Show us a behaviour without a cognition and we'll show you a rock rolling down a hill

Abstract

AbstractDismantling studies are used in psychotherapy in order to understand the important components of treatment. Typically, this has occurred so that people could understand the unique contributions provided by cognitive versus behavioural techniques. Recently, mindfulness-based approaches have apparently added a third dimension to the dismantling enterprise. Dismantling is seen as an important way of understanding the change process in psychotherapy and, therefore, clarifying how we might most effectively promote change. The way in which an entity is dismantled, however, exposes assumptions about the nature of the entity and its organization. In this paper we argue that dismantling studies in psychotherapy have perhaps generated more confusion than consensus and have provided little practical benefit for clinicians. We suggest that the phenomenon of control might provide a unifying perspective from which to approach the integration of behavioural, cognitive, and mindfulness approaches. In one sense all these seemingly different approaches are doing the same thing and it is this ‘thing’ we highlight in this paper.