Schema Therapy

MindYog’s Approach To Schema Therapy:

When emotional needs—one’s basic needs for affection, guidance, love, shelter, and safety—go unmet in childhood, individuals may enter adulthood with deficits in their abilities to find ways for these needs to be met, independently and through healthy relationships with others.

Schema Therapy is based on the belief that early maladaptive schemas form based on adverse childhood experiences. These maladaptive schemas, which can be described as an individual’s way to interpret life events and the behaviour of others, can later disrupt life: Individuals may make unhealthy choices from:

• toxic relationships;
• lack of fully developed social skills;
• engagement in destructive behaviour patterns;
• poor sense of judgment
• experience feelings of worthlessness or self-doubt.

Identifying and modifying maladaptive schemas is central to Schema Therapy.

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.

Some of the therapeutic techniques used by Psychological Experts at MindYog in this process may include:

• Imagery: In this technique, people in therapy explore upsetting childhood memories in an attempt to understand the development of maladaptive schemas. Individuals are first 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. Following this process, individuals often become more able to identify with the current situations eliciting similar emotions and may be more successful at getting needs met in healthy ways in similar situations in future.
• Flash cards: In Schema Therapy, therapists work to help those in therapy, create messages designed for the caregivers who failed to meet their childhood emotional needs. These messages can take the form of simple statements, notes or even complex poems. The person in treatment will typically look over the flash cards between sessions. 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 attempts to help those in therapy 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 type of chair work, a person 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 often conducted in conjunction with chair work.

Issues treated with “Schema Therapy” at MindYog

Schema therapy was developed to more effectively treat mental health conditions affecting individuals across many periods and aspects of their lives after our experts noticed that not only were there some concerns especially difficult to treat, but aspects of these conditions continued to cause problems for some individuals, even after generally effective treatment.

Studies conducted on Schema Therapy show this type of therapy is often effective in addressing:

• Post-Traumatic stress
• Eating disorders
• Criminal behavior
• Anxiety
• Substance abuse
• Relationship issues
• Chronic depression
• Personality-related conditions