Schema Therapy in Adolescents and Emerging Adulthood
Target Audience: Psychotherapists and Counsellors with basic knowledge in Schema Therapy and interest in ST techniques for adolescents and young adults.
Background: Emerging adulthood is a developmental stage that typically occurs between adolescence and young adulthood, with a focus on ages 16 to 25. Within this stage five major struggles occur: identity, instability, being self-focused, feeling in-between, and new possibilities.
Schema Therapy (ST), as an integrative, evolving model for psychotherapy that combines aspects of cognitive, behavioural, psychodynamic, and gestalt models, places emphasis on the childhood origins of many psychological and developmental problems and challenges.
Goals: In this workshop, participants will learn how to enhance the therapeutic relationship, and facilitate greater openness and trust to explore and better understand the roots of problems/symptoms, in the end leading to improved motivation of behavioural modifications. At the end of the workshop participants will be able to…
- develop an age-appropriate case conceptualization, by integrating ABC model, needs, schemas, modes, and the client’s symptom,
- generate the concept of the client’s Clever & Wise-Team including resource modes and positive schemas (Treasure bag exercise)
- create a mode sketch, thus illuminating the client’s inner mode black box,
to sooth, validate, nurture, and protect the Vulnerable Child mode (VCm), enabling the client to give up old dysfunctional (immature) behavioural patterns towards the functional (more mature) alternative ones.
- make use of age-appropriate Imagery Rescripting (IR) procedures.