Schema Therapy in Cambridge

Cambridge was created on January 1, 1973, when Galt, Preston, Hespeler and the village of Blair were joined into one city. Half a century later the three old cores still feel distinct, each with its own historic downtown, and Galt’s nineteenth-century stone buildings still line the Grand River. Places keep their early shape long after the reasons for it have changed. People do too. In Preston the Speed River runs into the Grand and the two become a single current, and a pattern from childhood can merge with a present-day relationship in much the same way, until it is hard to tell which one is doing the pulling.

That is the idea at the heart of schema therapy. A schema is a pattern learned early, often in childhood, about what you need to do to be safe, loved or acceptable. It made sense in the setting that formed it. Carried into adult life, it can keep running long after it stopped helping: the belief that your needs come last, that feelings should stay private, that rest has to be earned.

In workplaces that prize getting the job done, and a manufacturing city has many of them, those patterns can pass for strengths. The person who never asks for help gets called reliable. The one who takes every extra shift gets called a team player. Schema therapy doesn’t argue with those qualities. It asks what they cost you, where they came from, and whether you still have a choice about them.

Patterns also travel through families. A parent who worked double shifts to keep the house running may have taught, without ever saying it, that tiredness is not discussed and that love looks like provision. Children absorb lessons like that long before they can question them. Schema therapy can hold gratitude for what a parent gave alongside honest grief for what was missing, without having to choose between the two.

Schema therapy also pays attention to modes, the states you shift into when a schema is triggered. There is the Detached Protector that goes numb after a double shift, the Demanding Critic that replays every mistake on the drive home, and the Vulnerable Child who feels alone in a full house. Naming a mode is often the first moment someone realizes the reaction is older than the situation, and that it can be met differently.

Ghazal Sheikhtaheri, a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), uses schema therapy as her main framework, alongside attachment- and emotion-focused work. Sessions move at a pace that lets an old pattern be understood before anyone asks it to change, using imagery, chair work and plain conversation about what actually happened in your week.

Because every session is online, you can take part from anywhere in Cambridge or elsewhere in Ontario, in English or Farsi.