Schema Therapy in Burlington

Compared with most of the GTA, Burlington's population skews older, and a large share of residents are past 65. Schema therapy is often imagined as work for people in their twenties and thirties, but patterns do not retire. Midlife and later life are, if anything, when many people finally notice them: the children leave, a career winds down, a parent dies, and beliefs that were drowned out by years of busyness become audible again.

A schema is a belief about yourself, formed early and repeated for decades: that you must earn your place, that your needs come last, that if people really knew you they would leave. In a comfortable, orderly life these beliefs can hide well. Unrelenting standards look like conscientiousness. Self-sacrifice looks like being a good daughter, a good spouse, a dependable colleague. Approval-seeking looks like being easy to get along with. It is only when the structure changes, with retirement, an empty house or an illness, that you notice how much of your energy has gone into keeping the old rule.

Schema therapy works at both the thinking and the feeling level. Ghazal Sheikhtaheri, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), trained in schema therapy at the CASMH Health Institute in Germany and uses it as the foundation of her practice. Together you map the schemas that run your reactions, trace where they began, and use techniques such as imagery and chair work to build the "Healthy Adult" mode: a steadier inner voice that can meet your own needs now, whatever your age.

Schemas also show up between people. Two partners' patterns can lock together for decades, one person's self-sacrifice meeting the other's need for control, and retirement tends to bring that dance into sharper view. Individual schema therapy helps you understand your side of it; if you and your partner want to work on it together, Ghazal also brings schema work into couples sessions. Others first notice their schemas through work: the promotion that brought no relief, or the holiday that cannot be taken without guilt.

It is slower, deeper work than a set of coping skills. It tends to suit people who have already tried the practical route and found the same feelings coming back, including those who have spent years as the capable one in their family and their workplace and are only now asking what that capability has cost them.

Sessions are online, so you meet from home, whether that is a condo near the downtown waterfront or a house in the rural north of the city, with no drive and no waiting room. Sessions are weekly, 60 minutes each, combining conversation with experiential exercises, in English or Farsi.