The Mindful Therapist
How clinicians cultivate mindful presence to promote neural integration in therapy.
the therapist's presence, rather than the specific interventions implemented, is the most robust predictor of client improvement
Daniel Siegel builds his case for the clinician's own mind as the primary instrument of change. Drawing on interpersonal neurobiology, he argues that therapeutic work proceeds by fostering integration, the linkage of differentiated elements within the brain and between two people, and that the therapist can cultivate the states that make such linkage possible.
Much of the text is practical and self-directed. Siegel sets out reflective exercises, including the wheel of awareness, and a vocabulary for tracking sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts as they move through a session. He maps nine functions that emerge when the middle prefrontal regions are engaged, among them attunement, emotional balance, and intuition, and ties each to what happens in the room.
Written in the first person and free of dense technical language, it treats the practitioner's own regulation as the ground from which attuned clinical work grows.
About the author
Daniel Siegel
Daniel J. Siegel is an American physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Trained in pediatrics and in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry, he founded the approach he calls interpersonal neurobiology and serves as director of education at the Mindsight Institute. He is founding editor of the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology and the author of many books, among them The Developing Mind, Mindsight, Brainstorm, and Aware. He was a founding co-director of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center.
Details
- 2010
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton
- 288
- 9780393706451