Individual counseling, coaching or psychotherapy is helpful for people, who are dealing with various kinds of life struggles. People with difficulties in the following areas have engaged in and benefitted from individual sessions with Dipl.-Psych. Jan Kossack:
relationship/marital distress
parenting
job stress
trauma
anger management
anxiety/depression
social avoidance
family crises
substance abuse
self-esteem
motivation enhancement
personnel discord
narcissism/dealing with difficult people
sexual behavior problems
and more. Individual counseling, coaching or psychotherapy offered by Jan Kossack is strongly influenced by Schema Therapy.
“Schema Therapy was developed from traditional cognitive therapy by Dr. Jeffrey Young and colleagues over the last 20 years. It can be either long-term or short-term. The emphasis is on combating patterns of thoughts, which can impact negatively on you for your entire life. Techniques have been developed for weakening these thinking patterns and solving the related problems.” (J. Young & D. Bricker, 2012)
This treatment approach was developed for clients with more difficult long-term problems. People can learn to change these long-term patterns, especially their interaction with other people (colleagues, partners, children,…). For more information David C. Bricker and Jeffrey E. Young wrote “A Client’s Guide to Schema Therapy” (2012). Individual sessions can be held in English, German, Luxemburgish and French. For more details and appointments please contact jankossack@aol.com or mobile: +352 621 28 80 84
David C. Bricker & Jeffrey E. Young (explanations to Schema Therapy):
“Schemas - What They Are
A schema is an extremely stable, enduring negative pattern that develops during childhood or adolescence and is elaborated throughout an individual’s life. We view the world through our schemas. Schemas are important beliefs and feelings about oneself and the environment which the individual accepts without question. They are self-perpetuating, and are very resistant to change. For instance, children who develop a schema that they are incompetent rarely challenge this belief, even as adults. The schema usually does not go away without therapy. Overwhelming success in people’s lives is often still not enough to change the schema. The schema fights for its own survival, and, usually, quite successfully. It’s also important to mention the importance of needs in schema formation and perpetuation. Schemas are formed when needs are not met during childhood and then the schema prevents similar needs from being fulfilled in adulthood. For instance a child whose need for secure attachments is not fulfilled by his parents may go for many years in later life without secure relationships. Even though schemas persist once they are formed, they are not always in our awareness. Usually they operate in subtle ways, out of our awareness. However, when a schema erupts or is triggered by events, our thoughts and feelings are dominated by these schemas. It is at these moments that people tend to experience extreme negative emotions and have dysfunctional thoughts. In our work with many patients, we have found eighteen specific schemas. Most clients have at least two or three of these schemas, and often more…..
….Working With Modes
When treating clients with schema therapy one of the most important innovations is the concept of mode. For our purposes we will define a mode as the set of schemas or schema operations that are currently active for an individual. Or you might think of a mode simply as a mindset or state that you might be in temporarily. Most people can relate to the idea that we all have these different parts of ourselves and we go in and out of them all the time. For instance, if a friend tells you she had a bad day because her boss (or her toddler) was in his raging bull mode, you’d know exactly what she means. There are often occasions when a therapist will choose to work with a client’s modes in therapy. If a client is extremely upset at the beginning of a session, the therapist may inquire about what part of the person is feeling the emotional pain and attempt to recognize it and deal with it directly. For instance, for several sessions, Myra was very sad and hurt because she was unable to talk out some problems with her husband. In talking with her therapist they focused on a mode, or part of her, that she called
Lonely Myra, that seemed to be active after these failed attempts. By engaging this part of Myra in this manner the therapist was able to give her an opportunity to express the feelings and thoughts connected with her pattern of loneliness. The exact pattern of work with modes will vary from session to session. But some of the more common activities in mode work can be described. The history of the mode is often discussed; the client will speak about when the mode started and what was going on at the time. Connections are made between modes and current problems. Dialogues can be conducted between different modes when there is a conflict. For instance, a miser mode and a pl***oy mode might have it out over what type of car to buy. And there is always an effort to link mode work with other aspects of the therapy....”
(from “A Client’s Guide to Schema Therapy”, David C. Bricker, Ph.D. and Jeffrey E. Young, Ph.D., 2012)
