Schema therapy helps individuals identify and change long-standing negative thinking and behaviour patterns called ‘schemas’. These patterns often develop in response to experiences of trauma or emotional neglect in the early course of our lives, and they are often unconscious or so automatic we don’t even realise we’re using a uniquely patterned way of thinking and feeling. This therapy focuses on adapting and changing our schemas, leading to transformative outcomes, including healthier coping mechanisms and improved well-being.
What is Schema Therapy?
The dysfunctional beliefs and behaviours picked up in childhood and early adolescence or ‘schemas’ can go on to influence our behaviour and emotional regulation, leading to unhealthy coping mechanisms and difficulty interacting with others. Schema Therapy aims to recognise and replace these schemas with adaptive alternatives — helping you spend more time in a balanced, rational state of mind, finding healthier ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting with others.
In your schema therapy sessions, you and your counsellor will explore your early life experiences to help identify and understand the events that have shaped your current behavioural patterns and emotional responses. There’s a lengthy but interesting questionnaire to complete that gives you a good starting basis to see what kind of lenses or thinking patterns you tend to rely on most, which can start the more in-depth conversations and learning you do with your counsellor on these themes. With the support of your counsellor, you’ll gain insight into how your experiences of unmet needs, neglect or trauma have impacted you. The primary goal of schema therapy is to shift and replace negative schemas with healthier, adaptive ones. After identifying and understanding the origins of your schemas, the emphasis is on healing them, fostering healthier responses and improving well-being. Many people see a seismic effect on how they manage stressful scenarios, foster relationships, and communicate to get their needs met in healthier, adult ways.
Schema therapy can be a highly effective form of treatment for individuals presenting with deeply entrenched and sustained emotional and behavioural patterns. It can also be a great form of therapy when you’re seeking to deeply understand yourself, your personality and how you’re affected by the environments around you, and schema therapy can equip you to be more empowered with how you respond to the world's demands. It has proven to be successful in treating various conditions, including chronic depression, personality disorders and other mental health challenges.
Schema therapy is suited to clients experiencing chronic mental health conditions like depression, personality disorders, complex traumas, and even eating disorders. It is also a suitable therapy treatment when you want to explore your relationships with others, work, and stress. Our counsellors apply schema therapy techniques to address ingrained patterns and coping styles, especially those that have noticeably impacted a client's everyday functioning, relationships, and self-esteem. Our therapists work with clients to reshape and reframe their schemas, resulting in healthier coping and emotional processing styles.
In a schema therapy session, your therapist will encourage you to explore and understand how past experiences have influenced your present self. Expect an empathetic and supportive environment, with your first few sessions focused on your therapist getting to know you and your history. From here on, sessions will focus on exploring the origins of your schemas, learning to challenge and reframe these, and working on creating healthier processes. Your therapist will apply various experiential techniques to facilitate deep and meaningful change.
Schema therapy is proven to be effective in treating a variety of mental health conditions and emotional challenges, including:
Schema therapy addresses long-standing patterns of negative thinking and behaviour rooted in early life experiences. It blends elements from several therapies to provide a nuanced and comprehensive treatment framework for individuals with chronic and pervasive mental health challenges.
The duration of schema therapy varies depending on the individual, the nature of your experiences and entrenched patterns. Since schema therapy typically requires longer treatment, clients are encouraged to attend weekly sessions for several months to years. After your initial few sessions, your therapist should suggest the likely number of sessions you should attend to see progress and meet your goals.
Schemas are deep-seated beliefs and patterns that influence our perception of ourselves and our interactions with others. They usually develop in childhood as a result of unmet needs or adverse life experiences. Schemas can significantly impact our ability to regulate emotions and cope with adversity.
Life Supports offers schema therapy with qualified therapists across most major states in Australia. To find a schema therapist near you, contact our team on 1300 735 030.
To start your counselling journey with Life Supports, call or email our team for an initial consultation. We will listen and learn about your situation and the kind of counsellor you’re seeking. Our approachable team of intake officers are here to answer any of your questions about Life Supports services and will personally match you with a counsellor who best meets your needs.
A therapist working with CBT will work with you to understand the situations that concern you, how you fee about them, how you think about them and how you behave in response. Working back from this, a CBT therapist will help you challenge any negative or distorted patterns of thinking about a situation so you can see it from more points of view. With different ways to process a situation, they’ll also help you build skills and tools so you can behave differently in response to these situations. The premise of CBT is that if you change the way you think about something, you can change the way you behave towards it and ultimately change how you feel about it, so that you’re able to develop healthier and more fulfilling patterns in your life in response to situations that arise. A CBT therapist will help educate you, they might do some forms of assessment or questionnaires with you, and they will probably give you homework and strategies to practice during and in between sessions. A CBT therapist will often work with your goals and practice goal setting, so that together you can measure your improvements and work on practical strategies to help with what is most relevant to your situation.
The team at Life Supports can help you find the right therapist for you, someone that you can trust and feel comfortable with who can best help you achieve your goals. You can have a look online for a therapists that you resonate with, or you can leave an enquiry with us about what you’re looking for. Our intake team want to understand you, your story and what you’re looking for in a therapist (or what you DON’T want, just as importantly).
Everyone has different priorities for what they’re looking for, so if you let the team know what’s important to you, they will take this into consideration when finding your therapist fit. They’ll take into consideration where you’re based, your availability preferences, what your concerns and goals for therapy are, your budget and finances, and any other preferences you may have (age, gender, qualification, vibe or therapeutic approach). The team have an in-depth knowledge of each therapist’s personality, expertise and background, and they help clients everyday find a therapist they connect with so that clients can get great outcomes from high quality therapy.
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