Mastering Intrusive Thoughts: Helping Clients Understand and Effectively Manage Distressing Thoughts

In this course, Dr. Bruno A. Cayoun (DPsych, clinical psychologist and Founder/Director of the MiCBT Institute) introduces a practical framework for helping clients understand and manage distressing intrusive, obsessive, and ruminative thoughts. Drawing on Mindfulness-integrated Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Dr. Cayoun explains how thoughts can become reinforced through their relationship with bodily sensations and emotional reactivity, and demonstrates how equanimity, mindfulness of breath, interoceptive awareness, and systematic body scanning can help interrupt these processes. You will explore practical strategies for strengthening attention, response inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and experiential acceptance, alongside the Mindfulness-based Interoceptive Exposure Task for reducing reactivity to distressing sensations. The course also considers applications across anxiety, depression, OCD, insomnia, chronic pain, trauma-related presentations, and other clinical contexts, equipping practitioners with a transdiagnostic framework for helping clients respond more skilfully to intrusive thoughts in everyday life.<br><br> This course is the second part of a two-part series on this topic. The first course in this series is titled <a href="/catalogue/courses/mastering-intrusive-thoughts-neurocognitive-origins-mechanisms-and-predictability-of-spontaneous-intrusive-thoughts" target="_blank"><em>Mastering Intrusive Thoughts: Neurocognitive Origins, Mechanisms and Predictability of Spontaneous Intrusive Thoughts</em></a>.