Mindfulness Based Therapy and Navigating Change
The change process is a central component of counseling practice. Your role as a counselor in training includes recognizing and understanding how change can occur for each client you work with.
Watch the video “Mindfulness-Based Therapy and Guiding Clients Through Change” located in the Topic 4 Resources. Then write a brief statement describing your view of the change process.
In 250-500 words, answer the following:
- Describe the intent and purpose of mindfulness practice within the counseling process
- Describe how counselors-in-training can engage in this practice of thoughtfully attending to the clients’ underlying needs
- Give examples of additional strategies for how CIT can attend to client’s emotional needs when a client is focused on sharing extensive information about the details of their lives
- How might this focus on peripheral details be keeping them stuck or focused solely on their problems?
Include at least three scholarly sources in your response.
Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.
Transcript:
- 00:13
DENISE FOURNIER: name is Dr. Denise Fournier. [Dr. Denise Fournier, LMHC Mental Health Counselor Evegreen Therapy] I’m a licensed mental health counselor with a PhD in marriage and family therapy, and I am a mindfulness-based psychotherapist in private practice.
- 00:25
[What is mindfulness based therapy?]
- 00:32
DENISE FOURNIER [continued]: Mindfulness-based therapy incorporates the principles of mindfulness, which have emerged from ancient Eastern traditions, namely Buddhism, to teach us how to approach life in a very particular way with a sense of presence, with a sense of awareness, with a sense of intention, and with a sense of acceptance, nonjudgmental, and non-reactivity to what’s transpiring in our lives in any particular moment.
- 01:03
DENISE FOURNIER [continued]: Mindfulness-based therapy incorporates those elements of mindfulness with other evidence-based therapeutic, more Western, more modern practices, in order to deliver a form of therapy that invites clients to be more present to the experience that’s transpiring within them and around them at any given time. [How does mindfulness based therapy help clients navigate change?] Since mindfulness is all about awareness, acceptance, non-reactivity, and non-judgment, I find that it’s really well suited for approaching difficult life transitions that naturally generate a sense of anxiety that can naturally be really disruptive and destabilizing, because it equips clients with the tools to be able to pause, sit inside the discomfort of this upheaval of this destabilizing shake up of their status quo of what they’re used to and what they’re familiar with, and to be able to very thoughtfully appraise what’s happening and tease that apart from the mind’s anxious reactions to what’s happening.
- 02:23
DENISE FOURNIER [continued]: And so when big disruptive events happen, like this pandemic and everything that’s gotten shaken up over the last couple of years, when things like that happen or when clients go through their own upheavals, whether it’s a divorce or a big life change, they’re able to utilize mindfulness in the moment to moment practice of meeting this event face to face and being able to care for themselves and thoughtfully respond rather than emotionally instinctively react to what’s happening.