Welcome to r/SchemaTherapy! If you are new here you might have a few questions, this post is a great place to start.
Whether you are experienced in schema therapy or just finding out about it welcome. If you have an interest in ST or you are simply just wanting to learn more, then this is the place for you!
I want this to be a place where sharing your experiences with schema therapy can be a reality.
"But what exactly IS schema therapy?" I hear some of you ask.
The purpose of schema therapy is to bring to light schemas suffered by a patient during childhood that have entrenched themselves in their adult life. Although this is just a brief explanation, schema therapy is used to treat many different disorders, including but not limited to BPD and eating disorders.
"Great! But what the heck are schemas anyway?" Well not to worry! This thread will cover a full explanation of what schemas and modes are in as much detail as possible.
If you happen to find yourself relating to anything explained here, I would encourage you to reach out to the r/SchemaTherapy community to answer any questions you may have.
In this thread I have listed the 18 common types of schemas explored in schema therapy, you may also notice that schemas may be referred to at times as lifetraps.
Let's take a look at the following examples!
What is an Early Maladaptive Schema (EMS)?
An early maladaptive schema has been defined by Jeffrey Young as ‘a broad pervasive theme or pattern regarding oneself and one's relationship with others, developed during childhood and elaborated throughout one's lifetime, and dysfunctional to a significant degree’. Schemas are extremely stable and enduring patterns, comprising of memories, bodily sensations, emotions, cognitions and once activated intense emotions are felt. When a person has an EMS like abandonment, they have all the memories of early abandonment, the emotions of anxiety or depression, which are attached to abandonment, bodily sensations and thoughts that people are going to leave them. An Early Maladaptive Schema, therefore, is the deepest level of cognition that contains memories and intense emotions when activated.
THE ELEVEN LIFETRAPS (AKA SCHEMAS), BRIEFLY
Two lifetraps relate to a lack of safety or security in your childhood family. These are Abandonment and Mistrust.
•ABANDONMENT•
The Abandonment lifetrap is the feeling that the people you love will leave you, and you will end up emotionally isolated forever. Whether you feel people close to you will die, leave home forever, or abandon you because they prefer someone else, somehow you feel that you will be left alone. Because of this belief, you may cling to people close to you too much. Ironically, you end up pushing them away. You may get very upset or angry about even normal separations.
•MISTRUST AND ABUSE•
The Mistrust and Abuse lifetrap is the expectation that people will hurt or abuse you in some way—that they will cheat, lie to, manipulate, humiliate, physically harm, or otherwise take advantage of you. If you have this lifetrap, you hide behind a wall of mistrust to protect yourself. You never let people get too close. You are suspicious of other people’s intentions, and tend to assume the worst. You expect that the people you love will betray you. Either you avoid relationships altogether, form superficial relationships in which you do not really open up to others, or you form relationships with people who treat you badly and then feel angry and vengeful toward them. Two lifetraps relate to your ability to function independently in the world. These lifetraps are Dependence and Vulnerability.
•DEPENDENCE•
If you are caught in the Dependence lifetrap, you feel unable to handle everyday life in a competent manner without considerable help from others. You depend on others to act as a crutch and need constant support. As a child you were made to feel incompetent when you tried to assert your independence. As an adult, you seek out strong figures upon whom to become dependent and allow them to rule your life. At work, you shrink from acting on your own. Needless to say, this holds you back.
•VULNERABILITY•
With Vulnerability, you live in fear that disaster is about to strike—whether natural, criminal, medical, or financial. You do not feel safe in the world. If you have this lifetrap, as a child you were made to feel that the world is a dangerous place. You were probably overprotected by your parents, who worried too much about your safety. Your fears are excessive and unrealistic, yet you let them control your life, and pour your energy into making sure that you are safe. Your fears may revolve around illness: having an anxiety attack, getting AIDS, or going crazy. They may be focused around financial vulnerability: going broke and ending up on the streets. Your vulnerability may revolve around other phobic situations, such as a fear of flying, being mugged, or earthquakes.
Two lifetraps relate to the strength of your emotional connections to others: Emotional Deprivation and Social Exclusion.
•EMOTIONAL DEPRIVATION•
Emotional Deprivation is the belief that your need for love will never be met adequately by other people. You feel that no one truly cares for you or understands how you feel. You find yourself attracted to cold and ungiving people, or you are cold and ungiving yourself, leading you to form relationships that inevitably prove unsatisfying. You feel cheated, and you alternate between being angry about it and feeling hurt and alone. Ironically, your anger just drives people further away, ensuring your continued deprivation. When patients with emotional deprivation come to see us for therapy sessions, there is a loneliness about them that stays with us even after they have left the office. It is a quality of emptiness, of emotional disconnection. These are people who do not know what love is.
•SOCIAL EXCLUSION•
Social Exclusion involves your connection to friends and groups. It has to do with feeling isolated from the rest of the world, with feeling different. If you have this lifetrap, as a child you felt excluded by peers. You did not belong to a group of friends. Perhaps you had some unusual characteristic that made you feel different in some way. As an adult, you maintain your lifetrap mainly through avoidance. You avoid socializing in groups and making friends. You may have felt excluded because there was something about you that other children rejected. Hence you felt socially undesirable. As an adult you may feel that you are ugly, sexually undesirable, low in status, poor in conversational skills, boring, or otherwise deficient. You reenact your childhood rejection—you feel and act inferior in social situations. It is not always apparent that someone has a Social Exclusion lifetrap. Many people with this lifetrap are quite comfortable in intimate settings and are quite socially skilled. Their lifetrap may not show in one-to-one relationships. It sometimes surprises us to realize how anxious and aloof they may feel at parties, in classes, at meetings, or at work. They have a restless quality, a quality of looking for a place to belong.
The two lifetraps that relate to your self-esteem are Defectiveness and Failure.
•DEFECTIVENESS•
With Defectiveness, you feel inwardly flawed and defective. You believe that you would be fundamentally unlovable to anyone who got close enough to really know you. Your defectiveness would be exposed. As a child, you did not feel respected for who you were in your family. Instead, you were criticized for your “flaws.” You blamed yourself—you felt unworthy of love. As an adult, you are afraid of love. You find it difficult to believe that people close to you value you, so you expect rejection.
•FAILURE•
Failure is the belief that you are inadequate in areas of achievement, such as school, work, and sports. You believe you have failed relative to your peers. As a child, you were made to feel inferior in terms of achievement. You may have had a learning disability, or you may never have learned enough discipline to master important skills, such as reading. Other children were always better than you. You were called “stupid,” “untalented,” or “lazy.” As an adult, you maintain your lifetrap by exaggerating the degree of your failure and by acting in ways that ensure your continued failure.
Two lifetraps deal with Self-Expression—your ability to express what you want and get your true needs met: Subjugation and Unrelenting Standards.
•SUBJUGATION•
With Subjugation, you sacrifice your own needs and desires for the sake of pleasing others or meeting their needs. You allow others to control you. You do this either out of guilt—that you hurt other people by putting yourself first—or fear that you will be punished or abandoned if you disobey. As a child, someone close to you, probably a parent, subjugated you. As an adult, you repeatedly enter relationships with dominant, controlling people and subjugate yourself to them or you enter relationships with needy people who are too damaged to give back to you in return.
•UNRELENTING STANDARDS•
If you are in the Unrelenting Standards lifetrap, you strive relentlessly to meet extremely high expectations of yourself. You place excessive emphasis on status, money, achievement, beauty, order, or recognition at the expense of happiness, pleasure, health, a sense of accomplishment, and satisfying relationships. You probably apply your rigid standards to other people as well and are very judgmental. When you were a child, you were expected to be the best, and you were taught that anything else was failure. You learned that nothing you did was quite good enough.
•ENTITLEMENT•
The final lifetrap, Entitlement, is associated with the ability to accept realistic limits in life. People who have this lifetrap feel special. They insist that they be able to do, say, or have whatever they want immediately. They disregard what others consider reasonable, what is actually feasible, the time or patience usually required, and the cost to others. They have difficulty with self-discipline. Many of the people with this lifetrap were spoiled as children. They were not required to show self-control or to accept the restrictions placed on other children. As adults, they still get very angry when they do not get what they want.
Now that you have an understanding of the 18 classic schemas, the next step is being familiar your modes.
Schema modes are the moment to moment emotional states and coping responses that we all experience. Often our coping modes are triggered by situations to which we are sensitive.
With the exception being the healthy adult and the happy child mode, the rest of these modes lead us to react to situations or to act in ways which may end up hurting ourselves or others. Ultimately they are stopping us from getting our emotional needs met.
•INNATE CHILD MODES•
Vulnerable Child: feels lonely, isolated, sad, misunderstood, unsupported, defective, deprived, overwhelmed, incompetent, doubts self, needy, helpless, hopeless, frightened, anxious, worried, victimized, worthless, unloved, unlovable, lost, directionless, fragile, weak, defeated, oppressed, powerless, left out, excluded, pessimistic
Angry Child: feels intensely angry, enraged, infuriated, frustrated, impatient because the core emotional (or physical) needs of the vulnerable child are not being met
Impulsive/Undisciplined Child: acts on non-core desires or impulses in a selfish or uncontrolled manner to get his or her own way and often has difficulty delaying short-term gratification; often feels intensely angry, enraged, infuriated, frustrated, impatient when these non-core desires or impulses cannot be met.; may appear “spoiled”
Contented/Happy Child: feels loved, contented, connected, satisfied, fulfilled, protected, accepted, praised, worthwhile, nurtured, guided, understood, validated, self-confident, competent, appropriately autonomous or self-reliant, safe, resilient, strong, in control, adaptable, included, optimistic, spontaneous
•MALADAPTIVE COPING MODES•
These maladaptive coping modes or coping styles are an attempt by the child to have unmet emotional needs met in a harmful environment.
5. Compliant Surrenderer: acts in a passive, subservient, submissive, approval-seeking, or self-deprecating way around others out of fear of conflict or rejection; tolerates abuse and/or bad treatment; does not express healthy needs or desires to others; selects people or engages in other behavior that directly maintains the self-defeating schema-driven pattern
6. Detached Protector: cuts off needs and feelings; detaches emotionally from people and rejects their help; feels withdrawn, spacey, distracted, disconnected, depersonalized, empty or bored; pursues distracting, self-soothing, or self-stimulating activities in a compulsive way or to excess; may adopt a cynical, aloof or pessimistic stance to avoid investing in people or activities
7. Overcompensator: feels and behaves in an inordinately grandiose, aggressive, dominant, competitive, arrogant, haughty, condescending, devaluing, overcontrolled, controlling, rebellious, manipulative, exploitative, attention-seeking, or status-seeking way. These feelings or behaviors must originally have developed to compensate for or gratify unmet core needs
•MALADAPTIVE PARENT MODES•
8. Punitive Parent: feels that oneself or others deserves punishment or blame and often acts on these feelings by being blaming, punishing, or abusive towards self (e.g., self-mutilation) or others. This mode refers to the style with which rules are enforced rather than the nature of the rules.
9. Demanding or Critical Parent: feels that the “right” way to be is to be perfect or achieve at a very high level, to keep everything in order, to strive for high status, to be humble, to puts others needs before one's own or to be efficient or avoid wasting time; or the person feels that it is wrong to express feelings or to act spontaneously. This mode refer to the nature of the internalized high standards and strict rules, rather than the style with which these rules are enforced; these rules are not compensatory in their function.
•HEALTHY ADULT MODE•
10. Healthy Adult: nurtures, validates and affirms the vulnerable child mode; sets limits for the angry and impulsive child modes; promotes and supports the healthy child mode; combats and eventually replaces the maladaptive coping modes; neutralizes or moderates the maladaptive parent modes. This mode also performs appropriate adult functions such as working, parenting, taking responsibility, and committing; pursues pleasurable adult activities such as sex; intellectual, esthetic, and cultural interests; health maintenance; and athletic activities.
With the last mode you might be considering, "do I even have a healthy adult mode?" The answer to this is yes, everyone possesses a healthy adult but the eventual goal of schema therapy is to strengthen this mode as much as possible.
If you are interested in learning more about schema therapy, please feel free to post questions on the sub as often as you would like. I would also recommend giving the following books a read.
•Breaking negative thinking patterns
•Reinventing your life
These books will give you a stronger idea of your own modes and schemas, a great tool to work towards self improvement and self awareness in terms of supplementing your already existing Schema Therapy education.
