The field of psychological science is undergoing something of a revolution in the way it sees the origin and maintenance of emotional problems. From this vision a new way of helping those people who come to therapy is emerging. This book contributes to this development.
In the 1970s and 1980s the main concern of research in clinical psychology was to investigate biases in information processing. The field was dominated by experiments demonstrating, again and again, the extent to which people suffering from depression or from anxiety disorders of various kinds, showed biases in the way they attended to their internal or external environment; biases in the way they remembered the past or anticipated the future; biases in their judgments and interpretations. Part of this approach was research on schemas. Schemas are information-processing structures that normally assist in the streamlining of encoding and retrieval of complex sets of information. Such structures are enormously valuable in making cognitive processing efficient, but they can also make habitual the biases that are seen elsewhere in the information-processing system, establishing them into a biased sense of “self,” “me,” and “how I am.” When such patterns of processing become automatic in this way, these habitual reactions in thinking, feeling, and interacting with the world coalesce to form higher-order patterns: this we label “personality.”
This phase of the development of cognition and emotion research was hugely influential and highly productive in terms of its effects on cognitive and behavioral approaches. Yet gradually, as more research was done, we saw that there were other elements in the picture. In particular, we began to see that the ways people react to their own biased processing could determine whether the reaction would be maintained and exacerbate, or extinguish and fade. It was found that emotional problems were often maintained not only by the bias in attention, memory, judgments, or schemas, but by the processes that “come on line” to try and deal with such biases. Chief among these are two processes: the tendency to elaborate, become enmeshed in, or ruminate about things on the one hand; and the tendency to avoid, suppress, and push things away on the other. Dealing with these tendencies had always been implicit within cognitive and behavioral approaches, but the increasing awareness of the power of these ruminative and avoidance processes gave a new impetus to attempts to find explicit ways of dealing with them.
Mindfulness training is one such approach. It invites us to learn how to attend, first to moment-by-moment experience (internal or external), and then to see clearly how the mind can be caught up in elaboration or avoidance. Gradually, through such training, we learn to broaden awareness so we can see how a whole mode of mind is activated when things don’t go the way we want them to go, and how this “doing” mode, so useful in many circumstances, does not serve us when we are trying our best to deal with difficult and destructive emotions. In mindfulness training, by seeing the patterns of the mind more clearly, we are better able to make choices about what action, if any, to take. What emerges is a sense of having more space, having a greater capacity for wisdom and a deeper sense of compassion for the self and for others. Together with other new approaches that focus on dealing skilfully with rumination and avoidance, and approaches that cultivate acceptance, commitment, and compassion, mindfulness approaches are changing the way we think about emotion, and about what it is that any of us needs when the “storms in the mind” are raging and seem to be beyond our control. The evidence from clinical trials shows that the mindfulness approach can have large effects on alleviating emotional problems, and this book is an important next step toward clarifying what is most helpful for whom under what circumstances.