What is Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy | Dr Alex Milspaw | Pelvic Rehabilitation Medicine
Our Director of Behavioral Health, Dr. Alexandra Milspaw, tells us what Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy is and how it can help treat the mental side of chronic pelvic pain.
Dr. Alexandra T. Milspaw is a licensed professional counselor in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and an AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist who has been practicing counseling, as well as providing educational seminars and training sessions, since 2007. A strong believer in holistic, comprehensive healing, Dr. Milspaw is passionate about bridging the gap between the psychological and medical worlds. She seeks to utilize evidence-based research to highlight the connection between the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual experiences as a way of empowering clinicians and clients alike to trust the healing potential within everyone.
Pelvic Rehabilitation Medicine, our pelvic pain specialists provide a functional, rehab approach to pelvic pain. When you visit one of our offices, you spend an hour with your doctor reviewing in detail your medical history and symptoms. Then, we perform an internal exam (no speculum) to evaluate your nerves and muscles. Together, we'll discuss an individual treatment plan that gets to the root cause of your pain and helps you to feel better. The best part: you can begin treatment the same day!
At PRM, our mission is to decrease the time patients are suffering from pelvic pain symptoms.
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Mindfulness based cognitive therapy combines the science of mindfulness based stress reduction with cognitive behavioral therapy. The way I explain it is just cognitive behavioral therapy is great and it works. But with chronic pain and trauma, the way the brain changes is it's not able to click save very effectively. The science demonstrated that if they were doing mindfulness based brain exercises prior to starting the cognitive therapy, and then at the same time as doing the cognitive therapy, the brain was able to click save a lot more effectively and the relapse rates dropped significantly.
In a lot of the literature that's out there, they talk about only CBT. And they're forgetting that, again, when you have chronic pain and trauma, the hardware of the brain changes. And so, it can be really not only difficult for the brain to click save, but difficult for someone to actually exercise the practice of CBT, because in order to change your thoughts and behavior, you have to be aware of what you're doing and aware of what you're thinking. But because the brain is in that fight or flight mode so much, that self-awareness and that ability to be in the moment is really limited. So it's really hard for someone to do that.
And then, it feels like a performance issue and people feel like they're not doing it right, or that it's not meant to work for them as if it takes a certain personality to do the work. And it doesn't. They're just not understanding that their brain just needs plugged in, in a few places where it's been unplugged. So the mindfulness piece is huge in how it heals the brain. And then, we add the cognitive therapy on top of that and voila!