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PERSONAL STATEMENT- Sevinç Göral Alkan- Running for Secretary

Dear ISST community,

As many of you, internalization and integration of Schema Therapy model into my personal and professional life brought wellbeing, wisdom and chance to be effective for the healing of others. I am practicing to be a healthy adult/ good parent deliberately every day and I gain benefits of it. ISST has been an important resource for me to develop as a schema therapist. I have been always nourished by our events and trainings. Seniors of our society has been my role models. I am grateful for our model that it shows great effectiveness in the healing of our patients. It is an honor for me if I can serve to our community and to Schema Therapy in the world.

Here is some information about me. 

I was born in Antalya, a beautiful touristic city of Turkey. I have moved to the Netherlands when I was 30 years old due to doctoral studies of my husband. Our son has born in the Netherlands and we become citizens of this beautiful country where working standards are high, communication is transparent and society structure is egalitarian. I live and work in two countries for many years. Like schema therapy model, this immigration journey has been a very important teacher for me by means of integrating both sides and confronting my inner beliefs. I am grateful for having chance to grow, extending my limits and serving for the others more effectively by this journey.

I received an intensive and high- quality education on Psychodynamic Therapies, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Family System Therapies and research methods and received bachelor, masters and doctoral degrees from Turkey’s high- quality universities. 

Meanwhile Turkey has been trying to heal the wounds of '1999 earthquakes’. I started to work in the earthquake area as a clinical psychologist and worked with trauma victims for many years. I received intensive supervision on clinical applications and conducted research on psychological trauma. I gave group treatments and contributed to the social rehabilitation and psychosocial support projects for the disabled populations. I directed psycho-social community-based participation projects. Working with trauma patients in challenging conditions fed me personally and professionally as I was integrating my mind and knowledge with my heart and humanistic values. As a member of multi-disciplinary teams and working with local authorities and communities, I reached to a larger perspective in the solution of the problems. 

As the follower of scientist-practitioner model I have studied intensively on theoretical and research aspects of clinical psychology and received supervision and experience of psychotherapy during my doctoral studies. In my doctoral dissertation about projective identification and schema chemistry in the couple relationship, I tried to integrate Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Schema Therapy and psychodynamic therapies. I studied on the similarities and complementarities among the schemas of married/ cohabiting partners.

I am working in outpatient mental health care clinics for many years as a psychologist in the Netherlands. I learned a lot from the schema therapy practice with complex trauma patients who are coming from disadvantaged communities, having multiple problematic and comorbidity. I am thankful for working with immigrant and expat populations for many years that I learned different cultures and witnessed the universality of suffering/healing. I have got the chance to work under supervision of Arnoud Arntz and contribute to the multi-center randomized clinical trial study comparing schema therapy and dialectical behavior therapy (BOOTS) as one of the coordinators of the sites.

I am an Advanced level Schema Therapist, Trainer and Supervisor since 2017. I am a member of European Awarding Committee and Specialist European Awarding Committee for Psychotherapy of EFPA EuroPsy. I am the national certification coordinator/ chairperson of the National Training Program Directors Committee of Turkey since 2021.

I am the founder of Schema Therapy Turkey, which aims to contribute to the scientific and ethical applications of schema therapy in the psychotherapy, training, research, publication, symposium and community mental health activities. I am dedicated to improving the quality of ST training and supervision as an advocacy to the patient’s rights in Turkey.

I am translator and/or editor of Schema Therapy A Practitioner’s Guide; Schema Therapy Clinician’s Guide; and Mindfulness and Schema Therapy into Turkish.

I personally focused on the lifelong development of wise healthy adult. I have created and presented a Healthy Adult Strengthening Training during pandemic for clinicians and non-clinicians. I try to integrate (Contextual) Schema Therapy with acceptance commitment therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, compassion focused therapy, mindfulness, Buddhistic Psychology, Positive Psychology, psychological trauma perspectives, interpersonal neurobiology, polyvagal theory.









Why Schema Therapy?

Schema therapy has been extensively researched to effectively treat a wide variety of typically treatment resistant conditions, including Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Read our summary of the latest research comparing the dramatic results of schema therapy compared to other standard models of psychotherapy.

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