Schema Therapy in Hamilton

Steel is not Hamilton's past. ArcelorMittal Dofasco still makes steel here, and the Port of Hamilton is, by its port authority's description, Ontario's busiest marine port. For some families that history is personal: a parent or grandparent who worked long shifts, rarely complained, and measured a good life by how much they could carry.

That is a real strength, and it can also harden into a schema, the word schema therapy uses for a belief formed early and repeated for life. Unrelenting standards: rest is something you earn and never quite have earned. Emotional inhibition: feelings are private, and needing help is weakness. Punitiveness: mistakes deserve to be punished, starting with your own. Beliefs like these helped families through hard times. Decades later, in a different job or a different city, they can keep you exhausted, lonely inside a relationship, or unable to say what is wrong.

Hamilton itself is in the middle of change, and change stirs these patterns up. The population grew 6% between 2016 and 2021, to about 569,000. Galleries and studios line James Street North, where the Art Crawl runs on the second Friday of every month and the annual Supercrawl festival takes over the street. The LRT line from McMaster to Eastgate is still in its development phase and not yet running. A city in transition can be a useful mirror: the old structure is still standing while something new is built beside it, which is roughly what schema work feels like from the inside.

Hamilton is also a university city, home to McMaster, Mohawk College and Redeemer University. For students and early-career researchers, the same schemas tend to show up as perfectionism about grades and publications, difficulty asking a supervisor for help, or a conviction that everyone else belongs there more than you do. The setting is different from the plant floor; the rule underneath is often the same.

Ghazal Sheikhtaheri, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), works with schema therapy as her primary framework. Sessions look for the moments when an old rule takes over, follow it back to where it started and what it once protected, and then practise responding from a steadier, more flexible place, using imagery, chair work and plain conversation. The aim is not to throw away the work ethic you were raised with, but to be able to choose when to use it.

Sessions are online across Hamilton and the rest of Ontario, 60 minutes each, in English or Farsi.