Decentering
Decentering is seeing a thought or a feeling as an event passing through the mind, something we have, without taking it as a fact about us or the world. “I'm going to fail” is still heard, and it is noticed as a sentence the mind is producing. Researchers have proposed it as one way mindfulness-based therapy may work.
At 11 p.m., Maya thinks, “Tomorrow I'll freeze and everyone will see I don't belong.” She writes the sentence down word for word and adds, “A thought about tomorrow, arriving at 11:05, while tired.” The sentence is the same, and it sits on the page instead of running through her.
It doesn't mean feeling cut off from yourself. In the research on decentering, awareness of the experience is part of the idea: the person keeps looking at the feeling or thought while it is there. Feeling detached from oneself, or feeling that things are unreal, is described on the dissociation page and is a different experience. The two can be hard to tell apart from the inside. When that detached feeling is frequent or distressing, a doctor or therapist is the place to look into it.
How it shows
At work
After a sharp email, noticing “there goes the thought that I'm about to be fired,” and still answering it. Hearing the inner critic before a meeting as a voice that shows up on tense days, and then opening the slides.
In close relationships
After an argument, seeing “she doesn't care” as a thought that arrived while hurt, and asking what she meant. Letting a jealous thought pass through without treating it as a report.
In ourselves
Noticing “I'm a failure” as a sentence the mind produces on tired nights. The thought is still there, and it may grip less.
How it differs from similar ideas
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is paying attention to the present on purpose, and it has several parts. Decentering is one of the proposed changes it may produce: thoughts seen as thoughts. Some mindfulness questionnaires include a decentering scale, so the two overlap in how they are measured.
Dissociation
Dissociation is a break in the usual joining of awareness, memory, identity or perception, and it can include feeling detached from oneself or the world. In decentering, the person stays in touch with the experience while seeing it as an event. No study on this page compared the two, and both can be described as “watching from a distance,” so the difference is worth holding carefully.
Intellectualization
Intellectualization handles a feeling by thinking about it in abstract terms, which can keep the feeling at arm's length. Decentering looks at the feeling or thought directly, at the level of what it is like to have it, without converting it into an idea.
Cognitive reappraisal
Reappraisal changes the meaning given to a situation. Decentering leaves the content of the thought where it is and changes the way it is held. Bernstein and colleagues raised the question of whether decentering helps reappraisal along, and described it as open.
Rumination and worry
Rumination is repetitive thinking that circles a problem and absorbs the person. Decentering is seeing a thought, including a repeating one, as an event. The questionnaire on this page was designed with the two on opposite ends, and decentering scores went down as rumination scores went up.
Experiential avoidance
Experiential avoidance is the effort to escape or control unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Decentering lets them be present while they are seen as experiences. In the questionnaire study below, decentering went with lower experiential avoidance scores.
What it doesn’t mean
It doesn't mean the thought is false. A decentered thought may be accurate. The idea is about how the thought is held, as an event the mind produced, and not about whether it is true. A thought that “the deadline is tomorrow” can be seen as a thought and still be correct.
It doesn't mean pushing a feeling away. Decentering is described as staying in contact with the experience while seeing it as an experience. Pushing a feeling away is a different strategy and the page on experiential avoidance covers it.
It isn't the same as mindfulness. Mindfulness is the wider practice and has several parts. Decentering is one change that has been proposed to come from it, and researchers separate the two on purpose when they study how mindfulness-based therapy might work.
An example: Maya, the sentence and the next morning
Maya is 34 and presents a plan to her team at nine tomorrow. She is checking her slides late at night and is tired.
- 11:05 p.m. The thought arrives: “Tomorrow I'll freeze and everyone will see I don't belong.” Her chest tightens. For twenty minutes she plays out what each colleague will think, and it feels like a forecast.
- 11:25 p.m. She stops, takes a pen and copies the sentence word for word. Beside it she writes the time and the conditions: “Tired. Day before a presentation. This is the sentence I get.” The tightness is still there. The sentence looks smaller on paper.
- 11:40 p.m. It comes back twice. Each time she thinks, “that one again,” and goes on with her slides. She does not argue with it or try to prove it wrong.
- 9:10 a.m. On slide two the sentence turns up in the middle of a sentence she is speaking. She hears it, loses a beat, and goes on. Afterward she is still nervous for another ten minutes.
Maya's thought never left. What changed was the way she stood to it: it became a sentence she was reading, with a time and a mood attached, and it had less to say about what she did next.
The researchers on this page would call the shift at 11:25 decentering: a thought experienced as a mental event, as they put it, rather than as the self. It was not argued with, as it would be in a reappraisal, and it was not pushed away. The nerves stayed through the next morning, which fits the research's own claim, that the thought's pull may weaken while the feeling remains.
A different story would point elsewhere. If Maya had felt, at 11:25, that the thought and her own body belonged to someone else, that would be closer to what the dissociation page describes. If she had gone on replaying the forecast for another hour, the page on rumination would fit better. And if she had told herself a clever story about why presentations rarely go wrong, she would have been reappraising, which works on the content of the thought.
What the research shows
The research asks three things: whether decentering can be defined and measured, whether it changes with mindfulness-based therapy, and whether it may help explain why that therapy works. The studies below are a theory-and-evidence paper from 2002, the questionnaire that most studies use, a trial that compared treatments, and a review of the whole field.
Decentering can be defined and measured, and it rose in patients who took mindfulness-based therapy. One of its measures tracked later depression scores and another did not. The evidence rests on self-report, mostly from people with depression, in analyses that cannot show decentering is the cause. The review of the field adds that the names overlap and that behavioral measures are missing.
Patients with leftover symptoms of depression found it harder to see negative thoughts as events, and this predicted relapse
In 2002, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and colleagues defined metacognitive awareness as a way of responding in which negative thoughts and feelings are experienced as mental events and not as the self. They tested the idea in patients with a history of depression, comparing patients with leftover symptoms (called residually depressed) with people who were not depressed.
The residually depressed patients had less ready access to this way of responding when depressive cues came up. How accessible it was predicted relapse in the residually depressed patients. And where cognitive therapy, and separately mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, reduced relapse, accessibility went up. The authors concluded that both therapies may reduce relapse by changing the relationship to negative thoughts and not by changing belief in what the thoughts say.
Doesn’t show Only the abstract was read for this page, so sample sizes and the task are not stated here. The authors write that therapy “may” work this way. Seeing accessibility rise alongside a lower relapse rate cannot show that the rise caused the lower rate. They found this in some conditions and not others: the claim holds where the therapy reduced relapse.
A questionnaire built to measure decentering held together as one scale in students and in people in remission from depression
In 2007, David Fresco and colleagues, among them Zindel Segal and John Teasdale, tested the Experiences Questionnaire. It was designed to measure both decentering and rumination, and it had not been validated. They studied two undergraduate samples and then a clinical sample of people in remission from depression.
A single decentering factor emerged in the undergraduate samples. Scores related negatively to measures of depression symptoms, depressive rumination, experiential avoidance, and to a measure of emotion regulation whose direction the abstract does not explain. The same structure was found again in the clinical sample, where decentering was related negatively to concurrent depression symptoms. The authors called this initial support for the questionnaire as a measure of decentering.
Doesn’t show This study built a measure. It shows scores hang together and relate to other scores, and it cannot say whether the questionnaire catches the change people experience. All of it is self-report, taken at one point in time, mostly from students. Bernstein and colleagues later argued that the questionnaire captures stepping back from experience and leaves out how little a thought's content may then affect other mental processes.
Decentering rose in patients who took mindfulness-based therapy, and not in those who stayed on medication or switched to placebo
In 2012, Peter Bieling, Zindel Segal and colleagues analyzed data from a larger randomized trial. Of 160 people treated for depression with antidepressants, 84 reached remission (52.5 percent). They were randomized to one of three ways to prevent relapse during an 18-month maintenance phase: stop medication and take MBCT, continue antidepressants, or switch to placebo.
During maintenance, only the MBCT group showed significant increases on the decentering scales of the Experiences Questionnaire and the Toronto Mindfulness Scale (p < .01). Changes on the questionnaire's Wider Experiences scale, which asks about seeing thoughts and feelings as passing events (p < .05), and on a curiosity scale (p < .01) predicted lower depression ratings at the six-month follow-up. The rise on the Toronto scale's decentering measure did not predict them. The authors suggested that decentering and curiosity may underlie MBCT's effects.
Doesn’t show A secondary analysis of a larger trial, with a small sample made smaller because people who relapsed were treated again. The people taking MBCT were also tapering off medication, and the authors noted that withdrawal symptoms may have affected answers. They also noted that the questionnaires' items resemble what is taught in MBCT, so people in that group may have answered with the training in mind. Early in the study, during antidepressant treatment, changes in the decentering questionnaire went away once changes in depression were taken into account.
A review found one idea under many names and measures that rely almost entirely on self-report
In 2015, Amit Bernstein and colleagues reviewed research on decentering and its related constructs, among them self-distanced perspective, cognitive distancing and cognitive defusion. They proposed that these share a common mental phenomenon supported by three processes: meta-awareness (awareness of experience as it happens), disidentification from internal experience, and reduced reactivity to thought content.
They then examined research linking these constructs to mental health. They concluded that efforts to measure the constructs have been largely limited to self-report, that laboratory-based behavioral measurement is lacking, and that it is unsettled whether decentering is better described as a trait or as a state.
Doesn’t show A critical review plus a proposed model. The three-process model is the authors' theory, offered as a basis for future studies, and the review does not test it. Whether the related ideas are one thing or several is the authors' judgment, and others may draw the lines elsewhere.
Try it: the thought with a time on it
Pick one thought that has been loud lately. Write three short notes.
- The thought, word for word, as the mind said it
- The time it arrived, and what was going on around me
- What I did next, and whether the thought was still there afterward
If the second box shows a pattern, such as tiredness or a certain kind of day, the thought may belong to those conditions. The notes cannot say whether the thought is true, and they are not a measure of decentering.
What is decentering in psychology?
Seeing a thought or feeling as an event passing through the mind, something we have, without taking it as a fact about us or the world. The term was used in cognitive therapy in 1990 by Safran and Segal, and it was tied to mindfulness-based therapy by Teasdale and colleagues in 2002 under the name metacognitive awareness.
What is the difference between decentering and cognitive defusion?
They are overlapping ideas with different roots. Defusion comes from acceptance and commitment therapy and focuses on the effect of thoughts on behavior. Decentering comes from cognitive therapy and mindfulness-based therapy. Bernstein and colleagues argued in 2015 that they share a common core, and treated defusion as one of the decentering-related ideas. Whether they are the same thing is still argued.
Is decentering the same as mindfulness?
They are separate ideas. Mindfulness is the wider practice of paying attention on purpose, and decentering is one change it may produce. The two overlap in measurement, since a well-known mindfulness scale contains a decentering subscale, and the Bieling trial measured both.
Is decentering the same as dissociation?
They are different experiences. In decentering, the person stays in touch with the thought or feeling and sees it as an event. Dissociation is a break in how awareness, memory, identity or perception normally fit together, and it can include feeling detached or unreal. The two can be hard to tell apart from the inside. If feeling cut off is frequent or distressing, a doctor or therapist is the place to look into it.
How is decentering measured?
Mostly with self-report. The most used is the Experiences Questionnaire, validated by Fresco and colleagues in 2007, and the Toronto Mindfulness Scale has a decentering subscale. Bernstein and colleagues noted in 2015 that laboratory-based behavioral measures are lacking.
Does decentering explain how mindfulness-based therapy works?
It is a leading candidate and it is unproven. In one trial only the group given MBCT showed increases on the decentering scales, and the change on one of them predicted lower depression scores later. The change on the other did not. The same paper lists limits: a small sample, a secondary analysis and questionnaires that resemble what the therapy teaches.
Where the idea comes from
The word comes from cognitive therapy. In 1979 Aaron Beck and colleagues wrote about “distancing” from one's thoughts in cognitive therapy. In 1990 Safran and Segal used “decentering” for the same kind of stepping back, inside therapy.
The idea moved into mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT, a program used to help prevent depression from returning. In 2002 John Teasdale and colleagues, Zindel Segal among them, wrote about “metacognitive awareness”: a mental set in which negative thoughts and feelings are experienced as mental events, rather than as the self. “Metacognitive” means about thinking itself. They proposed that this set, more than a change in what people believe, may be what protects against relapse.
By 2015 many names were in use for what looked like one idea. Amit Bernstein and colleagues listed them in a review: cognitive defusion, cognitive distancing, decentering, detached mindfulness, metacognitive awareness, metacognitive mode, mindfulness, reperceiving, self-as-context and self-distanced perspective. They chose “decentering” as the umbrella word and proposed that the family shares three processes. That choice is theirs, and the field has not settled on one term.
The question it adds
When a thought feels like a plain fact, this idea asks how it would look as an event.
If this were a thought I am having, with a time and a mood attached, what would I write beside it?
Beck and colleagues, 1979 ('distancing'). Safran and Segal, 1990 ('decentering'). Teasdale and colleagues, 2002 ('metacognitive awareness'). Fresco and colleagues, 2007 (questionnaire). Bernstein and colleagues, 2015 (review)
Questions to carry
- Which thought has been loudest lately, and what changes if I write it down as “a thought that I have” rather than leaving it as the way things are?
- When I step back from this feeling and watch it, do I still feel in contact with it, or do I feel cut off from it?
Related
defusion, cognitive defusion, self distancing, step back from my thoughts, thoughts are not facts, watching my thoughts, observing my thoughts, believe everything i think, distance from my thoughts, witnessing thoughts, caught up in my thoughts, just a thought, the observer
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