in Psychotherapy Approaches August 17, 2020 2292 0 1

Is Schema Therapy something for me?

When I bring up the therapy approach “schema therapy”, my clients are often confused and even assume that they did understand correctly or even my pronunciation is questioned.

Since, I am a huge for stander of this so called third-wave CBT therapy and feel that almost everyone can benefit from it, I want to shed some more light on it.

A schema is a belief and a thought at the same time. For example you might have a “defectiveness schema” with the corresponding thought: “I am inadequate” and corresponding feeling of shame.

Recently I found this amazing short little youtube animation that gives a nice “taste” of what schema therapy is.

Please click here for the Schema Video

I am not affiliated with the video and also would like to highlight that while schema therapy was originally developed more for personality disorders and more severe clinical cases (and it is also presented like this in the video), I truly believe that it is beneficial for everyone that is interested to break long standing, often maladaptive relationship patterns and give themselves the best opportunity to thrive in life and live a up to their full potential.

How does Schema Therapy Sessions look like? How many Therapy Sessions do I need?

Often, I am also asked, but how does schema therapy really look like in practice and what to expect. I offer schema therapy online and offline and in a transparent 3-stages model.

Comprehensive History Taking aka talking about childhood and filling in a standardised official questionnaire for self assessment of schemas.
- It will take around 5 clinical hours plus 1 hour self assessment
- Goal: A “One page” individual case conceptualisation model that explains your schemas, critic voices and maladaptive coping styles
Schema Awareness Stage aka trying out the model in real life.
- Understanding and applying the case conceptualisation model with every day examples, understanding trigger points and refining the model if needed.
- Often clients are surprised by how much we can explain in a single piece of case conceptualisation paper and that most of our patterns and reactions to triggers are very repetitive.
- This stage takes on average around 3-5 clinical hours.
Growing the Healthy Part in You aka breaking the pattern and giving yourself what you really need instead of “hanging around” in maladaptive coping modes.
- In this stage we apply various experiential techniques such as empty chair talk, imagery re-scripting and EMDR trauma processing therapy. In all techniques we are dealing with emotions and not just thoughts.
- Therefore, this part is the most complex part and while my clients usually find this part the hardest part, they also homogeneously tell me that this is the part that helped them most and they highly benefitted from this.
- The length of the part really varies a lot and can be between 10-30 sessions, depending on the complexity of the case.