Recent years have seen an inspiring breakthrough in psychotherapy – mindfulness and compassion-based interventions (MCBI) can help clinicians to acquire essential skills and improve the relationships they have with patients.
A new study reveals that after MCBI, therapists see an increase in psychotherapeutic mindfulness skills (PMS) at both follow-up and after the intervention. Their empathy also improves at follow-up. As for patients, they experience improvements in perceived empathy, therapeutic bond, and symptomatology. And those improvements are maintained for somatization and anxiety at follow-up.
But what’s really interesting is the connection between the two. The increase in a therapist’s PMS can be directly linked to an increase in patient-reported empathy. This, in turn, produces an improvement in therapeutic bond and symptomatology. These results support the benefits of introducing MCBI in psychotherapists’ training to improve psychotherapy outcomes.