Treatment Suggestions for the Emotional Deprivation Schema
1.Write a letter to the emotionally depriving parent(s) expressing the deprivation uncovered in therapy exercises. Do not send the letter but use it as a tool for expression.
2. Learn to challenge the emotional deprivation schema by finding and experiencing warm, empathic, and protective environments where you can get many of your emotional needs met.
3. Find and choose good quality partners and friends. Also, identify your own needs, and ask to have these needs met in appropriate ways.
4. Decrease an exaggerated sense that others are acting selfishly or depriving you. Do this by discriminating gradations of discrimination and then ask yourself what logical rational reason someone might have to act this way.
5. Find and choose nurturing partners and friends and actively seek intimacy.
6. Keep from responding to mild levels of deprivation with anger or self-questioning. Also, end withdrawing or isolating behavior when feeling neglected by someone.
7. Learn assertion skills and other methods of communication to evaluate others’ abilities to listen to you as well as to express your needs.
8. Identify times of emotional deprivation in childhood. Use EMDR to eliminate the negative feelings and self-perceptions created by emotional deprivation.