Schema Therapy and Coherence Therapy: and interview with Pierre Cousineau
Channel: Experiential Psychotherapy Training
Date: 2022-10-29

More interviews at: https://tinyurl.com/mrymdnn2

Schema therapy (ST) is an integrative approach that brings together elements from cognitive behavioral therapy, attachment and object relations theories, and Gestalt and experiential therapies. It was introduced by Jeff Young in 1990 and has been developed and refined since then. Schema therapy is considered an effective way of conceptualizing and treating personality disorders. Rafaeli, Bernstein, and Young (2011) and Jacob and Arntz (2013) describe some of the distinguishing features of schema therapy.
ST places more emphasis than traditional CBT upon the development of current symptoms.
ST emphasizes the therapist–patient relationship and its potential for corrective influence.
ST aims to help patients understand their core emotional needs and to learn ways of meeting those needs adaptively.
ST focuses extensively on the processing of memories of aversive childhood experiences, making use of experiential techniques to change negative emotions related to such memories.
----------------
Coherence Therapy is a unified set of methods and concepts for individual, couple and family work that enable a therapist to foster profound change with a high level of consistency.
 
From the first session, the work is focused on guiding clients to bring awareness to ignored core areas of meaning, feeling, and emotional learning that are generating the presenting symptom or problem.  Coherence Therapy makes use of native capacities for swiftly retrieving and then transforming the client's unconscious, symptom-requiring emotional schemas, which were learned adaptively earlier in life.

SYMPTOMS DISPELLED BY COHERENCE THERAPY
A wide range of symptoms can be dispelled along with their associated, less visible emotional wounds, attachment patterns, and troubled ego states or "parts".  The process is experiential and the therapist's empathic attunement is a crucial ingredient.  The focused methodology requires far fewer sessions than conventional in-depth psychotherapies.