Introducing Experiencing Schema Therapy from the Inside Out

Welcome to Experiencing Schema Therapy from the Inside Out: A Self-Practice/ Self-Reflection Workbook for Therapists. This work is the result of many years of facilitating therapist groups with the goal of applying schema therapy (ST) to oneself and then reflecting on the process of that experience — what it means for you personally and what it means for you professionally in terms of understanding your clients' experiences and the ways you work with them. Both of us believe that the self-practice/self-reflection (SP/SR) process is an important, if not critical, component of psychotherapy training. The self-practice component is only half of the SP/SR experience. The other equally important component is self-reflection. The reflective questions move the SP/SR participant from personal experience to the professional implications. This is the difference between SP/SR and personal therapy, which focuses primarily on the personal experience. SP/SR is designed as a targeted, focused training strategy that makes an explicit link between the personal and the professional with a focus on both (Bennett-Levy, Thwaites, Haarhoff, & Perry 2015).

We have led 1-day ST SP/SR programs in ten countries over the last 10 years as part of the ST training we provide. Our belief in the benefits of SP/SR is based on our personal experience, feedback from psychotherapists in our trainings, as well as the research findings that support it (summarized in Bennett-Levy et al., 2015). We have both experienced a SP/SR-type group and personal individual therapy. We consider the self-practice of ST as a possibly ongoing, lifelong process. We feel that the work we did in our training years contributed to strengthening our Healthy modes and allowing us to stay grounded during the years that we worked with challenging and creative clients with severe personality disorders. The feedback from participating therapists, which is excerpted at the beginning of the book, has been very positive in terms of therapist self-awareness, understanding ST interventions, and in a better understanding of clients' experiences. As practicing psychotherapists and educators, the opportunity to write this volume and bring the experience of ST to an even larger group of therapists was very appealing to us. We know of no other SP/SR workbook using ST interventions.

In this chapter, we provide a brief introduction to SP/SR, discuss the rationale for including this component in ST training more specifically, briefly summarize the research evaluating SP/SR, and provide a "floor plan" of the rest of the book.

What Is SP/SR?

SP/SR is a training program for psychotherapists that combines guided self-practice with written self-reflection. It provides a structured experience of using ST interventions on yourself, followed by questions to assist your self-reflection.

The self-reflective

questions include reflection on your experience of the intervention, how you think this experience will affect your understanding of and work with clients, and how it affects your understanding of ST. The steps that we go through in the 20 modules of the program are essentially the same progression that we use in ST with clients. The difference in this therapist workbook, compared to our client workbooks, is that we provide some information on the "whys" of the interventions and directions on implementing them in your practice, while still holding the focus on your experience. For more information on ST and the implementation of ST interventions, see Farrell and Shaw (2012) and Farrell, Reiss, and Shaw (2014).

The Rationale for SP/SR

The workbook is designed to be of benefit to a wide range of therapists and students of psychology. You may be interested in learning more about ST, you may be at the beginning of training in ST, or you may be an experienced certified schema therapist and supervisor. Psychotherapists undergoing self-psychotherapy is a tradition that dates back to Freud. Traditional individual therapy focuses on the self of the therapist. The ability of the therapist to identify, reflect upon, and constructively utilize the content of his or her beliefs, assumptions, emotions, and behaviors, triggered by the interpersonal process of the therapeutic relationship, is seen as an important part of successful treatment outcome in cognitive therapy (Safran & Segal, 1996). Most psychotherapists who undertake training in ST have the experience of completing a self-assessment, including the Young Schema Questionnaire (YSQ) and the Schema Mode Inventory (SMI), which allow them to identify their early maladaptive schemas and schema modes. They also formulate their own ST case conceptualization using the same format as clients. Being able to recognize and respond to one's own schema activation and mode triggering when working with a client is a...