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Therapy role-play · ST
Jeffrey Young built Schema Therapy from cognitive, behavioural, attachment and experiential methods, for patterns that have lasted most of a lifetime. Simulated clients shift between schema modes, the emotional states and coping responses that take over in turn, so you can practise recognising each one and working with it.
Why this therapy
Schema Therapy sees some long-standing difficulties as rooted in childhood needs that went unmet, which is why they keep coming back after short-term therapy has helped for a while. The work goes at those patterns, the schemas and the modes they produce, through cognitive, experiential and relational methods. Much of it happens in the relationship itself: a therapist who offers only generic warmth, with no reparenting, has left out the main change mechanism.
Each protocol follows its published treatment model, and so does your feedback.
Simulated clients are a training aid. They do not replace supervised work with real clients.
Each one is reviewed in your debrief, with one concrete thing to try next time.
Notice the moment the client shifts mode, and name it with them. A client who seems calm and reasonable may be in detached protector, not better.
Meet unmet needs within the limits of therapy. Warmth with limits is the model; promising to be available at any hour is not.
Challenge an unhelpful pattern while staying plainly on the client’s side.
Give each mode a chair and a voice, keep them separate, and never end the session with the client still sitting in the punitive parent.
Help the client re-enter a painful childhood memory and have the need met in it this time, at a pace they can bear and only once they are stable enough to go there.
The same client carries across modes. Start where you feel comfortable, then stretch.
Each client comes with a history, a presentation and measures. Read the referral as you would on placement, then begin.
The client responds to how you work. Make your mistakes here, where they cost nothing; hints come only if you ask for them.
A clear debrief on the core skills of your model (the CTS-R for CBT). Then take any one skill into a focused drill and work on it until it holds.
The emotional state and coping response running in a given moment: the vulnerable child, say, or the punitive parent. Modes are states, not identities.
It goes further back, into long-standing patterns and their childhood roots, and it uses experiential methods such as chair work alongside cognitive ones.
Practise ST with us
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