Schema Therapy

The core of schema therapy involves collaborating with a therapist to explore and comprehend your "schemas," often known as early maladaptive schemas. These schemas represent patterns developed when emotional needs during childhood weren't adequately met. They persist throughout life, impacting coping mechanisms and behaviours if left unaddressed.

These schemas can significantly influence an individual's life and contribute to maladaptive coping strategies. Schema therapy aims to impart skills that ensure emotional needs are met in healthier ways, devoid of distress.

Understanding Early Maladaptive Schemas

The genesis of these schemas often stems from unmet emotional needs during childhood. These include safety, secure attachment, autonomy, emotional expression, playfulness, and suitable boundaries.

The Genesis of Schemas: Four Key Influences

Four types of negative experiences during upbringing contribute to the formation of schemas:

1. Unfulfilled needs, where children lack affection or other core emotional needs.
2. Traumatisation or victimisation, which includes experiences of abuse or trauma.
3. Overindulgence or lack of limits from parents, leading to overprotection or a lack of boundaries.
4. Selective identification and internalisation, absorbing parental attitudes or behaviours that result in developing schemas or coping methods.

The Power of Unaddressed Schemas

Schemas tend to take root during childhood and persist into adulthood, often resisting change. Left unmanaged, these schemas reinforce negative patterns through unhealthy interactions.

Once established, schemas unconsciously influence thoughts and actions, attempting to prevent emotional distress. However, the coping methods they create are frequently harmful or unhealthy.

There are 18 identified schemas:

1. Abandonment / Instability
2. Mistrust / Abuse
3. Emotional Deprivation
4. Defectiveness / Shame
5. Social Isolation / Alienation
6. Dependence / Incompetence
7. Vulnerability to Harm or Illness
8. Enmeshment / Undeveloped Self
9. Failure to Achieve
10. Entitlement / Grandiosity
11. Insufficient Self-Control / Self-Discipline
12. Subjugation
13. Self-Sacrifice
14. Approval-Seeking / Recognition-Seeking
15. Negativity / Pessimism
16. Emotional Inhibition
17. Unrelenting Standards / Hypercriticalness
18. Punitiveness

The Role of Coping Styles 

The reactions to these schemas are termed coping styles, which encompass thoughts, feelings, or behaviours employed to evade overwhelming emotions resulting from a particular schema.

Coping styles that were helpful in childhood can reinforce schemas in adulthood. These styles - surrender, avoidance, and overcompensation - can be influenced by temperament or learned from parental coping styles.

Your own coping style might evolve over time, yet the underlying schema remains constant. The therapy involves addressing these coping styles to heal and manage schemas.

Modes in Schema Therapy: Temporary Mindsets

Schema therapy introduces the concept of "modes," temporary mindsets that encompass both present emotional states and how they're managed. These modes can be adaptive or maladaptive.

The Therapeutic Journey

The therapeutic process involves identifying and healing schemas, addressing maladaptive coping styles hindering emotional needs, altering patterns of feelings and behaviours associated with schemas, learning healthier ways to meet emotional needs, and managing frustration when certain needs can't be met.

The therapy utilises various techniques, such as limited reparenting and psychodrama techniques like imagery re-scripting and empty chair dialogues, to facilitate healing and behavioural change.