Therapy That Can Help You Take The Step Forward
Discovering Schema Therapy: Your Guide to Emotional Healing
Schema Therapy offers a profound approach to addressing emotional and relational challenges. It is especially adept at navigating intricate, persistent issues or those that tend to resurface over time. This therapy delves into your personal history, ongoing challenges, and your usual reactions to stress, highlighting that many of our struggles stem from ineffective coping methods. Within the therapeutic process, you’ll gain insight into unproductive behavioral patterns and receive guidance on fulfilling your emotional needs constructively.
By adopting healthier coping techniques, you can alleviate emotional distress and phase out detrimental behaviors. Schema Therapy is versatile, catering to a broad spectrum of emotional, behavioral, and relational challenges. Many gravitate towards this therapy as it empowers them to understand their inner workings and hurdles better. Ultimately, the aim of Schema Therapy is to alleviate your distressing symptoms and elevate your overall well-being.
Tackling Life’s Challenges: What Schema Therapy Can Help With
Schema Therapy is a research-backed approach shown to adeptly address intricate mental health challenges like chronic depression, complex trauma, and borderline personality disorder. It’s particularly effective for addressing relational issues, ranging from feelings of insecurity and codependency to conflict, dominating behaviors, and barriers to intimacy. Additionally, this therapy offers solace to those grappling with feelings of isolation, emotional detachment, addictive tendencies, risky actions, a relentless pursuit of perfection, and harsh self-judgment, among other concerns.
Unveiling Schemas: The Building Blocks of our Emotions
A schema encapsulates specific thoughts, memories, and emotions around a central theme, like trust. Rooted in our earliest childhood memories, schemas evolve and expand throughout our lives, influenced by our experiences. As they mature, schemas shape how we perceive events, interpret others, and react in various situations. In cases where a child’s emotional needs consistently go unmet due to neglect or trauma, “maladaptive schemas” emerge. While these schemas might have once served as protective shields against emotional hurt, they often become counterproductive in adulthood, steering us toward emotional and relational problems.
Dr. Jeffrey Young, the architect behind Schema Therapy, categorized 18 such Maladaptive Schemas, detailed further in this article. Possessing even one of these schemas can disrupt both life and relationships. In therapy, clients gain insight into their own schemas, the emotions driving them, and strategies to fulfill these emotions healthily—ensuring a balance with others’ needs. Embracing healthier reactions and behaviors paves the way for enhanced mental wellness and more harmonious relationships.
The Invisible Lens: How Schemas Shape our Perceptions
Schemas can be likened to tinted glasses, subtly influencing our perception without us being fully aware. For instance, consider the “Defectiveness Schema.” Such a mindset often roots itself during prolonged periods of criticism or discouragement, perhaps stemming from inadequate parenting or peer rejection. In your adult years, when presented with feedback—especially on crucial matters—this schema springs to life. Guided by it, you might find yourself gravitating towards negative remarks, overlooking positive ones, or diminishing their significance. A mere offhand comment can evoke intense anxiety, compelling you to either internalize the shame, mask your imperfections, or strive for an unattainable perfection.
Your approach to managing distress is a pivotal component in Schema Therapy. More often than not, our coping mechanisms inadvertently reinforce these schemas, either through self-deprecation or by sidestepping situations that trigger them. Schema Therapy aims to excavate and disrupt these repetitive patterns, fostering healthier coping techniques. The result is a gradual dilution of the dominating schema.
Understanding Schema Modes: When Emotional Patterns Take Control
While most people harbor some form of maladaptive schemas, it’s the intensity of distress they trigger that truly matters. When these schemas are activated, individuals often slip into what’s known as a ‘Schema Mode’ — a distinct state of mind characterized by specific behaviors and emotions. It’s these intense reactions and behaviors in the Schema Mode that often prompt individuals to seek therapeutic help. Within this mode, individuals may experience episodes of vulnerability, feeling overwhelmingly helpless or emotionally exposed.
Some might respond to these feelings by becoming overly demanding or manipulative towards those they care about. Others might seek escape by resorting to substance abuse, indulging in unhealthy sexual practices, or excessively consuming media and games. Some might even defensively raise barriers of anger, pushing loved ones away. However, the silver lining to these distressing episodes is that they’re temporary, eventually giving way to a sense of normalcy.
In the therapeutic journey, individuals learn that their challenges are often rooted in how they handle these maladaptive schemas. Through therapy, they’re taught to tend to their emotional wounds, establish behavioral boundaries, interact justly with others, and shed layers of self-doubt. This transformative process paves the way for a life rich in purpose, encompassing fulfilling work, mindful parenting, a commitment to responsibilities, the pursuit of joy, and the formation of healthy, consensual bonds.
Love through the Lens of Schemas: A Couple’s Journey
In our personal relationships, the presence of schemas often becomes evident, as seen in this hypothetical scenario. Liam possesses what is known as a Self-Sacrifice Schema, compelling him to prioritize others constantly. Conversely, his fiancé, Sophia, is influenced by an Abandonment Schema, making her constantly wary of meaningful relationships ending prematurely.
Upon discovering that Liam is scheduled for a short business trip next month, Sophia’s Abandonment Schema comes into play. This manifests as an overwhelming anxiety about the future of their relationship. In response, she might become tearful and overly attached or, in a more aggressive display, vehemently demand that Liam cancels his trip.
Liam, in an effort to pacify Sophia, decides against the trip. However, internally, he harbors resentment. To an outsider, this might merely seem like a disagreement over work. But, in reality, it’s a collision of their schemas. Recognizing the underlying schemas in such disputes is paramount in therapy. Instead of superficial solutions (like always providing advance notice of trips, which might not always be feasible), therapy can address deeper needs, like their mutual desire for connection.
Identifying Your Unique Schemas: Which Patterns Resonate With You?
Below, you’ll find concise descriptions of the 18 maladaptive schemas, paired with examples illustrating three distinct coping styles: surrendering, avoiding, and overcompensating. These styles represent accepting the schema as truth, sidestepping the schema, or behaving as though the inverse of the schema holds true.
THE 18 MALADAPTIVE SCHEMAS
DISCONNECTION
Abandonment – fears that an important relationship will not last, either because the other person will disappear, leave, or no longer care about them. People might cope by staying with unreliable partners, avoiding intimate relationships, or reacting angrily to separations.
Mistrust – strong expectations that other people will mistreat, humiliate, or exploit them. People might cope by accepting untrustworthy partners, avoiding self-disclosure, or exploiting others who trust them.
Emotional Deprivation – a perception that love and support is not being received. People might cope by discouraging others from giving support, withdrawing from intimate encounters, or by making unrealistic demands that others meet their every emotional need.
Shame/Defectiveness – a feeling of inferiority, shame, and unworthiness, especially of others’ love, respect, and attention. There is intense sensitivity to criticism. People might cope by enduring criticism from partners and friends, avoiding sharing their personal flaws, or by appearing perfect and critical of others’ flaws.
Social Alienation – feeling so different from everyone else that they cannot find a group, event, or a “cause” in which to belong. People may cope by remaining on the outside of groups, spending all their time alone, or putting on a false persona in order to integrate.
IMPAIRED AUTONOMY
Dependency – feeling unable to manage daily decisions and life without the help and advice of others. People may cope by surrounding themselves with helpers, procrastinating, or refusing help from others when it would be beneficial.
Vulnerability to harm – a lingering fear that some kind of disaster (e.g. in finances or health) could occur unexpectedly to oneself, or someone close. People might cope by worrying, inconveniencing themselves and others in efforts to avoid catastrophe, or periodically engaging in reckless and dangerous behavior.
Enmeshment – a difficulty forming a separate identity, opinions, and life from significant others. People may cope by becoming overly involved with others’ affairs, avoiding people who strive for autonomy, or by engaging in excessive autonomy themselves.
Failure – feeling inferior to others, less talented, and likely to fail in some important area of life (career, sport, social life). People may cope by selecting jobs below their ability, avoiding difficult tasks and goals, or by striving for perfectionism.
OTHER-DIRECTED
Subjugation – feeling compelled to surrender control to others in order to avoid some negative reaction. People may cope by complying with dominant people, avoiding situations where people seek different things, or rebelling with passive-aggressive behaviors.
Self-sacrificing – voluntarily attending to the needs of others at the expense of one’s own needs. People might cope by completely ignoring their own needs for years, avoiding relationships, or refusing to do anything for others.
Approval-seeking – feeling compelled to gain the approval, attention, or acceptance of others at the expense of being true to one’s own identity. People might cope by drawing attention to accomplishments, avoiding people they admire, or purposely eliciting disapproval from people they admire.
IMPAIRED LIMITS
Entitlement – feeling deserving of special privileges and entitled to opinions, behavior, and possessions, regardless of the impact on others. People may cope by behaving selfishly, avoiding situations in which they will not excel, or by compensating with extravagant generosity.
Insufficient self-control – feeling unable to exercise self-control, to delay gratification, or resist impulses. People may cope by excessive eating, spending, drug-use, dropping out of school/work, or engaging in intense short-term projects.
HYPERVIGILANCE/INHIBITION
Negativity/Pessimism – feeling drawn to the negative and pessimistic aspects of life, such as loss, betrayal, mistakes, and guilt. People may cope by expecting and exaggerating negative events, developing low expectations, or by behaving in an overly optimistic manner.
Emotional Inhibition – feeling uncomfortable with spontaneous displays of affection, action, feelings, or communication. People may cope by being excessively rational, avoiding events that involve self-expression, or by behaving overly disinhibited (often with alcohol).
Unrelenting Standards – feeling under pressure to achieve and meet lofty goals at the expense of engaging in simple pleasures that do not further ambitions. People might cope by setting very high standards for themselves and others, procrastinating, or by producing work far below expectations.
Punitiveness – feeling little mercy, that all mistakes should be met with punishment. People may cope by behaving in a punitive and harsh manner, avoiding situations in which mistakes could occur, or by faking forgiveness while being inwardly angry.
If you are interested in learning more about schema therapy or learning more about your own schemas, please get in touch. All clients are given an opportunity to take the schema questionnaire, as well as other clinical assessments relevant to their needs.