Schema Therapy in New York City

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Schema Therapy

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spiral2grow, a leading provider of schema therapy in New York City, has professionals that include schema therapist or schema-focused cognitive psychotherapists and behavioral therapist, who are expert in schema therapy. spiral2grow, located in midtown Manhattan at 260 Madison #8023, New York, NY 10016, offers schema treatment for self esteem and confidence, anger management, social anxiety, general anxiety. Schema Therapy is provided in individual psychotherapy method, as well as group therapy method.

Schema-Focused cognitive Therapy – Overview

Schema therapy was developed started by Jeffrey Young. Dr. Jeff Young, who discovered that many people that had unhealthy long-standing patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving as well as coping mechanism may require unconventional means of intervention. Schema Therapy helps clients to address their challenges and modify these deeper patterns or themes, also known as ‘schemas” or ‘life-blocks.’ Schema Therapy is an integrative and comprehensive therapy that involves elements of many different treatment aspects including behavioral, attachment, cognitive, gestalt, and psychodynamic therapies. Schema therapy helps individuals identify and recognize the thought and behavior patterns underlying and perpetuating mental health conditions. Discovering the origins of one’s unmet emotional needs and learning to construct nurturing relationships through schema therapy can help people begin to build feelings of self-worth and adequacy. The treatment approach integrates elements from cognitive behavioral therapy, attachment theory, and a number of other approaches, expanding on CBT through exploration of emotions, maladaptive coping methods, and the origin of mental health concerns.

Schema Therapy (or Schema-Focused Cognitive Therapy) integrates multiple approaches that combines aspects of Experiential Therapy, Interpersonal and Psychoanalytic therapies into cohesive unified treatment model. Schema-Focused Therapy has shown successful results in helping individuals to change negative (‘maladaptive”) patterns who are interested to create adaptive and healthy dynamics in their lives.

What is Schema focused therapy used for?

Schema Therapy (ST) is an integrative therapeutic model, with a strong relational emphasis, designed to address deeper level maladaptive schematic beliefs and interpersonal patterns that are not responsive to first-line therapeutic approaches. The treatment targets the enduring schemas that are self-defeating patterns that usually developed early in life. These patterns consist of negative/dysfunctional thoughts and feelings, have been repeated and elaborated upon, and pose obstacles for achieving one’s goals and getting one’s needs met. Some examples of schema beliefs are: ‘No ones care or love me,” ‘I am a failure,” ‘People don’t love me,” ‘I am a loser,” ‘Something bad is going to happen,” ‘People are going to leave me,” ‘My needs will never be met,” ‘No matter what I do, I will never be good enough,” and so on. These schemas are perpetuated behaviorally through the coping mechanism (schema avoidance, and schema compensation) that only maintain the schema rather than changing it. The Schema-Focused model is designed to help the person to break these negative patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, which are often very persistent, and to develop healthier alternatives to replace them.

Four main Concepts of Schema Therapy

- Early Maladaptive Schemas are our fundamental patterns or behaviors that we tend to engage over and over again throughout our lives.
- Schema Domains refer to the emotional needs of a child. When these needs were not met during our childhoods life, unhealthy schemas are developed, which then result in unhealthy patterns of behaviors.
- Coping Styles are the way we adapt to schemas and early life experiences. These are often unhealthy and tend to maintain or worsen the problems. In other words, some the solutions that we adapted in early childhood, no longer help us in our present life and need to be revised.
- Modes are emotional states that we adapt and use from time to time. They can sometimes lie dormant for a long time or being activated by specific triggers. Whilst we can be in a dominant state or mode for some time, we can flip over into other modes.

The three stages of Schema-Focused Therapy

1. The first stage is the assessment phase in which schemas are identified to provide clear picture of the various patterns of behaviors and way of thinking.
2. The second phase is to increase of emotional awareness and experiential within the clients, so they will get in touch with their schemas and learn how to spot them when they are operating in their day-to-day life.
3. In the last phase, the behavioral change stage becomes the focus, during which the clients are actively involved in replacing negative, habitual thoughts and behaviors with new, healthy cognitive and behavioral options.

The efforts of spiral2grow are focused on helping clients break their disruptive, negative patterns and cycles so they become more resilient, cope better with life challenges and enjoy greater life satisfaction.

Therapeutic techniques used in Schema therapy

Therapeutic techniques used in in Schema therapy process may include:

Imagery: Clients explore challenging and upsetting childhood memories in an attempt to understand the development of maladaptive schemas. Individuals are asked to imagine the sights, sounds, and other sensations involved in these memories and then carry on imaginary dialogues with the caregivers involved in these memories and ask for their needs to be met. With time, individuals become more aware and more able to identify the current situations eliciting similar emotions and may be more successful at getting needs met in healthy mature ways.

Flash cards: Schema psychotherapists work to help those in therapy create messages designed for the caregivers who failed to meet their childhood emotional needs. Flash can be used as reminders. This regular review is intended to help individuals learn how to make healthy, effective statements about their emotional needs to important people in their adult lives.

Chair work: This aspect of therapy assists clients identify variations in emotions and personality. In chair work, the person in therapy moves between two chairs, expressing different emotions and aspects of personality in each chair. Chair work can also be used to help a person in treatment imagine dialogues with family, friends, or significant others. In this work, a client might make statements regarding emotional needs while sitting in one chair and then move to another chair to play the role of a person who might meet these emotional needs. Imagery work is also often used in conjunction with chair work.

Journaling: Clients are asked to keep a journal while logging of any experiences activating early maladaptive schemas. In treatment, individuals can learn to identify the thinking patterns associated with these schemas. When these thinking patterns occur between sessions, the diary allows individuals to write about the associated situations, feelings, and behaviors. These journaling notes are then reviewed in session and can be helpful in determining methods of practicing new ways of meeting emotional needs as well as situations in which these methods may be best applied.

Learn more about other therapeutic approaches by spiral2grow in NYC.