Living with Intention, Fullness, and Engagement with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

The LIFEwithIBD intervention is an adaptation of the Mind programme for people with cancer (Trindade et al., 2020), an acceptance, mindfulness, and compassion-based intervention designed to be delivered in a group format, with 8 weekly sessions. The Mind programme was adapted by the psychology members of the current research team for the IBD context, taking into consideration the psychological literature in this population. The results and experience derived from the Mind’s pilot study and preliminary results (Trindade et al., 2020) were also considered. An extra session regarding the educational aspects of IBD was added, modules on shame and self-criticism were further developed, and a gratitude module replaced the forgiveness module of the Mind programme. The module on ACT’s observing self was also removed, and some compassion approaches (e.g., Compassionate Image exercise) were replaced by exercises from the Mindful Self-Compassion programme (Neff & Germer, 2013).