SESSIONS EVERY WEEKDAY
Branch Training: MBCT for OCD
6 Day Training
Description
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is an innovative, standardized, and manualized treatment program designed to create significant clinical and life improvement in people who suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
Based on the research and clinical experience of Dr Fabrizio Didonna and documented in his handbook Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for OCD (New York, Guilford Press, 2020) the program integrates the most effective tools of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy with the clinical application of mindfulness and self-compassion practices.
This therapeutic model is the culmination of twenty-five years of the founder’s work with hundreds of people affected by OCD, and more than two decades of practicing and teaching mindfulness, especially MBCT.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder can be conceptualized as a severe state of ‘mindlessness’. The heart of MBCT for OCD lies in acquainting patients with the modes of mind that characterize OCD, while simultaneously helping them to develop a new relationship to their internal states. Patients learn to view thoughts and emotions as harmless and impermanent events in the mind, independent of their content and emotional charge.
This step-by-step intensive therapeutic program aims to help individuals with OCD to recognize and overcome the specific and/or generic cognitive biases and dysfunctional mechanisms that activate and maintain their disorder, to learn new effective strategies to neutralize those mechanisms, and to develop stable and healthy ways to relate to their internal experience.
Training Days: Thursdays 3rd October, 10th October, 17th October, 24th October, 31st October, 7th November from 9:00-17:00 UK Time
The Workshop
Led by a senior clinical psychologist, mindfulness teacher and retreat leader Fabrizio Didonna, Psy. D., this workshop analyzes the particular features of OCD patient’s relationship with their private experience, using a mindfulness-based perspective, and help to understand how this rapport might play an important activating and maintaining role in obsessive problem. Through mindfulness exercises and videos of MBCT for OCD sessions, the workshop explores the actual application of mindfulness and compassion practices in working with OCD patients. Furthermore, it explains the rationale, the agenda and contents of the therapeutic model and some practices of the program will be shared with participants.
The curriculum integrates didactic and experiential learning and includes some static meditations as well as active meditations.
The OMF provides Confirmation of Attendance letters to all participants who attend and take part in all aspects of 100% of the training event, including break out rooms, with their camera on.
What will I do on this course?
You will learn about the theoretical background and rationale for MBCT for OCD, the structure and sequence of the curriculum, and share some unique practices and exercises from this therapeutic program to have a direct experience of their possible effects on our mind and body.Learning Outcomes
At the end of the two workshop sessions, particpants will understand:- how OCD works and the cognitive processes and biases that activate and maintain OCD problems.
- through some mindfulness practices from the program, the central role of mindfulness meditation in facilitating the processes of decentering, disidentification and mindful exposure, which are pivotal in dealing with obsessive problems.
- the role of acceptance and self-compassion in changing OCD pathological biases and mechanisms
- the rationale as well as the cultural and scientific basis of MBCT for OCD
- the basic tenets and key features of MBCT for OCD as well as the session format and structure of MBCT for OCD
- the curriculum and core therapeutic tasks for each of the eleven group sessions of MBCT for OCD program
- some of the evidnece base from outcome studies on the effectiveness of MBCT for OCD
About the Teacher
Dr Fabrizio Didonna
I am a clinical psychologist, a senior mindfulness teacher, trainer, supervisor and author - and have been involved in mindfulness since the end of 90s and the beginning of MBCT. I am an Adjunct Professor of Clinical Psychology at the School of Medicine, University of Padova, Professor in the Institute for Lifelong Learning of the University of Barcelona and Visiting Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I am also a Founder Director of the International MBCT for OCD Center, in Vicenza, Italy, and the developer of the therapeutic model, and author of the related manual, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (Guilford Press, 2020, translated in Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French and Russian), the first manualized and validated mindfulness-based treatment model for OCD. I am also a Founder and Honorary President of the Italian Institute for Mindfulness (IS.I.MIND). I was for 25 years a Director of an inpatient Unit for Mood and Anxiety Disorders and a Unit for OCD at the Villa Margherita Private Hospital in Vicenza, Italy, where I implemented the MBCT model for hundreds of severe and hospitalized patients. I have trained in MBCT more than 2,000 patients in inpatient and outpatient settings. I also had the privilege to present scientific papers, lectures and workshops at a number of international conferences and universities worldwide, including Harvard and Oxford, and I published numerous articles, several chapters and three books. I am the Editor of the Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness (2009, Springer), the first manual on the clinical applications of mindfulness meditation (translated in five languages). I very much enjoy supervising mindfulness teachers from different parts of the world and giving workshops and training retreats, in particular in the field of mindfulness and compassion in psychotherapy and MBCT for OCD internationally, including United States, United Kingdom, China, Mexico, Spain, Panama, Israel, Finland and Poland.
