A little mindfulness and compassion can make a difference in easing stress, according to psychologists running a new Murdoch-based program.
The results saw Perth participants move from having clinical post-traumatic stress symptoms to non-clinical conditions, following the use of compassion and mindfulness-based exposure therapy treatment in a group setting.
The eight-week program, known as CoMET, was led by clinical psychologist Dr Auretta Kummar from Murdoch University’s School of Psychology, who said that making the group program more widely available would fill a gap for people who may otherwise suffer without treatment.
“Although post-traumatic stress symptoms can be debilitating, many people don’t seek treatment unless they experience a full post-traumatic stress disorder,” Dr Kummar said.
At present, Trauma-focussed Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (TF-CBT) is typically recommended by most international guidelines as the first-line treatment for PTSD among adults, assisting those impacted in directly attending to their memories of the traumatic event and their associated cognitive and emotional responses.
Dr Kummar said that one of the main concerns was that some patients were unwilling to initiate treatment with these therapies due to the belief that they were “too intensive.”
“Individuals with full PTSD also often continue to present with residual symptoms following standard treatment,” she said.
“One possible reason is that while trauma-focused therapies may support individuals with reprocessing past trauma-related symptoms, they may retain difficulties with emotion regulation strategies that challenge their capacity to cope with day-to-day stressors.
“Recently, several researchers suggested the potential role of mindfulness as a process that could support emotion regulation during standard exposure treatments.
“During mindfulness one not only cultivates conscious awareness of their aversive thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations but also couples this ‘exposure’ with a psychological distance from thoughts and emotions that allows for one to regulate through the experience and respond with non-reactivity and non-judgment.”
The team from Murdoch used participants’ self-reports on questionnaires and monitored changes in brain network connectivity, as well as assessing the participants’ engagement in mindfulness and self-compassion practices between sessions via weekly homework reflection sheets.
Results showed that following participation in the CoMET pro-gram, participants demonstrated significant decreases in PTSS severity, decreases in experiential avoidance and difficulties with emotion regulation, as well as significant increases in mindfulness skills and self-compassion.
Dr Hakuei Fujiyama, who supervised Dr Kummar’s research, said that CoMET not only held promising intervention outcomes for individuals with PTSS but had the potential to prevent participants’ levels of PTSS from escalating to greater levels of severity.
“Participants who took part in the study not only found that their post-traumatic stress symptoms improved from clinical to non-clinical levels, but they also showed improved alpha-band connectivity in a brain network that includes the amygdala – the brain’s fear centre,” Dr Fujiyama said.