COMBINING SCHEMA & EMDR

Schema Therapy and EMDR together form a powerful pairing that can deepen and strengthen therapeutic change.

Both Schema Therapy and EMDR access emotional experience and implicit memory via different pathways. Schema Therapy does this through imagery, chair work, and ‘reparenting’ via the therapeutic relationship. EMDR accesses these experiences through bilateral stimulation and direct memory processing. Used together, they can reinforce and enhance one another.

Importantly, both therapies recognise that emotional healing requires more than cognitive insight alone. Lasting change often occurs through emotional and physiological processing — not simply through talking about problems intellectually.

Why incorporate Schema Therapy with EMDR?

For someone struggling with a single-incident adult trauma — such as PTSD symptoms following a car accident — EMDR has a strong evidence-base and can usually provide relatively rapid symptom relief.

However, this type of single-incident trauma does not represent the experience of most people attending therapy. Many people experience long-standing patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are more complex and deeply rooted. These patterns are often shaped by early relational experiences and become embedded beliefs about the self and others.

Research suggests that both Schema Therapy (particularly Imagery Rescripting) and EMDR can be effective in treating the effects of childhood trauma, while also reducing symptoms such as depression, dissociation, and trauma-related beliefs.

Blending the two approaches supercharges the process, by allowing clinicians access to synergistic and responsive ways of treating long-standing patterns and trauma.

How do the two approaches work together?

There is no single or fixed way to integrate Schema Therapy and EMDR. The approach depends on the client’s unique presentation, goals, emotional capacity, and preferences. Here are some of the common ways the two modalities can complement one another.

EMDR can be used for immediate symptom relief at the onset of therapy - to relieve any significant distress, by processing high-impact traumatic memories or unresolved PTSD symptoms.

Schema Therapy provides a framework for understanding how schemas and modes (or “parts”) operate within a person’s internal world. Building awareness of these different parts of self – their developmental origins, and how they continue to appear in present-day - can more effectively target EMDR processing and allow for more nuanced approaches for working with parts that interfere with emotional processing.

EMDR and Schema Therapy can be used interchangeably when processing (EMDR) or Imagery Rescripting (Schema Therapy) gets “stuck.” In EMDR, processing may “loop” if a client is experiencing strong emotions like shame or fear. In these moments, therapists may use brief interventions known as clinical interweaves — carefully timed prompts that help processing continue without overriding the client’s experience. In Imagery Rescripting, bilateral stimulation during key moments of rescripting can help move through moments of intense emotion and reinforce bottom-up change.

Schema Therapy helps consolidate longer-term change through Healthy Adult Mode development, limited reparenting, cognitive restructuring, behavioural change, and attention to unmet emotional needs.

Who may benefit from combining Schema Therapy and EMDR?

In practice, this integration can be useful anyone - however, people who relate to the following situations or experiences might particularly benefit:

in cases of complex trauma (where the trauma is relational and developmental rather than based on a single event)
when EMDR or other therapies have not fully resolved underlying issues
strong emotional avoidance or detachment that makes direct memory processing difficult
personality-level difficulties or entrenched interpersonal patterns
clients who feel they intellectually understand their difficulties but still feel emotionally “stuck”