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spiral2grow, a leading provider of schema therapy in New York City, has professionals that include schema theraspit 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
- 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.
- The Schema-Focused Therapy was developed by 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.’
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.