Book Review: Mind and Emotions

4.0 out of 5 staAll the Science, But Not the Art, of the MBCTs... Maybe =Too= Generic

4.0 out of 5 stars All the Science, But Not the Art, of the MBCTs... Maybe Too Generic

Rodger Garrett "SighKoBlahGrr" (Loma Linda, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mind and Emotions: A Universal Treatment for Emotional Disorders by Matthew McKay, Patrick Fanning and Patricia Zurita Ona (New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook) 2011

My expectations may have been too great. Having waded through several of the other New Harbinger work books (all of them at least four-star), it may be that I thought a "best of" compilation would somehow be a genuine step further.

While the procedures / methods / techniques are all here, and it's hard to fault the nuts and bolts of M&E, I came away a little (though not "greatly") disappointed. McKay and a different group of co-authors did a wonderful job capturing and operationalizing Marsha Linehan's DBT in 2007.

But I recall thinking after I was a ways into that book that it was bit less "artful" than Marsha herself (at least on stage; her 1993 masterwork reads like a Chilton auto repair manual). The DBT Skills Workbook just lacked the metaphorical and other "tonal" quality of Steven Hayes's stunning Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life and Thomas Marra's Depressed & Anxious.

Maybe it's that I'm personally very attracted to Miller & Rolnick's Motivational Enhancement Therapy. Because, after all, the real challenge is in the denial / pre-contemplation and contemplation / consideration phases of the specific withholds any "seeker" may still have... despite his or her willingness to dig into meaningful ACTion in the already recognized and "radically accepted" areas of affective or behavioral difficulty.

The "art" of psychotherapy is most often required in those first two phases, after all.

Of course, it really comes down to how and when the book is used. For the "seeker" who's already been down the road a ways, and/or is already familiar with the methods and techniques of the mindfulness-based cognitive therapies, M&E strikes me as fine source of rehearsal and skills acquisition. It's just that my experience tells me that the very shame-based, anxiety-soaked patient may have more difficulty gaining traction with M&E than he or she would with Follette & Pistorello's Finding Life Beyond Trauma, or the two workbooks mentioned above.

I suppose what I'm suggesting is that it might be useful for NH and the authors to look at expanding what's already a very solid rundown of the most empirically proven of the DBT / ACT / MBCT skills with a little more metaphorical and other MET-style "sauce" to make them more appealing.

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