McCollum, E. E., & Gehart, D. R. (2010). Using mindfulness meditation to teach beginning therapists therapeutic presence: A qualitative study. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 36(3), 347-360. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1752-0606.2010.00214.x?casa_token=B5xLokk7JMIAAAAA:CYZKGtpKQJB5z_qHfbH_ilDrq5eYmodW-40GQqIi-yJuHJCt1ycT4x3qTpDiZJvPaukCmGFcN4cnKvxb
The author’s goal is to pinpoint how empathy, compassion, and presence are a few of the more elusive yet crucial elements of the therapeutic process. Both teachers and therapist students find it challenging to teach them. In this study, we explore how studying mindfulness meditation has impacted the development of therapeutic presence in our beginning practicum students. Several themes emerged through thematic analysis of their journal entries, including the benefits of meditation practice, the capacity to be present, balancing being and doing in therapy, and the growth of acceptance and compassion for both themselves and their patients. Our research suggests that adding mindfulness meditation to clinical training might be beneficial.
Thirteen students from our two classrooms who participated in opportunistic sampling permitted us to utilize their weekly journal entries as data for this study. The IRBs at both institutions gave their approval for the study. The weekly journals were a requirement for the course and over the course of the semester, the instructors read them before returning them to the students. Although they were not given a content mark, finishing the diaries was necessary to pass the class. The diaries served as a platform for the students to express themselves, reflect on their experiences, and be held accountable for their weekly practice. Students were encouraged to write in their journals about their experiences with mindfulness meditation and the impact they felt it had on their daily lives and clinical work.
The students talked about a wide range of experiences from practicing mindfulness and how they thought those experiences affected their work as aspiring therapists. The students attributed their capacity to be present as therapists to several “benefits” of their mindfulness practice. They believed that engaging in formal meditation practice made them more relaxed overall and during their therapy sessions in particular. Additionally, they felt it assisted them in becoming more conscious of their internal dialogue and either reducing or disconnecting from it. As a result, they were able to slow their apparent inner tempo or sense of rush by meditating. Finally, several students established boundaries between sessions and when they arrived at their clinical settings by engaging in brief periods of formal practice.
The students’ accounts of their experiences offer at least some proof that practicing mindfulness assisted them in acquiring traits we have dubbed therapeutic presence. This study had several restrictions. For instance, they could only gather information from those students who agreed to give us their notebooks after class. However, as previously mentioned, the specific use of their regular clinical work to ground their descriptions of their encounters lends some weight to the integrity of their reports.