SERVICES

Counselling

As an Advanced Schema Therapist, Talia provides primarily Schema Therapy. Schema therapy focusses on treating underlying factors that drive difficulties or recurring distressing patterns. Schema therapy addresses problems at their core, integrating cognitive, behavioural, emotional and affective components in order to develop insight into and shift lifelong dysfunctional patterns that prevent the meeting of emotional needs. Schema therapy is a longer-term approach that assists with the development of insight and self awareness, and results in lasting change. While this is Talia’s primary treatment modality, her eclectic style of counselling is informed by her training in various psychotherapy frameworks. Talia’s early training facilitated the development of a strong psychodynamic background, while her later training facilitated an appreciation for Existential Psychotherapy, and she is particularly inspired by the work of Irvin Yalom.

Talia aims to assist her clients to identify and understand their schemas, address their styles of coping or coping modes that get in the way of meeting their emotional needs, change patterns that result from the self perpetuation of schemas, learn to meet their core emotional needs in healthy, adaptive ways, and cope with frustration and distress when certain needs can’t be met. Talia’s philosophy is aimed toward optimum psychological development and facilitation of health and well- being.

Schemas are deeply entrenched beliefs about ourselves and the world, learned early in life. These schemas are central to our sense of self. To give up our belief in a schema would be to surrender the security of knowing who we are and what the world is like; therefore we cling to it, even when it hurts us.

Jeffrey Young

Talia works predominantly with adults and has training and experience working with couples. Difficulties that clients may work through with Talia include:

  • Addiction
  • Anxiety
  • Bariatrics
  • Conflict Resolution
  • Depression
  • Eating Disorders
  • Interpersonal concerns
  • Loss and grief
  • Relationships
  • Self esteem
  • Sexuality
  • Trauma and complex trauma
  • Work stress and work life balance

Everyone has a story or a struggle that will break your heart. And, if we’re really paying attention, most people have a story that will bring us to our knees … … Loving ourselves through the process of owning our story is the bravest thing we will ever do.

Brene’ Brown

Clinical Supervision

Talia is a Board- Approved supervisor and provides supervision to a broad scope of registered clinical practitioners, including Psychologists undertaking their endorsement program. Talia provides primary supervision for Registered Psychologists pursuing endorsement in Counselling Psychology, and secondary supervision for Psychologists pursuing other areas of Practice Endorsement. Talia also provides Schema Therapy Supervision for clinicians who are interested in deepening their understanding and practice of Schema Therapy.

I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story.

Irvin D Yalom

Schema Therapy

Schema therapy is a therapeutic approach that integrates elements from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Attachment and Object Relations Theories, and Gestalt and Experiential Therapies. It was developed by Jeffrey Young in the 1990’s to provide treatment options for long term issues and treatment resistant anxiety and depression, and has been developed and refined since this time and successfully applied to a number of other presentations.

The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it.

Gabor Mate’

An early maladaptive schema is a pervasive self-defeating or dysfunctional theme or pattern of memories, emotions, and physical sensations, developed during childhood or adolescence and perpetuated throughout one’s lifetime, that often has the form of a belief about oneself or the world. Schemas emerge in response to unmet childhood emotional needs, trauma or neglect.

The five core emotional needs are:

  1. Secure attachments to others 
  2. Autonomy, competence, and sense of identity
  3. Freedom to express valid needs and emotions
  4. Spontaneity and play
  5. Realistic limits and self-control

There are 18 Early Maladaptive Schemas, which are divided into five domains:

  1. Disconnection & Rejection– Abandonment/ Instability, Mistrust/ Abuse, Emotional Deprivation, Defectiveness/ Shame, Social Isolation/ Alienation
  2. Impaired Autonomy & Performance– Dependence/ Incompetence, Vulnerability to Harm or Illness, Enmeshment/ Underdeveloped Self, Failure
  3. Impaired Limits– Entitlement/Grandiosity, Insufficient Self- Control/ Self- Discipline
  4. Other Directedness– Subjugation, Self- Sacrifice, Approval-Seeking/ Recognition- Seeking
  5. Over-vigilance & Inhibition– Negativity/ Pessimism, Emotional Inhibition/ Overcontrol, Unrelenting Standards/ Hypercriticalness, Punitiveness 

Coping mechanisms are known in Schema Therapy as Schema Modes. Schema Modes are moment to moment emotional states and coping responses driven by schemas, that we all experience. Coping Modes emerge as a child adapts to damaging experiences. They become well entrenched and serve to reinforce unhelpful schema- driven behavioural and relationship patterns. Schema Mode Therapy is part of Schema Therapy and focusses on how Schemas express themselves when triggered.

Try to respect the reasons your lifetrap developed in the first place. During your childhood, it was essential for your emotional survival. But what was once a help to you is now hurting you, and it is time to give it up. It is time for you to begin the slow journey out of self- denial and self- defeat, and to reclaim your life for yourself.

Jeffrey Young

Schema therapy places great emphasis on the therapist-patient relationship, and the process of limited reparenting is an essential part of the treatment in Schema Therapy as well as one of its most unique and defining elements. Schema therapy utilises a variety of emotion- focussed, cognitive and behavioural techniques to help clients strengthen their Healthy Adult Mode, weaken their Maladaptive Coping Modes so that they can connect with their core needs and feelings, heal their schemas, and break schema-driven patterns in order to meet their emotional needs in healthy, adaptive ways that align with their beliefs and values.

Once you can open yourself up to the idea that your defectiveness is not a fact, the healing process can begin to work.

Jeffrey Young.