S1W3.1 - What are the scripts we target in rescripting and how do they relate to schemas and modes? - Part 1
Tracks
Track 2
Individual Therapy
| Saturday, June 1, 2024 |
| 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM |
Overview
In Conference Workshop
Details
If the presenter suggests breaking into groups then you should access the Breakout Foyer HERE
Schema therapists use imagery rescripting, to help clients to change their existing scripts. The concept of script has a long history outside psychology, in the theatre, and in information theory. Within academic psychology it was explored in the extensive work of Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991) and, in psychotherapy, in the work of Eric Berne (1910-1970) and those who further developed Transactional Analysis after his death. In this workshop we will examine what scripts are and how they relate to the foundational concepts in schema therapy: Early Maladaptive Schemas and Schema Modes. An understanding of scripts gives us insight into the personal meanings associated with schema modes. Once in place, scripts tend to run automatically with limited control from self-awareness. Uncovering script patterns, and understanding their nature and content, provides a foundation for working strategically towards helping clients change scripts that contribute to ways of experiencing and behaving that are limiting, harmful and self-defeating.
All schema modes have scripts. Primary Child (Vulnerable, Angry) modes have, at their centre, a primary distressing emotional state such as sadness, abandonment, shame, anger. These have scripts that capture the meaning and action tendency of the primary emotion. Authentic Child modes have implicit action scripts for creativity and personal development.
The scripts of Parent modes are messages directed at the child that were explicitly put into words or implicitly conveyed through the parent’s nonverbal behaviour. It is a standard practice for therapists to do a rescript to protect a Child from these kinds of harmful influences. However, this can have limited impact because the Parent messages, in turn, have their source in the scripts of the parent who sent them. These may themselves be complex coping scripts that incorporate family and cultural patterns that are intergenerational. To fully free the Child from the grip of the parent, these intergenerational scripts may need to be understood and addressed.
Coping modes have scripts related to how they are set up to help individuals cope with adversity. Typically, these scripts were set up in childhood, often early childhood or even infancy. We work with these by helping clients see how they often emerged in a family context very different from the one in which the individual lives now, but they still run in the same way. This can help clients make a new decision from the Healthy Adult about how to cope differently in the present.
The aim of this workshop is to show how a fuller understanding of the script of each mode provides us with a stronger toolkit for rescripting. This, helps to strengthen the Healthy Adult, which we can think of as a metascript, or set of metascripts, which equate with what has traditionally been called “wisdom.”
This kind of script analysis will be illustrated with clinical examples, and participants will have the opportunity to do practical exercises in relation to themselves or their own cases using the perspectives being presented.
Schema therapists use imagery rescripting, to help clients to change their existing scripts. The concept of script has a long history outside psychology, in the theatre, and in information theory. Within academic psychology it was explored in the extensive work of Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991) and, in psychotherapy, in the work of Eric Berne (1910-1970) and those who further developed Transactional Analysis after his death. In this workshop we will examine what scripts are and how they relate to the foundational concepts in schema therapy: Early Maladaptive Schemas and Schema Modes. An understanding of scripts gives us insight into the personal meanings associated with schema modes. Once in place, scripts tend to run automatically with limited control from self-awareness. Uncovering script patterns, and understanding their nature and content, provides a foundation for working strategically towards helping clients change scripts that contribute to ways of experiencing and behaving that are limiting, harmful and self-defeating.
All schema modes have scripts. Primary Child (Vulnerable, Angry) modes have, at their centre, a primary distressing emotional state such as sadness, abandonment, shame, anger. These have scripts that capture the meaning and action tendency of the primary emotion. Authentic Child modes have implicit action scripts for creativity and personal development.
The scripts of Parent modes are messages directed at the child that were explicitly put into words or implicitly conveyed through the parent’s nonverbal behaviour. It is a standard practice for therapists to do a rescript to protect a Child from these kinds of harmful influences. However, this can have limited impact because the Parent messages, in turn, have their source in the scripts of the parent who sent them. These may themselves be complex coping scripts that incorporate family and cultural patterns that are intergenerational. To fully free the Child from the grip of the parent, these intergenerational scripts may need to be understood and addressed.
Coping modes have scripts related to how they are set up to help individuals cope with adversity. Typically, these scripts were set up in childhood, often early childhood or even infancy. We work with these by helping clients see how they often emerged in a family context very different from the one in which the individual lives now, but they still run in the same way. This can help clients make a new decision from the Healthy Adult about how to cope differently in the present.
The aim of this workshop is to show how a fuller understanding of the script of each mode provides us with a stronger toolkit for rescripting. This, helps to strengthen the Healthy Adult, which we can think of as a metascript, or set of metascripts, which equate with what has traditionally been called “wisdom.”
This kind of script analysis will be illustrated with clinical examples, and participants will have the opportunity to do practical exercises in relation to themselves or their own cases using the perspectives being presented.
Speaker
Professor David Edwards
Director
Schema Therapy Institute Of South Africa
What are the scripts we target in rescripting and how do they relate to schemas and modes?
Biography
Professor David Edwards
http://www.schematherapysouthafrica.co.za/
David Edwards is an Emeritus Professor at Rhodes University in South Africa, where, for over 25 years, he taught cognitive-behavioural therapy (including schema therapy) to trainee clinical and counselling psychologists. He also taught group therapy and offered intensive workshops to students using expressive therapies including psychodrama, clay sculpture, drawing and dance. Since his retirement, at the end of 2009, he continues to work as a researcher and research supervisor.
He is a Clinical Psychologist in South Africa and the United Kingdom and has an active private practice offering psychotherapy. He trained in cognitive-behavioural, humanistic and transpersonal approaches to psychotherapy, and has a longstanding interest in psychotherapy integration. In the 1980s, he did a postdoctoral year with Aaron Beck in Philadelphia, where he first met Jeffrey Young and learned about his early ideas about schema therapy. He is certified as a Trainer and Supervisor by the International Society of Schema Therapy (ISST) both for individuals and couples.
Through the Schema Therapy Institute of South Africa, he presents basic and advanced training workshops and supervision in schema therapy locally and internationally. Within the ISST he served on the CCC (now the Ethics and Conflict Resolution) Committee, and is currently chair of the Case Conceptualization Committee. He was ISST President from 2016-2020.
He has over 100 academic publications in the form of journal articles and book chapters. In 2022 he published an article on the use of schema modes in case conceptualization (open access at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.763670/full ). He has promoted the use of case studies as a research method in psychotherapy and has published several case studies, with many focusing on psychotherapy for trauma and complex trauma, and the application of schema therapy to complex cases. His most recent case study is open access at https://pcsp.nationalregister.org/index.php/pcsp/issue/view/317 .
