral, disease-model and neuropsychological traditions. I thought I had a good grip on the dialectical view, but I didn't really "get" radical acceptance as the path to informed, experientially driven commitment to cognitive, affective and behavioral change.

Until now.

In this =remarkable= assemblage of 13 articles on the state of the "dialectical arts," the authors have pulled off little less than a one-volume sea change. Without having to fork over a few thousand to fly to a three-day conference, we get a panoramic picture of the startling progress made by the DBT-influenced crowd owing to the influx of Eastern meditation and resurgent experientialism upon behavioristic practice.

Read =this=, and you may feel that you really =do= have the tools in your hands to break through complex personality disorder defenses chop-chop.

Do I think further progress is possible? Absolutely.

My own work has shown me that a firm grasp of modern psychodynamic principles can provide the therapist who would use DBT, ACT, MBCT, etc., with a sense of cognitive, affective and behavioral function -- and purpose -- at a breadth and depth rarely grasped by the behaviorists. It also tells me that an equally firm grip on sub-cortical physiology provides the clarity needed to design behavioral interventions on the basis of how the mind works the brain and vice versa.

For now, however, M&A makes complete sense of Seligman's helpless rats, the reality-distorting function of language, what intimacy really is (and isn't), and the Big Lies of our "cultural norms," as well as the use of operant validation, distress tolerance, affect regulation, Vipissana meditation for both acceptance / self-identification and maintenance / relapse prevention, the power of what just =is=, and a lot more.

The client really can learn to identify, question and revise his core-to-current cognitive schema. Combined therewith, the client sit still and feel his feelings in a continuous feedback loop that results in ever-more reality-based, effective and functional perception, critical thinking, affect management and behavioral expression.

Read =this=, and find out how.