Schema therapy has been developed specifically to treat personality disorders but has now been successfully used to treat chronic depression, childhood trauma, criminal offenders, eating disorders, couples work, relapse prevention and substance abuse.

Patients with personality disorders or more chronic conditions have failed to respond fully to traditional cognitive behavioural therapy treatments. Beck, Freeman & associates, (1990).

Mainstream services have largely failed these clients, resulting in them feeling more abandoned, flitting from service to service and therapist to therapist. Clients have difficulty maintaining stable relationships, are impulsive, display inappropriate anger, have recurrent suicidal threats gestures or behaviours. They may also suffer from identity disturbance, chronic feelings of emptiness/ boredom and display efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment or rejection. Nhs staff therefore remain largely unskilled in dealing with this client group and may result in further feelings of rejection and abandonment as staff are only to relieved to have client move on to yet another department or service.

“These clients are treated with minimal compassion and much blame in other therapies”, Young, (2003).

Schema therapy therefore is unusually compassionate and humane, normalizes psychological disorders The approach is sympathetic and respectful with emphasis very much on therapy relationship.

Schema therapy is a combination of aspects of different therapies, including cognitive behavioural, attachment, gestalt, object relations, constructivist and psychoanalytical. It expands on cognitive behavioural therapy by placing greater emphasis on explaining childhood and adolescent origins of psychological problems, emotional techniques, client -therapist relationship and on maladaptive coping styles.

Schema’s

A schema can be described as-

There are now many hundreds of hypnotherapists who offer what is called “gut-directed hypnotherapy” for IBS, which takes general techniques of hypnotherapy and applies them directly to abdominal pain and digestive symptoms which IBS sufferers struggle with. This type of hypnotherapy has been clinically tested and found to be very helpful to many IBS patients.

One of first studies of hypnotherapy for IBS was conducted by Dr Peter Whorwell, a leading expert on IBS and hypnotherapy in UK. A trial he conducted in 1980s found that a group of IBS sufferers who had failed to respond to other treatments showed dramatic improvements when treated with gut-directed hypnotherapy. Since then, other therapists have shown similar results.

What hypnotherapy involves

Hypnotherapy in a medical setting bears no relation to kind of stage hypnosis where volunteers are made to do ridiculous things in name of entertainment. In fact, patients remain entirely in control of their own actions, and are simply coaxed into a kind of deep relaxation state.