ABSTRACT
The fifth chapter of the guidebook to Metacognitive Reflection and Insight Therapy (MERIT) describes six basic ideas that therapists need to have a full comfort with before they can effectively understand how to practice MERIT. Each of these six preconditions calls for therapists to be prepared to form increasingly complex ideas about patients and create a therapeutic context in which patients come to form more complex understandings of themselves and their lives. The six preconditions call for therapists to understand (i) patients as unique persons who can recover and (ii) who can direct his or her own path to recovery. It is also required that (iii) therapists must interact with patients and support recovery in a non-hierarchical manner while (iv) accepting that even the most unusual or disorganized material in session can be understood. Finally, therapists should (v) be prepared that pain may emerge with awareness and (vi) that stigma may emerge as well from any of a number of different sources and be a barrier to recovery.
