How ISTDP Can Address Two Major Barriers to Mindfulness

Mindfulness is kind of a craze these days, in the psychotherapy world and elsewhere, and for good reasons. The capacity to accept and reflect upon inner states is an important part of any therapy experience and, in my opinion, an important part of experiencing life. Because mindfulness meditation can be a personal practice, many people use it as a form of self-help.

Lately, however, I have been hearing from people that their self-help efforts at using mindfulness have not been fruitful. Why is that? they wonder. How can I help them? I wonder.

The Forces That Block Mindful Awareness and Acceptance of Inner States

When we set an intention to look inside, anything can rise up into the light of our awareness. In an ideal world, we meet our inner life with acceptance and tolerance. In the real world, those of us who have been trained to fear or hide our inner lives meet the emergence of inner truths with anxiety and avoidance. This can make a major barrier to the therapeutic use of mindfulness. The inner truths we seek can become terrifying, or may be obscured by defensive mechanisms.

When Anxiety Is a Barrier to Mindfulness

One person said to me, “When I look inside, all that comes up is anxiety.” When she turned her awareness toward inner states, they all seemed to get buried under muscle tension and racing heart. What was it her mind was so terrified of?

When we face ourselves with an open mind and heart, previously disowned parts of the self, such as painful or taboo thoughts and emotions, call out to us and ask if we will finally accept them. The pain of past traumas, rage toward loved ones, guilt about wrongdoing—any emotion we tried to bury—will reach up to us and ask to be felt. For people who can let these emotions in and reintegrate them, mindfulness is very effective therapy indeed!

For many of us, however, the same anxiety that led us to disown or bury those emotions in the first place may reappear, coaching us to continue to fear and avoid. When anxiety is a barrier to mindfulness, we look inside and re-experience our old fears of ourselves and our feelings, rather than experience the reintegration we sat down looking for.

When Avoidance Is a Barrier to Mindfulness

Another self-help meditator told me, “When I sit down to explore my deeper self and feelings, my thoughts run off to my grocery list.” Avoidance can be another barrier to mindful awareness.

In the face of our old anxieties about our inner lives (e.g., emotions, wants, needs), many of us are tempted, consciously and unconsciously (read: intentionally or unintentionally), to avoid. Avoidance can take many forms: the grocery list, the self-critical list of imperfections, the to-do list, etc. Hyper-focus on goals and perfectionism about the task—“Am I doing this right?”—can also suck us out of the moment and away from our inner reality. Any thought or behavior, especially self-critical ones, can be called upon to avoid the task of being present with and accepting of our inner states.

Possible Origins of the Problem

We were not born with anxiety about and avoidance of our inner states. If you’ve spent any time with newborn babies, you may have noticed that they seem pretty comfortable being honest about wants, needs, and gut reactions. However, the sometimes-traumatic conditioning processes we undergo throughout development can make our natural inner states something we fear and avoid. Why?

My impression is that emotions become frightening when we have to bear them alone. The primitive nature of the emotions of childhood, and the child’s inability to differentiate feeling from action, turns feeling into a terrifying experience. When we can’t process these reactions with a supportive other, or when our loved ones turn away from us or coach us to hide our emotions, we lose the sense of security that is necessary to face anything painful and challenging in life. If our feelings and self-states are met with anxiety or avoidance from caregivers repeatedly throughout development, this only compounds our anxiety and encourages our avoidance.

How Instensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy Can Help

Facing our formerly warded-off inner lives is sometimes impossible to do alone, but with the support of a caring person we may find the strength to reunite with ourselves. All therapy models offer support and caring, but intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP) is unique in its systematic approach to developing the capacity for mindfulness, and in its system for helping people overcome their barriers to mindfulness.

Facing our formerly warded-off inner lives is sometimes impossible to do alone, but with the support of a caring person we may find the strength to reunite with ourselves. All therapy models offer support and caring, but intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP) is unique in its systematic approach to developing the capacity for mindfulness, and in its system for helping people overcome their barriers to mindfulness.

Though treatment will look different for everyone, some basic principles will always be a part of ISTDP treatment (Abbass, 2015): If a person presents with tension that blocks inner awareness of other emotions, they will be systematically supported to feel the feelings that are making them tense. If a person presents with avoidance mechanisms blocking their mindfulness capacities, they will be systematically supported to evaluate and, if they wish, turn against and relinquish those mechanisms so they can bear their feelings.

Perhaps even more valuable is the capacity of ISTDP therapists to work with people’s walls. If a man comes to therapy for help in reducing anxiety or avoidance and accepting his inner life, but then puts up a wall of interpersonal avoidance between himself and the therapist, this wall will defeat the goals he came to therapy with. In ISTDP, we have an elegant system of interventions for helping people to notice, question, and, if they want, lower their walls.

Finally, what about people who experience severe dysregulation such as dissociation, panic, depression, or cognitive and perceptual problems when trying to use mindfulness meditation? For folks whose anxiety is channeled in these potentially frightening ways, ISTDP offers a “graded approach”—a form of mindfulness coaching that can, in an incremental way, support the ability to experience and reflect about your emotions rather than become overwhelmed when they enter your attention. ISTDP therapists are trained to monitor the verbal and nonverbal reactions that are triggered as you try to face your emotions, and will help you face as much feeling as you can while working with you to make sure you do not become overwhelmed or symptomatic.

In my experience, at the end of a successful ISTDP treatment course, people have a very high capacity for mindfulness. They can observe their inner states and emotions in a more accepting way, without anxiety and avoidance blocking them, and in this way they can get to know themselves better and use their reactions in the service of living more wisely and authentically.

If you are having difficulty using mindfulness as a form of self-help, consider contacting an ISTDP therapist to see if he or she can help with the anxiety or avoidance patterns that are keeping you from more fully connecting with yourself.

Reference:

Abbass, A. (2015). Reaching through resistance: Advanced psychotherapy techniques. Kansas City, MO: Seven Leaves Press.

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