News

Peace on Earth. Wonderfully joyous wishes to you and your loved ones this holiday season and the upcoming new year from your ISST family.

As the year comes to an end, many of us have celebrated, are celebrating, or look forward to celebrating Bodhi Day, Chinese New Year, Christmas, Diwali, Gantan-sai, Hanukkah, HumanLight, Kwanzaa, Mawlid, Solstice, or another holiday. Some of us may have also created our own traditions to honor.

As an international community with diverse backgrounds, we deeply appreciate the varied traditions and experiences of our members that enrich all of us. Holidays are an ideal time to reflect on our lives, and to feel gratitude for our journey.
 
To pause and think about how much life has changed for us this year is bewildering. For many of us, the global pandemic has restricted almost all aspects of what we do. For some of us, it has also provided unforeseen opportunities for newfound freedoms, reminding us even more of what matters in our lives.

Even though our darkest days of this pandemic may lie ahead in the near future, knowing that a light appears at the end of what may feel like a long tunnel is enough to ignite a burgeoning hope for the new year.
 
As many of us know all too well, the pandemic has thrust us onto the front lines of a growing mental health epidemic. We can be immensely proud of the work we have done as schema therapists, a force for good in the world through our caring, compassionate approach that touches the lives of people around the world.
 
Most of your clients or patients will never know how hard you work to help them get more of their core needs met. But they will appreciate the difference you’ve helped make in their lives, and the lives of their loved ones around them. Knowing that you’ve played a part in helping make people’s lives better is a powerful reward, and one that is especially important to remember during this holiday season, and throughout the coming year. Nothing else feels quite like it.
 
As this year comes to an end, our work to support each other as a schema therapy community to help improve the lives of others never stops.
 
Thank you for being part of our ISST family.
 
Season’s greetings to you and your loved ones,
 
Alp Karaosmanoglu
Executive Board President
International Society of Schema Therapy
 

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An ISST Member Exclusive: watch Graham Taylor share some of his vast experience in how EMDR can help enhance schema therapy

Applying EMDR to Enhance Schema Therapy

An ISST Webinar with Graham Taylor

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) was originally created by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s to alleviate traumatic memories.
The goals of successful EMDR treatment are to help patients adaptively resolve both their traumatic memories and adverse life experiences.
Successful treatment enables patients to relieve emotional distress, to reformulate negative beliefs, and to reduce physiological arousal.
EMDR applies three protocols within 8 phases of treatment:
1. Past upsetting events are 'processed' to create new associations with a meaning that is more adaptive 
2. Current distressing circumstances are targeted to desensitize internal and external triggers 
3. Patients develop skills to adaptively face imagined future events
Sound familiar? EMDR and schema therapy advance many of the same goals for therapeutic outcomes, but use very different languages in the details of their respective approaches. Seldom do either EMDR or schema therapy refer to each other.
This webinar looks at the commonalities between the two therapeutic models, and demonstrates how EMDR can be applied within the schema therapy model to help enhance results. 

Graham Taylor studied schema therapy from Jeffrey Young in 1989, while simultaneously learning EMDR from Francine Shapiro. Both approaches transformed his practice as a clinician. Graham started assisting Shapiro in providing trainings in EMDR in Australia in 1992. A year later, he began trainings in schema therapy in Australia.
Graham has several publications in both schema therapy and EMDR. After a long career as a clinician, he now solely focuses on training therapists in both approaches.
Graham is an Advanced Certified Schema Therapy Trainer, and also holds advanced certifications in EMDR and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).

Graham Taylor shares some of his vast experience in schema therapy and EMDR in an ISST Member Exclusive webinar!

Applying EMDR to Enhance Schema Therapy An ISST Webinar with Graham Taylor

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) was originally created by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s to alleviate traumatic memories.
The goals of successful EMDR treatment are to help patients adaptively resolve both their traumatic memories and adverse life experiences.
Successful treatment enables patients to relieve emotional distress, to reformulate negative beliefs, and to reduce physiological arousal.
EMDR applies three protocols within 8 phases of treatment:
1. Past upsetting events are 'processed' to create new associations with a meaning that is more adaptive 
2. Current distressing circumstances are targeted to desensitize internal and external triggers 
3. Patients develop skills to adaptively face imagined future events
Sound familiar? EMDR and schema therapy advance many of the same goals for therapeutic outcomes, but use very different languages in the details of their respective approaches. Seldom do either EMDR or schema therapy refer to each other.
This webinar looks at the commonalities between the two therapeutic models, and demonstrates how EMDR can be applied within the schema therapy model to help enhance results. 

Graham Taylor studied schema therapy from Jeffrey Young in 1989, while simultaneously learning EMDR from Francine Shapiro. Both approaches transformed his practice as a clinician. Graham started assisting Shapiro in providing trainings in EMDR in Australia in 1992. A year later, he began trainings in schema therapy in Australia.

Graham has several publications in both schema therapy and EMDR. After a long career as a clinician, he now solely focuses on training therapists in both approaches.

Graham is an Advanced Certified Schema Therapy Trainer, and also holds advanced certifications in EMDR and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).

Watch How to Help Cluster C Personality Disorders in this ISST Webinar.

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Angry Birds: Pushing for Anger in Cluster C Personality Disorders
An ISST Webinar with Ruth McCutcheon and Saskia Ohlin

Clients with Cluster C traits can struggle with expressing anger in a healthy way due to aversive early life experiences of anger which led to the development of maladaptive coping modes, posing a challenge to clinicians.
 

This webinar explores the following areas:
 

1). Formulating anger in Cluster C clients
 

2). Techniques to facilitate working with anger in Cluster C clients during different phases of treatment
 

3). Therapist stance in facilitating anger
 

4). Therapist tools for managing their own schemas in working with anger

Watch live demonstrations using chairwork and imagery rescripting to help equip clinicians with skills in helping to facilitate the expression of healthy anger while working with avoidant clients.

Ruth McCutcheon is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist with advanced level accreditation in Schema Therapy for individuals and couples with the International Society for Schema Therapy.  She is a co-director, supervisor and trainer with the Academy of Schema Therapy and works in collaboration with the Academie voor Schematherapie in the Netherlands. 

Ruth has fifteen years of experience working in NHS healthcare, including primary and secondary care, in addition to inpatient forensic settings.  She works as a therapist and supervisor addressing a range of psychological issues, including chronic depression, relationship difficulties, complex trauma and personality disorders. 

Practicing individual and couples’ therapy modalities, Ruth works with both adult and adolescent populations.  She is also a visiting lecturer at a number of London-based universities where she provides schema therapy workshops. 
 

For over 20 years, Saskia has worked in primary and secondary care in out - and inpatient settings. She has wide clinical expertise in treating complex trauma and personality disorders, particularly borderline personality disorder.

Together with Ruth, they head the Academy of Schema Therapy in London, UK providing courses and accreditation programs in schema therapy. Saskia also works in collaboration with the Academie voor Schematherapie in the Netherlands.
 

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