Schema Therapy in Ottawa

For a long time, a federal job in Ottawa was shorthand for security. Workforce reductions in the public service, through attrition, early retirement and job cuts, have unsettled that picture. Whether or not your own position is affected, living inside that uncertainty, or watching colleagues, friends and neighbours move through it, can stir up far more than practical worry. In a city where so many households depend on the same employer, the news follows you to the dinner table, the school pickup and the group chat, and it is hard to find a corner of life where the question of what happens next does not reach.

That is where schema therapy becomes relevant. In this approach, a schema is a deep conviction about who you are and what you can expect from other people, usually laid down in childhood and rarely examined since, that quietly decides how the present feels. When outside stability shifts, older beliefs tend to surface: that you are only safe while you are indispensable, that one mistake will expose you, that people move on once you are no longer useful. A reorganization, a new manager or a letter from human resources can land on those beliefs with a weight the situation alone does not explain.

For others the question is whether to leave, or whether to accept early retirement if it is offered, and a decision like that raises questions no pension seminar covers: who am I without this role, and was I ever valued for more than what I produced? Those questions often have roots much older than the job.

Some people also recognize a pattern of composure in themselves: staying measured and capable in public, being the one who never needs anything, holding everything together through a restructuring or a long winter. That composure is often a genuine strength, and schema therapy does not try to take it away. It asks what the composure has been protecting, and whether the part of you that learned so early to hold everything together might finally get some care of its own.

Ghazal Sheikhtaheri, a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), takes this work slowly and in depth: naming the pattern, following it back to its first appearance, and meeting it through imagery and chair work at the level of feeling, not only thought. She sees clients by video in English or Farsi, which fits around a working week anywhere from Nepean to Orléans without an extra trip.