Methods

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

CBT has been successful in helping clients:

  • Finding ways to deal with anxiety and anxiety attacks

  • Stopping compulsive and obsessive thoughts or behaviors

  • Gaining more structure and focus in their life

  • Acquiring skills to master social situations

CBT is an evidence-based therapy, which means that it is grounded in sound academic research. It is based on the assumption that the way we act and think affects our emotions. For example, a person who is afraid of dogs might develop certain behaviors (e.g., avoiding contact with dogs at all cost) and irrational thought patterns (e.g., holding on to unrealistic beliefs about how dangerous dogs are) that uphold - and in some cases even worsen - his or her fear of dogs. Through many different practical skills and healthy coping mechanisms CBT can help to reduce such unhelpful behavioral and thought patterns. CBT is a focused, time-limited therapy that aims to improve your well-being in the “here and now”.

Schema Therapy

  • Do you feel like you inadvertently get tangled up in the same situation again and again and would like to find out why?

  • Do you find yourself dealing with intense emotions without really understanding what caused them?

  • Do you want to understand how your childhood may have impacted the way you think and act today in a profound way?

Then Schema Therapy might be the right direction for you.

Schema therapy is a new, holistic approach devised in the USA that is gaining popularity all over the globe. Like CBT it is an evidence-based approach, which means that it is grounded in sound academic research. At its core, Schema Therapy is based on the assumption that every human being has core emotional needs (e.g., forming secure attachments to others). When one of those core emotional needs are not met during childhood (e.g., because a parent was not emotionally available), we create negative coping patterns in order to deal with the pain (e.g., coping with the fear of being abandoned by avoiding close relationships). These patterns can cause significant pain later in life (e.g., not being able to have a meaningful romantic relationship). Schema Therapy helps us to identify these patterns and to understand why we feel, think and act the way we do. In order to create more helpful ways to cope Schema Therapy makes use of emotion-focused techniques that are based on your own experience as well as of the whole CBT ”tool-box”.