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Schema Therapy Essentials.
Schema Therapy Essentials is a 3-day course from the Association for Psychological Therapies (APT), a leading provider of Schema Therapy training for professionals working in mental health and related fields in the UK and Ireland. Schema Therapy Essentials is the benchmark for professionals who want an excellent introduction to Schema Therapy which will enable them to understand it and use it straight away.
Founded in 1981, APT has grown to become a trusted source of gold-standard training, from introductory through to masterclass level. Over 150,000 mental health professionals have attended APT’s post-qualification courses, commissioned by more than 120 NHS Trusts and all major independent providers.
APT’s Schema Therapy training uniquely combines built-in APT Accreditation with automatic access to our renowned post-course resources to help you support your clients. It is available for both teams and individuals, face-to-face or online, and can also count towards The APT Diploma in Psychological Therapies and The APT Diploma in Working with common mental health diagnoses.
Executive Summary:
Schema Therapy has become one of the most influential developments in psychological therapy over the past two decades. Originally developed to work with complex and long-standing difficulties — including personality disorder, chronic depression, trauma, and entrenched relationship problems — it is now widely used across mental health services with a broad range of clients.
This Schema Therapy Essentials course provides a clear, practical, and clinically grounded introduction to the model, designed specifically for qualified and experienced mental health professionals.
Why Schema Therapy?
Many therapists recognise the limits of symptom-focused work when difficulties are deeply rooted, repetitive, and emotionally charged. Schema Therapy offers a powerful way of understanding:
- why the same problems keep recurring.
- why change can feel emotionally impossible, even when insight is good.
- why clients may swing between vulnerability, avoidance, compliance, anger, or emotional shutdown.
At its heart, Schema Therapy helps clinicians understand enduring emotional patterns, how they develop, and — crucially — how they can be modified in a safe, structured, and compassionate way.
What this course covers:
This course introduces the core concepts and clinical methods of Schema Therapy in a way that is accessible, practical, and immediately usable in day-to-day work.
You will explore:
- Early maladaptive schemas — what they are, how they form, and how they shape adult behaviour.
- Schema domains and common presentations seen in clinical practice.
- Schema modes — including vulnerable child, detached protector, punitive parent, and healthy adult.
- How schema modes explain rapid emotional shifts, self-sabotage, and interpersonal conflict.
- The therapeutic stance: empathy, validation, and appropriate limits.
- An introduction to key interventions, including imagery, mode dialogues, and experiential techniques.
- How Schema Therapy integrates with CBT, trauma-informed practice, attachment theory, and compassion-focused approaches.
Throughout the course, theory is consistently linked to real clinical examples, making the model feel grounded rather than abstract.:
What makes this an APT course:
As with all APT training, this is not about teaching a rigid protocol or a new set of labels. Instead, the emphasis is on:
- Clinical understanding, with minimal jargon.
- Practical usefulness, as well as theoretical purity.
- Helping you think more clearly and insightfully about each client.
Who should attend:
This course is suitable for:
- CBT therapists and practitioners wanting to extend their work with complex or entrenched difficulties.
- Mental health nurses, psychologists, counsellors, and psychotherapists.
- Clinicians working with trauma, personality disorder, chronic depression, self-harm, or relational difficulties.
- Practitioners interested in attachment-informed and compassion-focused approaches.
No prior training in Schema Therapy is required.
What you’ll take away:
By the end of the course, you will:
- Have a clear conceptual map of Schema Therapy.
- Understand how schemas and modes operate in everyday clinical work.
- Feel more confident working with clients who feel "hard to shift".
- Have practical ideas you can integrate immediately into assessment, formulation, and intervention.
Format:
- Delivered in APT’s clear, engaging, and practical style.
- Richly illustrated with clinical examples.
- Suitable as a standalone introduction or as preparation for further Schema Therapy training.
Booking is easy...
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Quick Links
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy ❯
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy ❯
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy ❯
Live Feedback Ratings.
Every delegate rates our courses for presentation and relevance and the averages below update automatically as each new course runs.
These live results also power APT’s acclaimed Accreditation System — so widely valued because it is evidence-based, drawing directly on the real-time ratings of professionals who have completed the training.
Face-to-Face*
Presentation:
Relevance:
* Feedback taken from the last 10 runnings of this course (each course has around 15 people attending).
If the course has run less than the stated number of times, the percentage score will be based on the number of times the course has been completed.
Reviews.
APT prides itself on the feedback we receive about our courses. Below are just some of the great comments the Schema Therapy Essentials course has received.
“The delivery of the training was excellent. I will not hesitate to recommend the course to friends and another organisation.”
“The course was well planned and executed. The presenter delivered the material with confidence, skill and humour. I was completely engaged the whole time and enjoyed the combination of information/education and interactive practice ... One of the best presentations I have been on for a long time.”
