ABSTRACT
A distinctive theoretical feature of MCT is the idea that cognition can be separated into cognitive and metacognitive systems and that processing can be cognitive or metacognitive in nature. This division raises the possibility that a person can experience thoughts in different modalities. Thoughts can be experienced as external events that are indistinguishable from events that actually occur or they can be experienced as simply events in the mind. In metacognitive therapy, the former mode of experiencing thoughts is called the object mode, whilst the latter is called the metacognitive mode (Wells, 2000). For example, an individual suffering from contamination obsessions repeatedly has the thought; ``It's contaminated with faeces'' when encountering stains in public places. This person is in object mode and does not differentiate between the thought and the perception of the stain. In metacognitive mode, this person would be aware of the thought and see it as separate from the stain and as an event in the mind. In this way the problem is transformed from one of contamination everywhere to one of giving thoughts too much importance and fusing them with reality.
