Schema Therapy for Children and Adolescents (ST-CA) has become a hot topic within Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and the world of psychotherapy in general. The approach has quickly gained popularity among clinicians and mental health services for its high success rates for difficult to treat children, adolescents and parents with more severe, chronic, entrenched difficulties who do not respond to first line approaches. This includes the significant proportion of children and adolescents who do not engage in CBT, or don't respond to CBT (or showed an initial response and then relapse).

Participants learn how to explain and investigate the client’s core needs, and what happens, when these needs get frustrated: usually, unpleasant feelings like sadness, anger, or fear pop up, that are often labelled as “negative emotions”. If the need frustrations go on, the “negative emotions” become “painful emotions”. Since no human wants to endure painful emotions, clients tend to build up protector modes such as the detached, dissociative, regressive, angry, self-soothing/-stimulating, hyperactive, somatizing, avoiding, or complaining protector modes. Although the activation of these protector modes is on one hand understandable (pain reduction), on the other hand these protector modes block the therapist to work out and finally meet the emotional needs of the client. The result is that the therapy process is often stuck, though the client is suffering a lot. 

The content of the seminar is a step-by-step plan that includes age-appropriate psycho-education and validation of the need for protection. The goal is the support and encouragement in the development of adequate and functional protector modes that better fit into the client’s world. Participants learn age-appropriate play therapeutic approaches (for children), but also metaphors and chair dialogues (for adolescents).