Bättre kartor för livsorienteringen

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

The present paper deals with cognitive therapy and its efficacy (low cost/high benefit) for personality-disordered patients. Persons exhibiting sudden shifts from one mood state to another (borderline-personality) benefit from schema-focused cognitive therapy, where early maladaptive schemas comprising, among others, unconditional beliefs about one's self in relation to the environment, are addressed. Even if the present-day problems often seem to stem from earlier traumas we find that certain schemas have developed. The schemas are caused by ongoing patterns of everyday environment-provoked, noxious experience leading to the patient's great suffering in the form of a vicious circle of maladaptive functioning. In a stepwise escalating interval therapy, pain-causing maladaptive functioning maintenance is identified, retold, reframed, and reformulated. These procedures instigate new adaptive ways of functioning and the patient develops effective coping strategies.