In my blog on Mindfulness you will find rationale and technique, mostly as it relates to stress and anxiety reduction. Mindfulness is also used to get down to issues so they can be addressed.
We can categorize issues into three areas. Did the person feel safe, loved and valued? Each area is important and they work in order. If a person frequently felt frightened and unsafe growing up, work in that area will be most productive. If a person felt physically safe but not loved, work will be mostly useful in that area. Many people felt physically safe and loved but did not get the message that they brought much of value to the table. In that case, work should focus there.
Mindfulness helps us get down inside where these issues live so that the experiences that were formative can be altered in certain ways and the belief system (who I am) can be changed. In some ways it is quite amazing that this can be done. I once had a woman in her 70s work on a memory from 3 years of age. It needed to be done because the messages (what she had internalized about life and herself) were just as potent as they were 60 some years before-and they were not good for her.
It is never too late to change the narrative. We can’t change what happened or what we did but we can change what we take away from it and we can feel safer, more loved and more valuable, which frees us to live today!
Mindfulness (awareness of ourselves, our bodies) is a fantastic skill anyone can learn. Combine that with inquisitiveness and memories and skills we, our therapists and friends have to speak into our lives and the sky is the limit on the freedom that can be attained when the primary problems are experiential, not biological.