Contextual Schematherapy

Over de cursus

Contextual Schema therapy carries the integrative spirit of Schema therapy one step further.  In this course, we will broaden the therapeutic bandwidth and deepen therapeutic impact by working with bodily activation during imagery exercises and integrating ACT processes to strengthen the Healthy Adult mode.

Body work helps guiding clients from narratives to a deep experience of schema activations in the present moment, while ACT processes induce perspective changes pulling the clients out of their life traps and give access to previously blocked resources. Expanding the therapeutic bandwidth on both poles gives your therapy a dynamic push and creates a very intense atmosphere in the sessions.

Inhoud

Jeffrey Young, the founder of Schema therapy, described his approach as “essentially integrative”. Contextual Schema Therapy takes the spirit of integration one step further by expanding the therapeutic bandwidth into two directions: It condenses essential experiential techniques like imagery rescripting and chair dialogues into its core processes applied in a defined therapeutic field commuting between schema-activation, an embodied Mode awareness and shifting into a standing-up observer position (The Adult mode). By returning to present-moment awareness and taking a physically decentered perspective, clients can step out of their life traps and regain psychological flexibility. This helps them reconnect with emotional resources and personal values that guide functional behavior in the present.

Being able to guide the clients through this process requires an active therapeutic role balancing between a close emotional connection and the skills of empathic confrontation. This workshop introduces how to bypass coping modes and empathically confront the clients by adding a second layer to the therapy relationship while working in the standing-up position maintaining a therapeutic alliance on the observer level. From this safe harbour, we are able to access the vulnerable side of the clients, connect them with their Healthy adult mode skills and finally opening them up for a more balanced and flexible interaction with others by merging functional processed taken from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy with the evidence-based experiential schema therapy techniques.

This workshop provides you with a condensed, dimensional Schema-Mode-Model, the principles of a well-balanced therapist role and the essential processes of the experiential techniques. The teacher will demonstrate the core interventions how to deal with externalizing and internalizing clients and we will practice some of them in dyads. Thus, you will get a vivid experience how this way of working feels like. Since the processes are similar in individual and couple sessions you gain knowledge applicable in both settings. However, the presence of the partner gives the actively working client an immediate response rewarding the functional behaviour. I will show you how to include the partner for at least a few sessions. This makes your setting more flexible