Promoting Attachment-Related Mindfulness and Compassion: A Wait-List Controlled Study of Women Who Were Mistreated during Childhood
Speaker: Jon Caldwell, DO, PhD
Format: Audio & Slides

Numerous studies have shown that mindfulness-based interventions contribute to positive outcomes in physical, cognitive, and affective domains. Less is known about how mindfulness influences close interpersonal relationships. The present study evaluated a novel mindfulness-based intervention for promoting cognitive-emotional processes that are underdeveloped in people who have experienced unhealthy attachment relationships. In this quasi-experimental pilot study, women who were mistreated in childhood were assigned to either an intervention group (N=17) or a wait-list control group (N=22) and assessed at three time points. Attachment-related cognitive-emotional processes were measured with valid self-report questionnaires and writing exercises involving participants' emotional disclosures about stressful attachment experiences in childhood. Attachment anxiety was related to rumination and negative emotion, attachment avoidance was related to emotion suppression and lack of emotional clarity, and both kinds of insecurity were related to emotion dysregulation and lower levels of mindfulness. Across measurement periods, a treatment group, relative to a wait-list control group, evinced significant improvements in the domains of rumination, emotion suppression, clarity of emotions, emotion regulation, and mindfulness. Of these variables, changes in rumination and emotional clarity mediated the gains in mindfulness for the treatment group. Also, when comparing participants' pre- and post-intervention descriptions of a stressful or traumatic childhood attachment experience, the treatment group used fewer past tense words and more present tense, cognitive processing, and insight-oriented words. Taken together, the results suggest that the intervention led to increases in mindfulness, primarily due to improvements in rumination and emotional clarity, and these treatment-related changes were specifically related to participants' thoughts and emotions regarding attachment.