Stress and Adaptation Problems: Psychotherapeutic Support

In working with stress, we combine the depth of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy with the gentleness of schema therapy. Often, sudden shifts compel the psyche to split the world into an idealized, safe past and an entirely hostile present (splitting). We gradually explore this defense, helping you learn to tolerate diverse, often contradictory feelings regarding the new circumstances (tolerance of ambivalence). Through the way you establish contact with me directly during sessions (transference analysis), we can observe live exactly how you react to uncertainty: whether you freeze, anticipate criticism, or attempt to control everything totally.

Depending on how your psyche is structured, the targets of our work will differ. If the stress threatens the very sense of "who I am" and you experience internal emptiness (borderline personality organization, or BPO), we will work on gathering your different self-expressions into a stable, integrated whole (identity integration). If the difficulties are instead caused by an internal conflict between your desires and duty (neurotic personality structure), we will identify the obsolete emotional templates (maladaptive schemas) activated by the stress so that you can rely on yourself in the new reality.

Changes—even those we strived for—always demand colossal work from our psyche. When our familiar world collapses or transforms, we lose not just our old living conditions; we feel as if we are losing a part of ourselves that was connected to them. This process is accompanied by deep internal anxiety and a grief over how things used to be that is often invisible to others. The psyche attempts to protect itself from unbearable uncertainty by reverting to its earliest, most familiar ways of reacting, which may no longer work in the new reality.

In a state of acute stress and adaptation difficulties, the client's pain lies in a feeling of complete loss of control over their own life. What previously seemed understandable and stable becomes a source of threat. Instead of looking for quick tension-relief techniques, we explore why these specific new circumstances proved so intolerable for your internal world, what deep fears they awakened, and how your psyche is trying to cope with this reality.