ABOUT SCHEMA THERAPY

Schema Therapy is an evidence-based therapy which is helpful for people stuck in persistent self-defeating patterns, and those navigating life stressors such as a relationship breakup.

What is Schema Therapy?

Schema Therapy draws principles and techniques from a range of therapies including CBT, Gestalt Therapy and Psychodynamic Therapy to form a holistic therapeutic approach that is particularly effective at resolving long-standing psychological problems.

Schema Therapy is based on the premise that we all have core emotional needs that must be met in a 'good enough' way through our childhood and teenage years. When these needs are not adequately met, belief systems or 'schemas' may develop. Often, we're not even conscious of our schemas but they impact how we think, feel and behave.

The goal of therapy isn't to eliminate schemas - instead, it's to learn how to be aware of and meet our own needs, so our schemas are less likely to be triggered and we can recover faster.

Is Schema Therapy right for me?

Schema Therapy may be helpful if you identify with any of the following:

You struggle with ongoing concerns such as low self-confidence or self-esteem, perfectionism, mistrust, anger, depression, anxiety, emotional regulation difficulties, interpersonal clashes, severe avoidance, disordered eating, or difficulties functioning in day to day life.

You are navigating a life stressor, and want to better understand why you are having such a strong emotional response and learn how to manage it.

You have a history of early trauma, emotional neglect or difficult family dynamics.

You want to build self-awareness, improve functioning in relationships, and attune more deeply to yourself.

You have had therapy before and have awareness of why you feel, think and behave in the way you do - but need a more active approach involving deeper psychological work to shift some of your patterns.

What are Schemas?

Schemas are ideas or beliefs which we develop in our early years, usually through a combination of our innate temperament (that is, the personality factors we're born with) combined with our experiences and our upbringing. Schemas may be formed in our very early years when we were still developing our language, and as such may be comprised of body sensations or emotions. When this reaction is triggered in us as adults, we may have a strong physical or emotional which might come as a shock or feel overwhelming.

We all have schemas, but they affect us in different ways. Some peoples schemas are active every day and have a huge impact on their lives. Other people's schemas might lie dormant, only to be activated when triggered by a life stressor such as an argument with a partner or being reprimanded by an authority figure at work.

Schemas are easiest to explain by using examples. Imagine that you’ve called a friend, but a day later they haven’t returned your call. How do you react? You might be quick to assume that they don’t care about you, causing you to feel sad or angry at them. You might think you’ve done something wrong, and spend a lot of time racking your brain about your last interaction while you get more and more anxious. Both of these situations are examples of different schemas being triggered.

There are 18 different schemas - click here to read about them.

Why do Schemas develop?

There are a few different reasons why schemas develop, the most common being that our core needs aren’t adequately met during our upbringing.

All children have core needs to do with being safe, expressing needs and emotions, developing our own sense of identity, having the opportunity to be spontaneous and play, and having appropriate boundaries and limits placed on their behaviour.

Sometimes, it's not possible for parents to meet these needs sufficiently. Or, a child's innate temperament (their personality) might clash with their parents' style of parenting, giving rise to schemas. An example of this is a very sensitive child who has an overly authoritarian parent and takes on the belief that they are somehow 'not good enough' or 'defective'.

Schemas might also develop if we have a traumatic experiences growing up, or if we take on some of our parents’ beliefs, fears and anxieties about the world. For example, if we have a parent who is very cautious and overprotective, we might take on the idea that the world is a dangerous place - causing the formation of a 'Vulnerability to Harm' schema.

What does Schema Therapy involve?

There are two main ways that Schema Therapy can be useful. If you're coming to therapy for a specific issue, we might focus on building awareness of your schemas, how they are triggered, and your habitual patterns of response. After this, we can do deeper work to heal these schemas and shift any ingrained patterns.

If you're someone who is struggling with more significant or long-term psychological challenges, we might work from a Schema Mode approach. This involves building awareness of the different modes or 'parts' of ourselves that might operate in daily . For example, we all have a part of us that is called the 'Vulnerable Child Mode'. This is the part that houses all the difficult emotions that we experienced in childhood, such as feeling scared or lonely. As we grow up, we all develop ways to cope, or survival strategies, to protect this vulnerable part of ourselves. Examples of these modes are giving in to other people to avoid confrontation or abandonment, detaching from emotions so we don't have to feel pain, self soothing with food, or being overly controlling or critical of others.

Click here to watch a video explaining how the mode approach works.

Interested in reading further? I recommend the book Reinventing your Life or downloading the pdf A Client's Guide to Schema Therapy.