A Russian-language workbook for rehearsing schema therapy responses

A note for colleagues who practise or supervise in Russian: this workbook is in Russian and was written for Russian-speaking schema therapists. The MIST team produced it, Alexandra Yaltonskaya edited it, and Nauchny Mir published it in 2025 – 112 pages, ISBN 978-5-91522-574-8. It stands next to the Russian edition of Behary, Farrell, Vaz and Rousmaniere's Deliberate Practice in Schema Therapy (2023) as a separate, original text.

Lines written in Russian

The format is the familiar deliberate practice one. Short, tightly structured exercises are repeated until the skill runs on its own, worked through alone, step by step, across the core skills of the model. The section I would open first holds example therapist statements for the moment a client's mode activates, adapted for a Russian-speaking audience. MIST lists four authors – Darya Maryasova, Grigory Ovtsov, Alyona Lydina and Alexandra Koreneva – with Yaltonskaya as scientific supervisor.

Here is why that section matters to me. Schema therapy came into Russian consulting rooms through translated books, and the therapist's lines came with them. Limited reparenting lives in the exact words said to the Vulnerable Child or set against the Punitive Critic. A line built on English syntax and read out in Russian sounds like a quotation, and clients hear quotation as distance. Russian phrasing for these moments is a skill of its own, apart from knowing the model, and it is trained the way any skill is: by saying the line many times until it comes out in your own voice.

For a Russian-speaking clinician: take the mode-activation responses into peer pairs between supervisions, say them aloud, and rework any that do not sound like you before they reach a client.