Emotional Schema Therapy

This book presents innovative tools for helping patients to understand their emotional schemas--such as the conviction that painful feelings are unbearable, shameful, or will last indefinitely--and develop new ways of accepting and coping with affective experience. Therapists can integrate emotional schema therapy into the treatment approaches they already use to add a vital new dimension to their work. Rich case material illustrates applications for a wide range of clinical problems; assessment guidelines and sample worksheets and forms further enhance the book's utility.

Robert L. Leahy, PhD, is Director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York and Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. His research focuses on individual differences in emotion regulation. Dr. Leahy is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Cognitive Therapy and is past president of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, the International Association for Cognitive Psychotherapy, and the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies. He is the 2014 recipient of the Aaron T. Beck Award from the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies. Dr. Leahy has published numerous books, including, most recently, the coauthored volumes Treatment Plans and Interventions for Bulimia and Binge-Eating Disorder; Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, Second Edition; and Emotion Regulation in Psychotherapy.

I. Emotional Schema Theory
1. The Social Construction of Emotion
2. Emotional Schema Therapy: General Considerations
3. A Model of Emotional Schemas

II. Beginning Treatment
4. Initial Assessment and Interview
5. Socialization to the Emotional Schema Model

III. Specific Interventions for Emotional Schemas
6. The Centrality of Validation
7. Comprehensibility, Duration, Control, Guilt/Shame, and Acceptance
8. Coping with Ambivalence
9. Linking Emotions to Values (and Virtues)

IV. Social Emotions and Relationships
10. Jealousy
11. Envy
12. Emotional Schemas in Couple Relationships
13. Emotional Schemas and the Therapeutic Relationship
Conclusions