Schema Therapy in Richmond Hill

Schemas form early, in whatever language a child's family spoke. For the 10.3% of Richmond Hill residents whose mother tongue is Persian, and for the many others who grew up speaking another language at home, the first messages about worth and love were spoken in that language: what a good child does, what happens when you disappoint someone, whose needs come first. Those messages were absorbed long before anyone could question them.

That matters because schema therapy works with feeling, not only with thought. In imagery work you return, in your mind, to a moment when an old pattern took hold; in chair work you give the inner critic a voice and then answer it. Bilingual people sometimes find that these exercises feel distant in their second language and suddenly vivid in their first. A phrase a parent used, heard again in its original words, can reach the part of you that still believes it, and that is where the work can begin.

Some bilingual people also notice that their inner critic speaks one language and their calmer, coping self speaks another. Paying attention to which voice uses which language can be revealing in itself, and in schema work it becomes a way to reach each part more directly: answering the critic in the language it uses, or letting the vulnerable child side speak in the words it first had.

The patterns themselves are not cultural traits. Unrelenting standards, emotional deprivation, subjugation and the rest appear in families everywhere; what culture shapes is how they sound. Ghazal Sheikhtaheri, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), CRPO #21300, was born in Iran and completed her first graduate degree, in clinical psychology, in Tehran before further study in Canada and advanced schema therapy training in Germany. She can follow a pattern through Farsi and English without it needing to be translated first, and she treats both languages as equally good places for the work.

You do not need to be fluent in Farsi, or Iranian, to work with her. Sessions can be held entirely in English. The point is simply that no part of your history has to be left outside the room because of the language it happened in.

Sessions are online, which can suit experiential work: you are in your own space and do not have to compose yourself for a drive home afterwards. Nobody has to travel: you can take part from anywhere in Richmond Hill, from the streets around the Mill Pond to Bayview Hill, or from elsewhere in Ontario.