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    Metabolising bigger-than-self distress through nondual enactive wisdom development : a layered autoethnographical study of embodied embedded psychological responses to biospheric and civilisational crises : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2022) Laurence, Nicholas Clyde
    The current thesis explores the question of how psychologists and other mental health professionals might assist clients experiencing bigger-than-self distress. Bigger-than-self distress is defined as psychological distress that relates to what I describe as the biospheric-civilisational meta-crisis, which comprises a compounding and interlinked set of social and environmental issues, some of which pose time-bound existential threats to the stability of our civilisation and the biosphere’s capacity to sustain it. The thesis begins with looking at the cognitive behavioural tradition and mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and explores what further psychological assistance might be given for those whom these interventions are not enough. The thesis takes an autoethnographic approach, drawing on the author’s own experience of responding to bigger-than-self distress, and blends this with an enactivist theoretical account that seeks to link more closely together mindful understandings of experience with cognitive scientific theory and empirical literature. The author’s experience of engaging in mindfulness training broadened and deepened his perspective on bigger-than-self distress and the seeming necessity of an expanded container within which to hold and process it. This expanded container is expounded in the form of the Big History, Systems View of Life, and Theory of Knowledge perspectives, which provide an evolutionary, scientific, and cosmological account of history within which to situate the biosphere, humanity, and the civilisational-biospheric meta-crisis that is related to bigger-than-self distress. An updated view of cognition is also provided, which views cognition as self-organising, based on principles of relevance realisation, free energy minimisation, predictive processing, and which is profoundly embodied and embedded within its environment. From this expanded base, wisdom traditions from Western, Eastern, and Indigenous cultures are discussed with a view to being able to draw from these for novel interventions within the cognitive behavioural tradition that align with this updated version of cognition and context of cosmos, biosphere, humanity, and biospheric-civilisational meta-crisis. From there, interventions within clinical psychology and coaching (IFS and Aletheia Coaching, primarily) are presented as prototypical novel cognitive behavioural interventions that are aligned with this view of cognition. The novel ways of working with psychological content are applied to bigger-than-self distress via a new term that I label metabolisation. This overall way of working can be understood as enactive nondual wisdom development for bigger-than-self distress and helps to provide a cognitive scientific vocabulary for understanding psychological responses to bigger-than-self distress. Importantly, nondual enactive wisdom development is something that can only be enacted in real-world praxis, and so to guide clients through it requires clinicians to go through it experientially ahead of their clients: a philosophy that overall fits well with the reality of bigger-than-self distress and the meta-crisis being something that clinicians and clients alike are subsumed within.
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    MINT pilot study : a text message package as an adjunct to existing mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in an early intervention setting : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Miller, Mary
    Background: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is being used in an increasing number of settings including Early Intervention (EI) for psychosis services. People with psychotic symptoms face difficulties including compliance problems with home-based practice, which may affect the utility of MBCT. This study aimed to examine whether text message technology could be used as an adjunct to support home-based practice. Method: A single case multiple baseline design was used to assess the mindfulness text message intervention (MINT) in 11 participants. Results: There was a statistically significant increase of group mean total practice time per week of 7.1 minutes from the baseline to post-intervention phase, with a medium effect size. There were no statistically significant results for change in mindfulness skills or depression and anxiety symptoms. Discussion: Text messages can be used as an adjunct to support home-based practice in an EI setting. The amount of home-based practice required to produce an improvement in clinical outcomes is unclear. Future studies may explore the variation between participants found and the use of MINT in other settings.
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    Creating a compendium of third wave therapy strategies : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Rous, Michelle Leanne
    Third Wave Cognitive Behavioural therapies have received much attention in the practice community recently. However, little has been done to understand how these therapies relate and diverge. Despite the varying theoretical models contributing to the Third Wave movement and their supposed varying therapeutic elements, studies have suggested that outcomes do not differ across these therapeutic approaches. This finding leaves room for the notion that shared or ‘common’ factors may be operating across these approaches. Exploration into common elements between these approaches is useful for identifying areas of overlap or uniqueness, shared processes of change, and perhaps components that may be particularly efficacious. Goldfried argued the best way to identify the commonalities among diverse therapeutic approaches is to compare them by their principles of change, or change processes (Goldfried, 1980). Research has investigated change processes for many approaches, including those of the Behaviour and Cognitive tradition. However, such extensive investigations have not been applied to the Third Wave approaches. Further, a lack of quality comparisons across these approaches, even at the more specific level of therapeutic strategies, represents a gap in the field. The present research first identified a set of strategies (84 items) within three Third Wave approaches: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy. Strategies are sorted according to similarity in a card-sorting task, by two participant samples, a non-therapist sample (N=32) and a therapist sample (N=35). Sorting data were analysed using multidimensional scaling (MDS) to produce three three-dimensional models, representing each sample and a combined sample. The therapist sample was judged to represent the underlying relationships between strategies best. Three dimensions were identified that classified strategies according to their internal or external orientation; response to experience (accepting or exploratory in nature); and the perspectives involved (clients or external such as therapists). Additionally, 17 clusters were identified that comprised strategies perceived to represent similar concepts, five of which contained strategies from all three paradigms (Mindfulness; Noticing; Distress Tolerance and Acceptance; Therapist Style; and Observing and Perspective Taking). Commonalities and differences observed across the approaches are discussed and suggestions made for future validation of this model. Applications are discussed around informing investigations of change processes in the Third Wave and the integration of Third Wave therapy elements. This research presents opportunities for mapping strategies to various characteristics of the client, therapist or disorder, for example, and then identifying effective strategy use among these variables.