Do you aspire to be a schema therapist, but the process is intimidating you? Are you not sure where to start? Maybe you have started but you feel a bit lost about how to get to the finish line. Here’s my guide and top tips to schema therapy training and becoming a certified schema therapist.
What is Schema Therapy?
Dr Jeffrey Young developed schema therapy when he found conventional psychological therapies such as CBT were not sufficiently effective for treating people with chronic and complex mental health difficulties, including difficulties described as ‘personality disorders’.
The Schema Therapy model is easy to understand, but the different layers of the model allow for formulation of complex psychological difficulties including mode shifts. The interventions are emotion-focused experiential exercises, which are anchored in the client’s needs.
Why Become a Certified Schema Therapist?
Personally, I have found that schema therapy has transformed the psychological interventions I offer to my clients. I have a framework to conceptualise the complex process issues that present themselves in the therapy room. Limited reparenting allows me to develop emotionally connected and reparative relationships with my clients, but also empathically confront the patterns that are preventing change. The powerful experiential tools, imagery re-scripting and chair work, help clients connect deeply with their emotional needs and process their trauma.
I no longer sit and talk to my clients session after session, hoping that cognitive insights will bring about emotional shifts and feeling uncertain about how to facilitate the processing of complicated feelings.
Due to the effectiveness and humanity of Schema Therapy, it is a sought-after psychological therapy. Currently there are not enough schema therapists to meet the demand. Not only does becoming a certified schema therapist increase your referral rate, it also opens up the pathway for providing supervision and training for future schema therapists.
How to Become a Certified Schema Therapist
For full details of certification requirements – see the International Society of Schema Therapy website.
Schema Therapy Training
Eligibility
First things first, are you eligible for the certification programme in schema therapy?
In the UK, for automatic eligibility, you need to hold a Bachelor of Honours degree and be one of the following:
A HCPC registered clinical, counselling or forensic psychologist
A fully accredited member of the BABCP
An accredited member of the BACP
If you do not meet the above criteria, speak to a training programme about demonstrating your eligibility with a portfolio. Anyone can attend schema therapy certification workshops and learn schema therapy, but the certification process is limited to those eligible.
Tip: Choose a training programme and sign up for certification – you will make life harder for yourself if you take modules from different training providers and have to demonstrate that you have covered the International Society of Schema Therapy (ISST) curriculum when you come to filling in your application for certification.
The curriculum requires a minimum of 40 hours of certification training in schema therapy. Training providers split these 40 hours into 6 to 7 days of experiential workshops over two to three modules.
You have three years to complete the requirements for certification from the final workshop of the certification training that you attend.
Supplementing your Training
Tip: It takes some time to understand the depth of the schema therapy model. Support your learning by joining the Facebook Page I facilitate with Tena Davies and Gemma Gladstone, to see how clinicians are applying the schema therapy model in practice.
Read the following books:
Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide. Young, Kiosk & Weishaar.
Schema Therapy in Practice: An Introductory Guide to the Schema Mode Approach. Arntz & Jacob.
Tip: Have a list of schemas on your desk, in your diary or pinned to the wall. Primarily, clinicians follow a schema mode approach, but this blog post describes why it’s so important to understand the schemas that trigger the modes. As you are working with clients, think about the schemas that are being activated and what the client’s unmet needs are.
Tip: A fun thing to do (if you are a schema geek like me!) is to play spot the mode on TV programmes and films to help you become familiar with the different types of schema modes.
Schema Therapy Supervision
As soon as you have completed the first day of certification training you can start to receive supervision to count towards certification. This supervision needs to be with an ISST certified supervisor. If you have signed up to a certification programme, your training providers will help you find a supervisor. Otherwise, you can search on the ISST directory (it’s not the easiest to navigate), ask in the Schema Therapy Interest Group on Facebook or ask colleagues who are schema therapy trained.
You need to receive a minimum of 20 supervision sessions to apply for standard certification in schema therapy. If you are receiving group supervision, item 6 in this document will help you work out how many group supervision sessions you need to attend to reach the required levels of supervision.
If you’re anything like me then after a training course I come out inspired and wanting to jump straight into applying what I have learnt, but as soon as I hit a block and something doesn’t work the way I expect, I stall. Supervision is the remedy to this – a space to talk through, role play or watch a snippet of your session to think about what has happened and what you might be able to add or do differently next time.
Tip: Start sharing videos or audio recordings of your sessions as soon as you can in supervision! This, along with role plays, is the most effective way to learn. I know it’s terrifying. I thought I was going to be found out to be a rubbish psychologist too. However, I learnt more from those opportunities for feedback than I had ever learnt from a discussion about what happened in a session. Be brave. It will help you get certified more quickly.
Read the Schema Therapist Competency Rating Scale to understand what you are expected to cover in a schema therapy session.
Tip: By the time you have received 8 to 10 supervision sessions, ask your supervisor to rate a session for you. Their feedback on a whole session will be invaluable in helping you shape up your schema therapy.
For standard certification, your supervisor needs to rate at least two sessions and you need submit a session to be rated by an independent rater. Your session needs an average score of 4.0 on the schema therapist competency rating scale for standard certification. The session you submit for rating should include either imagery rescripting or mode dialogues with chairs.
Therapy Elements of Certification
For standard certification you need to provide schema therapy to at least 2 clients for at least 25 therapy sessions. 1 client or more should have a diagnosis of ‘personality disorder’ or significant ‘personality disorder features’. The other clients should be suitable for schema mode work, meaning their difficulties are chronic, complex or the person has not benefitted from previous interventions. You need to have provided at least 80 sessions of schema therapy across all of your clients. Discuss each client with your supervisor, so they can sign your work off.
Tip: Choose several clients to solely use schema therapy with. Have a go at using the Young Schema Questionnaire to develop your formulation and your mode map. Give yourself some confidence by working out a draft of your client’s mode map outside of session and then have a go at doing it together in session.
Tip: It’s okay for chair-work and imagery rescripting to feel clunky at first. It’s kinder to yourself to give these experiential exercises a go with your more compliant clients as you build your confidence. I found imagery for assessment a good place to start and chair work with the critic mode. Then you can build on this with more complex exercises and clients as time goes on.
Tip: Record your sessions and listen back to them in the car (when you are alone!). Think about why you did what you did and what you could have done differently. Keep the rating scale in mind, and check off whether you have covered everything you need to. I know it’s painful to listen to your own voice, but regularly listening to your sessions will help you to identify your strengths and the things you need to work on further.
Finally, unlike I have here, don’t leave the case conceptualisation (which needs to be submitted alongside session recordings for review) to the end – it’s really frustrating and disappointing to realise that you have missed an important part of the conceptualisation when you are 25 sessions into therapy with a client! I speak from experience. Start pulling a rough draft together after 4 or 5 sessions and keep building on it. The conceptualisation is your compass – it will really help you meet the criteria of the session rating scale.
Tip: Once you have met the criteria for standard certification I encourage you to apply for your certificate, as from time to time the criteria changes and you might have to meet different standards by the time you reach the criteria for advanced schema therapy certification. Join the ISST prior to your application, as this is a requirement.
Conclusion
Becoming certified in schema therapy is hard work and it probably looks very daunting written out like this, but when you follow the steps I have set out here, you will find it’s absolutely achievable and your clinical work will be transformed.
If you would like to take the first step and join certification training, you’ll find details of our next certification workshops here.