Interview of Dr. Dan Siegel about THE MINDFUL THERAPIST

From Stephanie West Allen’s blog on Neuroscience and conflict resolution.

Click to read the interview. Here is an excerpt:

Ruth [Buczynski]: Let’s jump right in and talk about why mindfulness can make health and mental healthcare practitioners more effective. There’s more and more science coming out about that all the time. Can you just give us some of the highlights?

Dan: Well, there are a number of reasons why learning to be mindfully aware helps a practitioner of anykind of clinical intervention be more effective.

On the basic level, the studies have now shown that if a primary care physician learns to develop mindful awareness (which we’ll define in a moment), that individual will be less likely to burn out.

They’ll be more likely to maintain a state of empathy, which now studies are showing as one of the key ingredients for any kind of clinical encounter for a patient or a client to heal and to respond positively to therapeutic intervention.

So, you keep a clinician feeling well themselves; you keep a clinician passionate about their work and you allow them to actually have the very ingredient of interpersonal compassion (empathy) that is needed for effective therapy in any kind of medical or psychotherapeutic encounter.

In all these ways science has now shown that teaching mindfulness to clinicians would be a very important basic step in helping everyone involved in the clinical experience.

                       

Stephanie West Allen

Stephanie West Allen, JD, practiced law in California for several years, held offices in local bar associations, and wrote chapters for California Continuing Education of the Bar. While in CA, Stephanie completed several five-day mediation training programs with the Center for Mediation in Law, as well as a two-year intensive… MORE >