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What is Schema Therapy?

Schema Therapy (ST) is a flexible and comprehensive approach to therapy that focuses on understanding you as a person. It provides a helpful framework for us to make sense of some of the difficulties you might be experiencing. These might be difficulties with how you feel, your thought patterns, relationships, unhelpful behaviours, or a general dissatisfaction with your life.

ST was developed in the 1980s by psychologist Jeffrey Young and can be understood as an integrative model that draws on a number of therapeutic approaches, including cognitive behavioural (CBT), psychodynamic, gestalt, and person-centred.

CBT has a strong evidence base and because of this tends to be the treatment of choice for many common difficulties such as anxiety and depression; when delivering ST, I would be able to work with you to incorporate many of the effective components of CBT to support with the changes you make. In addition, ST goes deeper and puts more of an emphasis on understanding the links between childhood experiences and the development of patterns in thinking, feeling and behaving.

ST asserts that it is our schemas that link our past to our present. In ST, a schema can be understood as a deeply held belief which is often out of our conscious awareness. Schemas affect how we think, feel, and behave, and are sometimes described as our blueprints or software. They help us to make sense of the world, and are the patterns that run throughout our life. A goal of schema therapy is to help you to become more aware of your schemas and then to provide you with tools to change on an intellectual, emotional and behavioural level.

Another important part of ST is the focus on emotional needs. ST believes that schemas develop from experiences when our emotional needs were not met. One of the overarching goals of ST is to help you to develop an awareness of these needs and, over the course of therapy, develop a variety of ways of meeting them.

What happens in schema therapy?
In the early sessions of ST, we would work together to build an understanding of your current problems and how they developed. A crucial element of this is making links between your early life experiences and your current problems. The process of therapy is active, and, right from the start we would use different therapeutic techniques. These can be divided into: (i) emotion focussed strategies that aim to connect you with the emotional level of your experience, and include imagery and chair work; (ii) cognitive techniques that aim to promote flexible and compassionate thinking; and (iii) behavioural techniques that help you to challenge fears and break behavioural patterns.

What I like about schema therapy?
I really like the comprehensiveness and flexibility of ST. It provides a framework for understanding how we function on a deeper level and helps us to spot the common thinking and behavioural traps that we can all fall into. As a therapist I can be creative and draw on a number of proven techniques that aim to address problems on a variety of levels. ST also encourages therapists to play an active role in the therapy and to bring an authentic and open approach to the therapeutic relationship. This can help create a genuine connection, which is often the foundation for lasting change.

 

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Dr John Burns, please contact him here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

 

Dr John Burns  is an experienced Consultant Clinical Psychologist registered with the British Psychological Society, Health and Care Professions Council, and the British Association of Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies.  He is available at our Brighton & Hove Practice.

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Online Anger Management Therapy

Anger issues can have a negative impact on your physical and mental health, as well as impacting other areas of your life such as your relationships. Online anger management therapy can be helpful in enabling you to control your anger before it controls your life.

What is Online Anger Management?

An online anger management counsellor can work with you to help you identify the signs of anger and to help you examine the triggers that cause your anger to flare up. Through learning how to control your emotions, you’ll be able to deal with your anger in a more constructive way.

Online anger management therapy isn’t about avoiding anger or removing it from your life entirely – anger is natural and, when expressed in a healthy way, it can actually be helpful in diminishing your negative feelings. Anger management is simply a tool to help you express your feelings in a more appropriate and assertive way.

Men often experience anger more than women, which may be because of how men are taught to express their emotions. Anger can often be seen as acceptable for men to express, rather than women, and it can often be used as a way of masking other feelings like sadness, grief or humiliation. But, of course, anger control issues can affect anyone and there is no shame in experiencing difficulty in controlling your anger.

An experienced professional therapist can help you find suitable ways to express your feelings, so you have a better hold over your emotions. Those struggling with anger issues may find it difficult to seek help or admit they have a problem. But online therapy can be a convenient way of finding ways to diffuse your anger and can highlight the areas of your life that are causing these emotions.

How Can Online Anger Management Therapy Help Me?

In many cases, anger is an appropriate emotion for the situation. In others, it may not be suitable or the level of anger you’re feeling may not be appropriate for what has happened. Online anger management therapy can help you learn what is a suitable emotion for the situation and find ways to express that anger in a healthy way.

For a lot of people, the thought of speaking to someone face-to-face about these issues can be embarrassing or awkward. Online therapy can be a great compromise that offers the benefits of speaking with a licensed therapist but at a time and location that suits you so you’re more relaxed and comfortable.

If you want to talk to our team, contact us today or take a look at our practitioners.

All the content on this page has been reviewed and vetted by Mark Vahrmeyer UKCP Registered Psychotherapist, Superviser and Co-Founder of Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy. For any questions or more information about the subjects discussed on this page please contact us.


Online Bereavement Therapy

Grieving is an emotional, psychological and physical response to losing someone we’re close to. It can be an unsettling experience and many people feel as though something is wrong or missing from their life. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief outline the core emotions as denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But there are countless other emotions you may feel as a result of losing someone, which can make it confusing to comprehend.

What is Online Bereavement Therapy?

Online bereavement therapy can be beneficial in helping you cope with your loss and come to accept what has happened. You’ll speak with a trained counsellor who has experience in helping people grieve and the issues that surround bereavement.

Since grief is often accompanied by feelings that are similar to depression, it can be all too easy to rely on anti-depressants to heal you. But this can often mask the impact of grief and delay the grieving process, causing more harm than good.

Online therapy will enable you to work through what has happened and come to terms with it. A counsellor can also help you understand that grieving is not a neat process and even after you’ve accepted your loss, you may still have difficult periods occur in the future. Your therapy may last several months or even longer – it all depends on the individual and how they process such events.

How Can Bereavement Therapy Help Me?

Some people find comfort in talking about how they feel, while others may find it difficult to talk about their emotions and withdraw from those around them. Grieving is incredibly tough, but you don’t need to feel as though you’re on your own. Offloading your worries and feelings onto someone else can be beneficial and help you work through the stages of grief.

Online bereavement therapy can help you during this mourning process – you’ll have the support of a trained professional and everything you discuss with them will remain completely confidential. It can help to discuss your loss and identify the emotions you’re feeling, whether it’s sadness, anger, guilt or helplessness.

Your counsellor can also help you in learning to live without the person you’ve lost, something that can be daunting. With the support of a counsellor, you’ll soon realise just how common and natural your responses to grief are which can make these emotions easier to deal with.

If you want to talk to our team, contact us today or take a look at our practitioners.

All the content on this page has been reviewed and vetted by Mark Vahrmeyer UKCP Registered Psychotherapist, Superviser and Co-Founder of Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy. For any questions or more information about the subjects discussed on this page please contact us.


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Making Changes

As well as working privately, I work within an NHS IAPT Service providing psychological therapy for depression and anxiety disorders and when a client comes into therapy, one of the first things we discuss is goals for treatment.

What is it the client is hoping to change by the end of treatment? Is there anything that the client is not able do now, because of their difficulties, that they would like to be doing in the next couple of months?

Goals help to focus the therapy. It’s quite common that the client will say they would like to increase their confidence or to improve their self esteem, to be less anxious or to be happy. These are very broad goals, would be difficult to measure and don’t tell us what the client would actually be doing differently if they were to be confident, have better self esteem, be less anxious or be happier. So we work together to work out what this might look like.

One way to help determine goals for change is to think of our values. When considering values we need to think about what is really important to us, what gives our life meaning and purpose. Values are what we care about and are different for everybody. They can change over time depending on where we are in our life. Meaningful activity is value driven. Values are fluid and don’t have an end point, they are how we want to live our lives, they help us to be the person we want to be.

We hold values in different areas of our life: intimate relationships / marriage / being a couple; family relations; friendships & social relationships; parenting; career / employment; physical wellbeing / healthy living; connecting with the community; spirituality; education / training / personal growth; mental wellbeing.

It can be useful to consider what values you hold in each of these areas and rate how important each domain is to you and where you are in achieving that domain. For example what kind of values do you hold in physical wellbeing? How do you want to look after yourself physically? Is it to take regular exercise, eat healthily, get enough sleep and rest? Are you achieving this as much as you would like to be? What sort of friend do you want to be and how would you like to act towards your friends? For example, loyal, trustworthy, to spend time with friends, to share, to listen, to have fun together. What kind of values might you want to model as a parent? For example, to be curios, have courage, be adventurous, have determination, gratitude kindness and have fun (to name but a few). Values can be described as compass directions in which we live our life.

If you feel that you are not where you would like to be within a particular domain, how can you bring this value further into your life? This is where goal setting comes in. Values are a direction we want to progress in. Goals can be set to help us achieve that direction. For example, if we place value upon exercise and physical health we might have the goal of going for a swim twice a week or we might have a goal of completing a qualification, which sits within the value of education and personal growth. Goals can be achieved and have an end point. You maybe familiar with the acronym SMART goals. This means goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time limited. So if we wanted to make the goal of ‘going for a swim twice a week’ into a really SMART goal we could add a set time period, i.e. ‘going for a swim twice a week for half an hour’. By setting SMART goals we break down the areas of change into manageable chunks.

Change is difficult and if we are feeling low or stressed and anxious we can often feel overwhelmed. It is likely that areas of our life that are important to us have become affected and we don’t know where to start to change this.

Setting ourselves small goals for change in line with our values is a useful starting place. It’s important to remember that there is no such thing as a failed goal. If we don’t achieve our goal it still give us useful information. Perhaps we set ourselves an unrealistic goal, in which case we might consider how we can break this down further into smaller, more manageable chunks. We can explore the process along the way whilst trying to achieve our goals and moving towards our values. In this way change takes place and has a positive impact on our mental wellbeing.

 

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Rebecca Mead, please contact her here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

 

Rebecca Mead is an accredited, registered and experienced Psychotherapist offering Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) to individuals adults.  Rebecca is available at our Brighton and Hove Practice.

 

Further reading by Rebecca Mead –

Social Connections

Back to ‘Bace’ics

Interpersonal Therapy (IPT) explained

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Why ‘Cancel Culture’ is about the inability to tolerate difference

What is Cancel Culture?

This seemingly new trend is one of promoting the ‘cancellation’ of people, brands or television shows as a result of what some (the cancellers) perceive to be some form of offensive comment, remark, view or behaviour. It has surged on social media with various derogatory hashtags, notably #RIP.

A recent high profile ‘celebrity’ who has been on the receiving end of social media trends to have her cancelled is J.K. Rowling for her, views on transgender issues that some find offensive.

Is it that new?

The term may be new and the platforms used may serve to whip up a storm of support against those who some wish to have cancelled, however the concept is by no means new at all. Cancel culture is essentially a form of social banishment whereby in traditional tribal communities one of the most severe punishments would be the banishment from the tribe: to be cast out.

To be cast out of ones tribe would mean more than social death; if not literal death through being vulnerable to attack from predators and other tribes, banishment most certainly meant the death of the sense of belonging, which in psychological terms, could potentially instigate a psychic collapse (going mad).

However, whilst this may seem primitive, historical and anthropological evidence shows that it would be a punishment of last resort and would be handed down by the elders of the tribe – in other words, there would be some form of judicial process in place that sanctioned the banishment.

This is where cancel culture differs profoundly from tribal banishment or ‘being cast out’. It is not a decree from wise elders or some sort of judiciary; it is generally used as an attack against the views, opinions or behaviours of others that some disagree with.

Why does it matter?

Put simply, it matters because there seems to be an ever decreasing array of opinions and voices allowed and cancel culture is an immature way of trying to ‘kill off’ anybody holding views or opinions that may not be comfortable for others to hear.

Feeling offended and causing offence

There is a difference between a person feeling upset or even offended by another’s views and with another trying to purposely hurt a person or group of people. The former is what we may experience when we encounter others and are confronted by a different perspective. The latter is when we encounter sadism.

Sadism is unacceptable and should not be tolerated, however the mark of being an adult is the capacity to tolerate a different perspective and a different mind. Even if we may feel offended.

On mergers and separation

Although separate from its mother, an infant, when born, cannot differentiate between their mother and themselves. In essence they believe that their mother is an extension of them. Of course, in reality, the mother in question is very much as separate entity, at least physically, and thus will eventually fail to meet the needs of her infant. This is extremely frustrating for the infant in question and the mind of the infant concocts an ingenious defence against the pain of separation – a good and a bad mother is created: the infant imagines it is the good mother who meets all their needs and the bad mother who frustrates them. It is a primitive psychological defence called splitting.

Infants split off the bad until through ‘good enough’ parenting they eventually integrate the two mothers and tolerate reality: mother is not part of them and frustrates them as she has a different mind and a different set of needs. However, mostly, she seems to meet their needs so on life goes and importantly, on psychological maturation goes. The child is on the path from mergers to a world where they can be in separate relationships with others and tolerate a different mind.

Why cancel culture is simply splitting by another name

To be unable to contain ones feelings when confronted by a different perspective and thus a different mind shows a lack of psychological maturity. The world is split into ‘good and ‘bad’ like in a child’s fairy tale. Bad must be killed off so good can live happily ever after. This is not how the real world works; it is how cancel culture works.

How does cancel culture relate to psychotherapy?

In essence, psychotherapy is about outgrowing cancel culture. It is about learning to be in a relationship where difference can be tolerated and acknowledged, without this needing to be threatening. For some this means they must learn for the first time to bring their needs ‘into the mix’ – something that can feel really confronting and may bring on fears of rejection and abandonment. For others it may mean the opposite which is to be able to cope with the separateness of their psychotherapist and tolerate this without throwing away ‘all the good’ – without ‘cancelling’ them, if you like.

Being an adult means tolerating the frustrations of the real world and the frustrations of the others who make up the real world. However, if this can be tolerated then real relationships are possible and people can locate substance and meaning thus moving them out of a fear/threat pattern into adult relating patterns.

If you would like to work on your own intolerances and relationships, get in touch with us to discuss whether psychotherapy may be appropriate for you.

 

Mark Vahrmeyer, UKCP Registered, BHP Co-founder is an integrative psychotherapist with a wide range of clinical experience from both the public and private sectors. He currently sees both individuals and couples, primarily for ongoing psychotherapy.  Mark is available at the Lewes and Brighton & Hove Practices.

 

Further reading by Mark Vahrmeyer

Why does the difference between counselling and psychotherapy matter?

Love in the time of Covid

Why am I feeling more anxious with Covid-19?

Coronavirus Lock-Down – Physical Health Vs Mental Health

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