The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician’s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration

242 Pages·2010·1.29 MB·English

by  Daniel J. Siegel

THE MINDFUL THERAPIST
DANIEL J. SIEGEL, MD
THE MINDFUL THERAPIST
A Clinician’s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York • London
All illustrations are the property of the author, unless noted otherwise. To contact
the author, please visit mindsightinstitute.com.
Copyright © 2010 by Mind Your Brain, Inc.
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Siegel, Daniel J., 1957–
The mindful therapist: a clinician’s guide to mindsight and neural integration /
Daniel J. Siegel.—1st ed.
p.; cm.—(Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-39370645-1
ISBN: 978-0-393-70658-1 (e-book)
1. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. I. Title. II. Series: Norton series on
interpersonal neurobiology.
[DNLM: 1. Psychotherapy—methods. 2. Awareness. 3. Brain—physiology. 4.
Mind-Body Relations (Metaphysics) 5. Professional-Patient Relations. WM 420
S5705 2010]
RC489.M55S54 2010
616.89’1425—dc22
2009049383
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T
3QT
To my parents, Sue and Marty,
and my brother, Jason:
Thank you for growing me up in Carthay Circle
and inspiring me to dream
of triangles of well-being and
planes of possibility
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Presence
2. Attunement
3. Resonance
4. Trust
5. Truth
6. Tripod
7. Triception
8. Tracking
9. Traits
10. Trauma
11. Transition
12. Training
13. Transformation
14. Tranquility
15. Transpiration
Appendix
References
Suggested Reading
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As my wife says, this work has taken a lifetime to develop before I ever placed
fingers on keyboard to enable the words and the worlds to be expressed here. In
this way, I am also grateful for a lifetime of support from many wonderful
people who have graced this journey with their presence. From the beginning
with my mother, father, and brother, I have been encouraged to “think on my
feet” and to not take anything for granted. My friends in my youth, Jon Fried and
Yves Marton, have likewise nourished this propensity to question everything
with a curious mind. As I grew through my formal education, elementary, junior
high, high school, and college teachers have variously inspired and pushed me to
look beyond what was in plain view. Through medical school, Leston Havens
was a mentor in this same vein; and in psychiatry training through my clinical
and research years, Gordon Strauss, Joel Yager, Denny Cantwell, Robert Stoller,
Donald Schwartz, Regina Pally, Marian Sigman, Chris Heinicke, and Robert
Bjork all contributed to my growth as clinician and academician. I thank them
all. Now, in my work at UCLA, Sue Smalley, Diana Winston, Marv Belzer,
Susan Kaiser-Greenland, and the gang at the Mindful Awareness Research
Center along with the assembly of wonderful thinkers at the Foundation for
Psychocultural Research/UCLA Center for Culture, Brain and Development
continue to stimulate my creative thinking about our human lives. My close
connections with Diane Ackerman, Lou Cozolino, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack
Kornfield, Allan Schore, and Rich Simon continue to offer me sustenance, as I
feel blessed by their wisdom and our relationships. At the Mindsight Institute,
Stephanie Hamilton, Eric Bergemann, Tina Bryson, Adit Shah, and Aubrey
Siegel make working at the interface of ideas, interventions, and education in the
world of compassion and brain science a wonderful adventure. Stephanie’s
husband, Chris, was a tremendous help in putting my ideas of the plane of
possibility into visual form. The other drawings were done by MAWS &
Company, for which I am much appreciative. Deborah Malmud, Kristin Holt-
Browning, and Vani Kannan have been a pleasure to work with at W. W. Norton
and Gabe Eckhouse has been helpful in the final proof editing of the manuscript.
At home, my two children have inspired me to be present as they move forward
in their own journeys, exploring their passions and bringing me great joy and
wonderment with their growth. And, as always, my wife Caroline Welch remains
a steady and attuned partner whose support, advice, and role modeling continue
to nurture my life and my work.
INTRODUCTION
You and I are the subjects of this book. I invite you to join with me in the
chapters that follow, written as a conversation between two clinicians, as we
explore the nature of how we connect with others in healing relationships. This
dialogue is organized in both breadth and depth with the goal of being useful for
experienced practitioners, as well as for those new to their education in the
healing arts.
Research suggests that our presence as medical or mental health clinicians,
the way we bring ourselves fully into connection with those for whom we care,
is one of the most crucial factors supporting how people heal—how they respond
positively to our therapeutic efforts. Whatever the individual approach or clinical
technique employed, the therapeutic relationship is one of the most powerful
determinants of positive outcome in a range of studies of psychotherapy (see
Norcross, Beutler, & Levant, 2005).
In this book we’ll be addressing these findings by asking ourselves this basic
question: Why is our presence—not just the interventions we offer or the
theoretical stance we take—the most robust predictor of how our patients
respond? What is “presence,” and how can we cultivate this in ourselves? In The
Mindful Therapist, we will be exploring the possible answers to these
fundamental questions that emerge from a scientific journey into the art of
healing. In this Clinician’s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration, we’ll be
diving deeply into a professional view of the fundamental way that we sense and
shape energy and information flow in our lives—a process called mindsight.
With mindsight, we are given the tools of empathy and insight to more deeply
sense and understand ourselves and others within relationships, the process of
our ever-changing brains, and even how our mind itself functions. This inner
clarity can help us to modify the flow of energy and information within our own
lives and in our interactions with others in a very specific manner. The power to
move our lives from nonintegrated states of rigidity or chaos toward the more