My guest this week is fellow clinical psychologist and CBT therapist Dr. Paul Greene. We talked about our experiences with mindfulness, both in our own lives and in our clinical practice. We also explored the effectiveness of CBT for treating trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and our thoughts on combining these treatment programs with some of the body-focused treatments (like those I discussed in a recent episode with Ilene Smith). Paul and I also got into some of the personal benefit we find in meditation practices, and the kinds of practices we tend to be drawn to.

Other topics we discussed included:

• Our difficulty in predicting which outcomes in our life will end up being positive or negative
• The story of the Taoist farmer
• The wisdom in not getting too worked up about developments in our lives
• My guest’s background in mindfulness
• Karmê Chöling, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in Vermont where Paul spent some time
• The applicability of mindfulness to generalized anxiety disorder
• What it means to change our relationship with our thoughts and worries
• Variations of mindfulness practice
• Making anything into a meditation practice
• The difficulty of trying to apply sporadic mindfulness practice in stressful situations
• The Shambhala approach to Samatha meditation
• Metta (loving-kindness) meditation
• My (mostly ineffable) experience of doing gentle yoga
• Connecting with others through shared suffering
• My guest’s approach to treating trauma with prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy
• Whether CBT for trauma and PTSD can be “retraumatizing”

Paul provided some very helpful links for those who need effective treatment following a trauma. See this page for general info about PTSD. Learn more about the evidence-based treatment programs of Prolonged Exposure therapy for PTSD (which I was trained in and use) and Cognitive Processing Therapy.

For those who are interested in learning more about the Shambhala approach to meditation, see this book by Chögyam Trungpa: Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.

Paul B. Greene, PhD, is an expert in the treatment of a wide range of conditions, including PTSD, OCD, depression, trichotillomania, panic disorder, and illness anxiety.

He specializes in helping survivors of trauma who develop posttraumatic anxiety. Paul has extensive training in evidence-based treatments.

He completed his doctorate in psychology at Boston University, and served as an assistant professor at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine for six years. While he was there he was the principal investigator of an NIH-funded research study that trained over 300 mental health clinicians in CBT.

Paul is a certified meditation instructor and a teacher of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. His work has been covered in outlets like Cosmopolitan, Vice, the New York Times Magazine, and Forbes.

Find Paul’s practice at Manhattan Center for CBT. As of the time of this episodes’s release, sessions are entirely online, and the center has openings.

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