As a practicing MCT psychologist, I have dedicated much of my time to sharing knowledge about MCT, so it comes as no surprise that I recommend it as an effective treatment.
In this post, however, I have asked several colleagues to sharetheir views on MCT, and why they recommend it. So here are 7 experienced MCT therapists’ opinions on why you should choose MCT.
As a therapist, my biggest reason for recommending the metacognitive approach is because of the insight it has given us about how the brain works.
The brain has many counterintuitive and funny rules that are good to know about because when you learn the rules, you can use them to reach your own personal goals.
One of the rules of the brain is: “What you give attention, grows”. This is because the brain registers what thoughts, feelings, and symptoms you pay attention to. This relates to both paying positive and negative attention. The more attention you pay to a symptom, the more the brain interprets it as important. The brain sees the attention as a signal to produce more of that thought or feeling, even though this is often not your intention.
Unhelpful ways to pay attention to thoughts and feelings
If you try to change a negative thought to a positive one, or try to push it away or worry about it to find solutions, then you are paying too much attention to that thought.
One of my clients mentioned the other day, that she couldn’t understand why her anxiety didn’t go away despite her using so much time and energy on fighting it. She told me that used many hours every day doing yoga, breathing exercises, resting, and monitoring her symptoms without any luck.
This is a great example of a person who had the best intentions of getting rid of her anxiety but who ended up reinforcing the anxiety because she did not have insights into how the mind really works.
When this client discovered that she actually had to do the opposite – allow the anxiety and not give it attention – she quickly experienced that the anxiety decreased. At first, it seemed counterintuitive and surprising to her that she shouldn’t fight the feeling to make it go away. But once she understood the mechanisms of the brain and discovered how to work with the brain’s simple rules, she managed to give less attention to the thoughts and feelings that distressed her. Ultimately, this lead to less nervousness and restlessness.
We know that physical wounds heal better when we leave them alone and don’t scratch them. The same principle applies to the mind. It is important to learn how the mind works and how to create good conditions for healing mental wounds. Metacognitive therapy provides us with that important insight, and that’s why I recommend it.
According to MCT, the mind can heal itself from mental illness, negative thoughts, and feelings through a mechanism called self-regulation.
2. I describe MCT as a lazy therapy
Erik Palm – Licenced Clinical Psychologist, Stockholm
The most rewarding feeling as an MCT therapist is when clients realize that the work they’ve been putting in so far has been part of the problem. And that using energy and force has maintained and worsened their problem.
There is relief in that for the client but it also takes a lot of courage to give up old strategies, i.e. to stop perseverating. I like to describe MCT as a “lazy therapy” or even as an anti-therapy because there is no need to regulate a self-regulating system.
Clients that come to me are everything but lazy, they’re often highly analytical with a sort of “doer” mentality. If I can get them to become lazy for a while and work less with their “inner events” (feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations) they gain new, surprising insights into how their mind and body work.
Other areas of clients’ lives also improve from MCT
Oftentimes, clients tell me that other areas of their life, like their relationships, also improve, even though we didn’t address them directly in therapy. This is another thing I appreciate about working with MCT.
With a solid plan laid out by the end of the treatment and a booster session booked a few months ahead, I always feel confident that my clients are really well equipped to take on life’s challenges, regardless of what will come their way.
According to Erik, MCT is the right treatment for you if you can relate to the points below:
You feel “stuck” as if you were cornered by your own thinking. A “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” feeling.
You feel controlled by your thoughts and spend a lot of time trying to tame them. I.e. you worry a lot and don’t know how to stop worrying.
You’ve talked extensively about your problem with friends or therapists but still dwell on the event/situation more than you would like.
You can’t stop analyzing your feelings, thoughts, or bodily sensations.
You feel like you’re “looping” – the same kind of thoughts keep coming back
You often keep track of your mood and energy levels, asking yourself how you’re feeling and whether you can get through the day
Photo by Annie Spratt
3. Independence
Julie Schou – Clinical Psychologist, Copenhagen
Personally, my favorite thing about working with Metacognitive therapy is that it allows me to help people become independent.
People who struggle with mental disorders like anxiety or depression can end up becoming very dependent on other people. They depend on their friends and family to calm them down, give them reassurance, and comfort them. They often also end up relying on their therapist to help them talk through all of their problems or trigger thoughts, to provide that relief. However, the relief only works short-term.
It all comes from a place of kindness and a desire to help others. But unfortunately, it can end up putting strain on relationships. Suddenly the purpose of being together is no longer to enjoy each other’s company but instead for one person to calm down the other.
Reassurance-seeking make people feel as though they cannot cope on thier own
Depending on others to calm down ends up making people feel as though they cannot cope on their own. As though they need help in order to get through the day.
In Metacognitive therapy, we work on helping people realize that they have the ability to cope on their own. That they have the ability to control their worrying and ruminating completely without help from others, even their therapist.
Nothing makes me happier than saying goodbye to a client for the last time knowing that they have the skills they need to cope with their trigger thoughts and problems on their own, without the help of me or anyone else.
It is a relief for many people to not have to delve into unpleasant thoughts or trauma to feel better.
I find Metacognitive therapy interesting because it is actually based on a proven theory of how the brain works. I recommend that you try MCT because, in the course of therapy, you aim to change the thigs that you have control over and leave the things that are outside of your own control.
Another reason to try MCT is that you will become aware of what you are doing with your thinking and attention. Increased awareness and flexibility helps you reduce unneccesary thinking and create the life you want to live. An MCT therapist interferes very little in how you should live your life but helps you minimize th inner noise so that you can ultimately make better decisions for yourself. And you don’t need to talk through your problems in detail to achieve that.
In my experience, it is a relief for many people to not have to delve into unpleasant thoughts or trauma to feel better. This is because MCT works with processes (how much you think) rather than changing people’s values and reinterpreting their experiences and memories from the past. Because of MCT, people slowly build a new trust in their brain and its ability to regulate and process trauma, feelings, and thoughts. This can free up extra resources for the individual.
It is very “empowering” to discover that you actually have more control over your thinking than you thought.
To put it bluntly, you should choose MCT, because it has a much more rigorous and robust theoretical foundation than any other therapeutic method so far. MCT was developed through attempts to pinpoint the exact mechanisms of the mind that lead to psychological disorders. This results in significant benefits.
First of all, MCT cuts much more to the chase of what is maintaining your problem and teaches you how to solve it. This means that therapy is often of a shorter duration, and gives results faster than many other techniques. If you have previously felt exhausted from therapies that require you to examine your past over and over, you may find MCT to be somewhat gentler and less exhausting.
MCT cuts to the chase
Secondly, because MCT truly gets to the heart of what maintains psychological distress, it is incredibly generalizable. While you are dealing with one problem in therapy, you are simultaneously learning to deal with other, completely different problems (since most psychological problems are caused by excessive overthinking). Thus, you may notice improvements on several fronts at once, and future problems are easier to overcome.
For example, if someone attends therapy to overcome their health anxiety, they not only learn to control their health worries but also get better at controlling other, often unrelated, worries like for example worries about finances, work, and relationships. Basically, the lessons you learn from therapy will help you deal with many other problems later on.
In this way, choosing MCT can truly be the investment of a lifetime.
Do you want to understand what MCT is and how it works? Go to this post to learn the basics, and this post to learn how MCT it works in the brain
MCT is something completely different from what you might have tried before.
Many clients say that this approach is not as heavy compared to other therapies that delve into worries or uses exposure techniques. This is because, in MCT, you are working on a different “level” of the mind, often addressed as the meta-level.
The point of MCT is to spend less energy on your thoughts, rather than having to change how you think, the latter requiring more mental energy. MCT is particularly useful if your anxiety and depression are connected to a “real-life” problem. Here, you are not going to learn to think differently about your problem (for example, thinking more positively) but instead, you strengthen your control over worrying about the problem. This will result in less anxiety and depression, and an increased ability to solve the problem.
MCT is also a really good approach if you worry a lot and find that your worries jump from one problem to another; as soon as one concern is put to rest, another appears. The techniques for tackling worry are simple and you can use them to overcome all types of mental challenges. It is called a transdiagnostic approach. It works across diagnoses and has proven to be incredibly effective for psychological challenges with a high risk of relapse.
Most importantly, you get a good overview of how your mind works and you will have a relaxed relationship with your thoughts, no matter what kind of thoughts they are and how scary they seem.
7. It is possible to disengage from all kinds of thoughts
You cannot overcome overthinking by thinking more – only by thinking less.
If you struggle with going over the same thoughts in your mind over and over again, in a downward spiral, like there is no ending to it, you should know that It is possible to disengage from thoughts. All kinds of thoughts.
By now, you might be aware that you have been dealing with some of the same thoughts for a long period of time, and at the same time, you find it difficult to stop this thinking. Perhaps you find yourself worrying about the future or ruminating about the past for hours each day, which affects your mood and energy level, making it difficult to keep up with everyday tasks.
I practice Metacognitive therapy every day for a range of psychological disorders. Here, I want to share with you some of my experiences with this kind of therapy, and how it works.
From my clinical experience, it is possible to break out of unhelpful thinking patterns.
In Metacognitive therapy, we use different exercises to explore how it is possible not to engage with thoughts, which is a process called detached mindfulness. The idea is that you cannot overcome overthinking by thinking more – only by thinking less. This makes Metacognitive therapy different from other therapies that I have practiced. In therapy, we don’t sort thoughts out, we practice leaving them alone so that the mind gets a bit of rest for its self-healing processes.
My clinical experience is that when you give less importance to some thoughts, they will become less important to you over time. How you respond to your thoughts makes the whole difference between feeling a little stressed out from time to time and suffering for a long time.
In Metacognitive therapy, we don’t go into the content of the thoughts. Instead, we stay at the meta-level of processing. We ask the client, “When you have that thought in your mind: Do you forget about it, or do you try to work it out?”, and also, “What’s your goal with working that thought out in your mind?”. We have this kind of metacognitive dialogue throughout the sessions to increase metacognitive awareness and help clients reduce overthinking their thoughts.
In summary, you can discover how to think less, i.e. disengage from the thinking process itself. Over the course of therapy, you lean that thoughts are passing events in your mind that you can choose to let go.
Photo by Greg Rosenke
Tips on choosing a good MCT therapist
If you are already convinced that MCT is a good approach for you but unsure how to find a good therapist, here is a guideline to help you.
A good MCT therapist does not combine different therapeutic approaches. He or she works only with MCT
A good MCT therapist is MCT-I qualified or in the process of getting qualified
A good MCT therapist confidently interrupts your worrying process and insists on teaching you MCT in every session
A good MCT therapist does not teach you meditation or techniques to calm your feelings.
A good MCT therapist teaches you to change your relationship with thoughts, not to push your thoughts away
A good MCT therapist does not talk about the content of your thoughts but about how you deal with your thoughts
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