It is now well established in affective neuroscience that most mental health disorders share a reduced ability to perceive the ordinary bodily sensations from which emotions emerge. When these signals go undetected, early regulation is not possible. Emotional reactivity rises, change feels hard, and relapse is more likely, because regardless of the trigger, we react according to what we feel. The less we feel, the more we react.
To help you address this challenge with your clients, Dr. Bruno Cayoun, a clinical and research psychologist, has developed Mindfulness-Integrated Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (MiCBT), an evidence-based approach that integrates the latest findings in Western psychology and neuroscience with over 2,500 years of Buddhist phenomenological psychology. This therapy specifically includes the systematic body-scanning practice of the Burmese Vipassana tradition in the lineage of Ledi Sayadaw, U Ba Khin and S. N. Goenka.
Where most mindfulness-based therapies rely on focusing and open-monitoring of attention, MiCBT directly trains both interoceptive capacity and interoceptive desensitisation at the heart of emotional regulation.
This course will teach you how to deliver MiCBT across a wide range of clinical presentations. It is structured around MiCBT's four stages: Personal (attention and emotion regulation), Exposure (addressing avoidance), Interpersonal (relational effectiveness), and Empathic (compassion and ethics).
Over ten weeks, you will develop competency in applying the Co-Emergence Model of Reinforcement — a neurophenomenological framework that describes psychological distress and its reinforcement as a consequence of craving for pleasant body sensations and aversion to unpleasant ones, both co-arising with unhelpful thoughts. This transdiagnostic case-conceptualisation framework will greatly expand your insight into what creates and maintains mental health disorders.
You will learn evidence-based practices including progressive muscle relaxation, mindfulness of breath, body scanning in the vipassana tradition, advanced scanning methods, mindfulness-based exposure techniques, equanimity training, mindfulness-based interpersonal communication skills, and loving-kindness meditation to cultivate compassion for self and others to help prevent relapse.
The course combines theoretical understanding of MiCBT's mechanisms with practical application, so that you can deliver this integrated approach across a wide range of disorders, including generalised and phobic anxieties, acute and chronic depression, OCD, PTSD, chronic pain, and emotion dysregulation.
Special emphasis is placed on the critical role of daily mindfulness practice as the foundation for rapid and lasting therapeutic change, maintained by the resulting neuroplasticity, and on understanding how to motivate client commitment through Socratic dialogue and cognitive reappraisal.
By course completion, you will be able to assess client suitability for MiCBT, structure and deliver all four stages of the program, manage common implementation challenges, and integrate MiCBT principles into your clinical practice. Twenty-nine audio guides for mindfulness practices and their integration with exposure are provided. Video demonstrations showing Dr Cayoun delivering the methods with real clients who present with complex comorbidities are also provided.
