Understanding schemas and schema therapy

0:02 A listener production. Welcome to another solo episode of Crappy to Happy this week. I have had a listener send me a voice message, but I really wanted to respond to Remember, you too can send me a voice message. If there's anything you want me to talk about on these solo episodes, just send me a voice message on my Instagram page cast Done Underscore XO. If you're not on Instagram, you can just record a voice memo on your phone and you can email it to Hello atkastdone dot com. Here's that listener question right now, Hi. Cas, I'm really interested in learning more about schemers. I've heard a lot about them lately, but I don't really understand what they are or how they can help us.

0:48 Also interested in understanding how psychologists use them to help their patients. If you could do an episode on schemers, that would be great. Thanks. Schemers this is one of my favorite favorite topics, much like attachment theories, so if you didn't listen to my solo episode about attachment, then you might want to revisit that one as well. Schemers, I think are very similar to attachment theory, but probably go a little deeper than attachment theory. When I say similar, I mean in the sense that Schemer theory when it was developed, was all about how our early experiences lead us to creating particular mental frameworks which can then persist throughout our life, and they can impact so much of how we experience life and relationships, our thoughts, feelings, our emotions, and I think it is really really helpful to have an understanding of schemers. And while we all don't need to go off and have schema therapy and all of that, like, I think just in terms of how they contribute to our understanding of ourselves, which can then help us to have more self acceptance and self compassion, then it can be really useful to give some consideration to schemers and the role that they play, particularly in relationships as well.

2:09 So it was Jeffrey Young was a psychologist who developed Schemer theory back in the nineteen eighties. I think nineteen ninety might have been when something was first published about Schemer theory, and Jeffrey Young was treating people with kind of personality disorders significant ingrained patterns of behavior, unhelpful obviously maladaptive patterns of behavior, and he found that CBT Surprise Surprise wasn't necessarily cutting it when it came to treating those issues, So he was looking for something deeper, something that really got to the core of what was going on for these people. So essentially what the theory is, and I will just say up front two, I devoted a whole chapter to this in my most recent book, Crappy to Happy Love who You're With, which is not a book about how to have a happier intimate relationship or improve your marriage. It is actually about how you can have healthy relationships with everybody in your life, family, friends, colleagues, how you can resolve conflict better, set healthy boundaries, how you can end relationships well. Recommend that you grab a copy if you don't already have that. But a big part of what I have written about in that book is about how you can have a better understanding of yourself so that you know what you are bringing to relationships and taking responsibility for your own patterns rather than looking for other people to be making you happy or to meet your needs, or blaming other people for issues and problems in relationships. Anyway, that aside, I did devote a chapter to schema theory and understanding schemers very very briefly, because it's only a little book. So what Jeffrey Young

3:40 came up with was this idea that as children, we all have certain needs, and when those needs are not met obviously, our needs are typically met by our caregivers, by our parents, the adults responsible for us. When those needs aren't met effectively, then we develop these schemers to cope as a way of coping with that situation. A schema is essentially like a mental framework. It's more than just a core belief. If you've ever heard the term core beliefs, you know, the ideas that we sort of develop as little children based on our experiences and the ideas that we hold to be true with regard to ourselves, whether we are a smart person, whether we are lovable, whether we're funny about other people, about the world, whether people are trustworthy, whether people are kind or good, whether the world is a safe place or a dangerous place.

4:28 That's what core beliefs are. A schema is more than that. It's like this whole kind of mosaic. I guess it's this whole constructed experience which can include those thoughts definitely, but also emotions, images, body sensations. So it's a whole experience that we can kind of construct in relation to or in response to something that's going on in our life or a particular need not being met or get more into this later. So when those needs aren't met, we per schema to cope. It's a way of seeing the world, a way of experiencing the world. And then that schema, that mental framework. Again, we just typically go through life without ever really questioning it, and it becomes a pattern. It becomes a pattern in our life, a way that we respond to particular situations, an attitude or a mindset or a behavior pattern that we bring to situations based on those early experiences. And I'll go into detail about that now. So let me start with what those needs are that Jeffrey Young suggested all children have and which when not meant, could potentially result in the development of a maladaptive schema. Remember, anything can be helpful or unhelpful. Anything can be adaptive or maladaptive. Maladaptive just means unhelpful, like ultimately it doesn't really serve us. And so therefore down the track, we might want to look

5:58 at that and question it and see if we want to do something about that, about changing that. So I'm going to go to my trusty yellow book, my book three Crappy to Happy, Love who You're with, because that is where I have written down what those needs are, what those basic emotional needs are that we all have. Every child needs security, stability, affection, autonomy, healthy limits. So children need boundaries, self expression, and play like spontaneous play, and we need all of those in order to grow up as healthy, emotionally resilient adults. So the schema or the operating model basically that we develop if those needs aren't met, can kind of just lay dormant and be activated later on in life in a particular situation. For example, let me just give you a really basic example before I really go into detail with what the schemas are.

6:55 So let's say you've got an abandonment schema. Let's say you lost a parent, for example, through death or divorce or just absence for some reason, and you developed an abandonment schema, this feeling of being left alone, somebody that you love leaving you and not coming back, having that void that I mean, many people will relate to this, that void, that sense of somehow maybe as a little child feeling unloved, unworthy, or rejected, just lost without this important person in your life. If you have an abandonment schema, then later as an adult, it might be that every time your partner goes away for work, or even when they walk out the door to go to work for the day, you might notice that you're having this schema activated, like it gets triggered, and you might feel this constriction or feeling of panic or fear. Or it might be that when they're out with their friends that you feel like you worry that they're going to never come back.

8:03 Something's going to happen to them. And it's not just a belief, it's a whole experience of physical sensations, it's emotional experience that it could be patterns of behavior like calling, texting, and again, if you listen to the attachment episode, you might recognize this as an insecure attachment, like an anxious attachment. It might also play out as an avoidant attachment like shutting down and not getting too close to people because you don't want that schema activated. You don't want to be put through that painful experience again. So we'll talk about that in a minute as well. How you actually cope with these schemas. So that's a really common one.

8:44 It's a really one that a lot of people can relate to. That's kind of how a schemer gets developed and then how it gets activated later in life. So what are the eighteen schemers that Jeffrey Young came up with? And before I run through them, here's the really important thing to know. As you know, your brain, once it is set on a particular idea or a belief or a cognitive framework, it will work to maintain it. Your brain wants you to be safe. That's its only job. And what is safe for your brain is what is familiar, what it knows, a pattern of behavior or a pattern of being in the world that it recognizes. Oh, I know this situation, I know my place in this situation.

9:25 I know how I'm supposed to react in this situation. So this is what we'll continue to do so often in relationships, particularly if you find yourself constantly being drawn to the same kind of person or constantly playing the same role constantly for example, being a people pleaser, or subjugating your own needs, or getting involved with people who are emotionally unavailable, or putting yourself in a situation where you feel inferior to other people or superior to other people, then what's happening often is that you are playing out this pattern over and over because it is what you know and what you are familiar with. And even the most uncomfortable, painful situations are comfortable if they're familiar. Even if we don't like feeling lonely or sad or disappointed or rejected, if it's familiar, we will gravitate towards it and recreate it because it is what we know best, like I know my place, I know how this goes.

10:24 That is the tricky thing about schemers, and that's why often people have a lot of trouble changing them and finding themselves in these same patterns over and over and over again, because our brain is working to just keep taking us back into that same situation because it's familiar. So, having said that, let's talk about what the eighteen schemers are, the eighteen maladaptive schemers that Jeffrey Young came up with. Number one abandonment, Well, there you go. I already talked about that one. So abandonment or instability is basically the perceived instability or unreliability of other people, So other people aren't going to be available to me for support or connection. It involves a sense that significant others will not be available to continue providing support, connection protection, they'll be emotionally unstable or unpredictable. The second one is the mistrust and abuse Schemer goes without saying probably comes from early experiences of being abused, neglected, other people not being able to be trusted to care for you. You'll see some similarities in some overlaps with some of these too, by the way, So this is the expectation that other people will hurt, abuse, humiliate, cheat, lime, manipulate, take advantage in some way. It's the perception that the harm is intentional or the result of unjustified or extreme negligence.

11:46 It might include the sense that you are always the one being cheated, You're always getting the rough end of the deal, that other people are just out to get you. So if you've got that sort of thing playing, that could be a mistrust abuse schemer. The third one he identified was emotional deprivation, and this is the expectation that ones desire for a normal degree of emotional support will not be adequately mad. It could be the deprivation of nurturance, empathy, or protection. Again often probably similar to like an avoidant attachment, if your emotional needs aren't met and so therefore you kind of learn to shut down your emotional needs or you don't expect that other people are going to be there and be available for you. Defectiveness or shame is the fourth one. This is a feeling that as it says that you are defective, bad, unwanted, inferior, invalid, or that you would be unlovable to other people if they really knew you. That's obviously the definition of shame. So it can play out as kind of being hyper sensitive to criticism or rejection, being very self conscious, comparing yourself to other people, being insecure around and other people being feeling ashamed, just feeling ashamed of any sort of weakness or vulnerability. The fifth one is the social isolation or alienation schema, and this is the feeling that you are kind of separate from other people, that you're always on the outer. It can develop in childhood, maybe if you

13:16 come from a different religious or cultural background, if you always felt like you're on the outer, maybe from being bullied and stuff as well. But Essentially, it's this sense that you're always on the outer, that you don't really fit in to a crowd, You're not really part of the group, not really part of the community. The sixth one is dependence or incompetence, and it is the belief that you would be unable to handle everyday responsibilities in a competent manner. So you know, obviously this would happen if you were not given the opportunity to develop to develop independence as a child, if you had overly intrusive parents. Perhaps it could play out as a dependence incompetence schema.

13:59 I don't make good judgments, I can't take con difficult tasks, but don't make good decisions. I can't take care of myself. It presents as helplessness. Basically. The seventh is vulnerability to harm or illness. So this can happen if you have had health issues as a child, or if you've witnessed other people be struck down by health issues. It's an exaggerated fear that imminent catastrophe will strike at any time and that you'll be unable to prevent it. It can be a fear of medical catastrophe like having a heart attack, emotional catastrophe, natural disasters, you know, external events, unavoidable events that will result in disaster. The eighth is enmeshment, or an undeveloped sense of self. This comes from being too enmeshed in the life of somebody else, for example a parent.

14:49 So if a parent has been overly involved in your life and there's this real like perhaps they've relied too much on you as a child for their emotional needs to be met, and the child is given the opportunity to individuate, to separate and develop their own sense of self, then that can result in this schema of enmeshment, and that can play out in other adult relationships where almost like playing out is codependent relationships or heavily and mess relationships withere there's no sense of self. It's a belief that at least one or the other couldn't survive or be happy without the other, without the partner. Nine is failure, so a failure to achieve schema, which is as it says, it's this core belief and this schema that inevitably you'll fail or you'll be inadequate relative to other people. It can be a belief that you're stupid, and apt, untalented, ignorant.

15:40 It can result from childhood experiences where you are told that you're a failure, or you're stupid, or you're inept, or that you're constantly compared to somebody else and unfavorably. So these are the sorts of experiences that might result in the development of this kind of schema. Number ten is entitlement and grandiosity. This is the schema that says you're superior to other people, that you've got special rights, special privileges. Often it will result from parents who raise a child to believe that they are special and entitled. It often will look like narcissism in later life. This sense of superiority, this sense that the rules don't apply to you, can result in excessive competitiveness, domination of others, exerting power over others, rail roading your opinions onto other people, forcing other people into your point of view, controlling other people's behavior. Number eleven insufficient self control or self discipline.

16:41 This is the pervasive difficulty or refusal to exercise sufficient self control and frustration tolerance to achieve goals. It can present as basically an inability to tolerate discomfort, so therefore avoiding anything that looks like responsibility, boity, stress, over exertion, confrontation at the expanse of living a full life. As we know, for avoiding all the difficult, painful things, then we often are not living fully. So that is number eleven. Number twelve. Subjugation. This is the excessive surrendering of control to others because one feels coerced, usually to avoid anger, retaliation, or abandonment. So it's subjugating your own needs, subjugating your own emotions. It is excessive compliance. A hypersensitivity to feeling trapped often leads to a buildup of anger. Can look like passive aggressive behavior, uncontrolled outbursts of temper. Essentially, what it is is that I'm subjugating all of my own needs because that's what I believe I need to do to keep other people happy, because that's what I've learned as a child. But then this resentment bubbles under the surface.

18:00 It might be passive aggressive because I don't feel comfortable to have a direct confrontation. But I'll get passive aggressive. Sometimes it will be this explosion, this angry outburst that seems to come out of nowhere to other people because they're not seeing this resentment that's bubbling under the surface. They're just seeing this compliance and this going along. This people pleasing. Closely tied to subjugation is self sacrifice. That's number thirteen. That is an excessive focus on voluntarily meeting the needs of others at the expense of one's own gratification. Again, it's to prevent causing pain to others, to avoid feeling guilty because you'd feel selfish, or it's to maintain the connection with other people. It's often the result of an acute sensitivity to other people's pain, and it sometimes leads to a sense that one's own needs are not being adequately met and therefore resentment of those who are taken care of. And it does say here in Jeffrey Young's own notes that it can overlap with the concept of codependency.

19:12 This like needing to keep other people happy in order to feel happy. Number fourteen is approval seeking or recognition seeking, and this is an excessive emphasis on gaining approval recognition attention, on fitting in at the expense of developing a secure and true sense of yourself, So molding yourself to gain other people's approval, not expressing who you truly are. It's your sense of esteem being dependent primarily on the reactions of others rather than on your own natural inclinations. It can include an over emphasis on status, appearance, social acceptance, money, achievement, all as a means of gaining approval or validation or admiration at the cost of living authentically and living a life that is personally meaningful and satisfying. Number fifteen is a negativity or pessimism schema. This is this pervasive, lifelong focus on the negative aspects of life, on pain and death, loss, disappointment, guilt, resentment, just problems, problems, problems. We all know somebody who has there very negative, very pessimistic take on life, and this can be an ingrained pattern that's been there for a really long time. It can involve an exaggerated expectation that things will eventually go wrong, that ultimately things are going to fall apart, that I can't trust that things are going to turn out well, and so therefore it feels

20:42 safer and more comfortable to focus on the fact that it's probably all going to turn to shit. Potential negative outcomes are exaggerated. There's a strong negativity bias frequently experienced chronic worry, complaining, indecision, vigilance. Number sixteen is emotional inhibition, which is the excessive inhibition of any spontaneous action or feeling or communication. It's like a repressing your emotions, usually to avoid disapproval of others or feeling shame or losing control of your impulses. So it can be sexual inhibition. It can be inhibition of anger or frustration, or even joy.

21:28 It's really a difficulty expressing anything, difficulty expressing vulnerability, communicating freely, saying what you really think, showing your emotions. Number seventeen is an interesting one. I see this a bit unrelenting standards or hyper criticalness. That would be So it's the underlying belief that you must strive to meet very high internalized standards of behavior. So it's this internal idea of high levels of perfectionism, usually to avoid criticism, feelings of pressure, difficulty slowing down. Being very critical towards yourself and other people can involve impairment in pleasure or relaxation. Unable to relax, not able to feel a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction when you do achieve. It is inordinate attention to detail, it's maladaptive perfectionism. Obviously, perfectionism doesn't always have to be a bad thing. Lots of rigid rules, lots of shoulds, lots of expectations about how other people should behave and how you should behave, like what's the right thing to do?

22:38 Unrealistically high moral or ethical or religious standards for example, like really living life by the rule book and having very excessive, very exacting standards. And number eighteen. The last one is punitiveness, and that is the belief that people should be harshly punished for making mistakes. Not much mercy here. All justice involves a tendency to be angry, intolerant, punitive, impatient with other people and yourself who don't meet expectations or standards. It often involves a lot of difficulty for giving others for mistakes and for giving yourself for mistakes.

23:22 Very reluctant to consider extenuating circumstances, to give people the benefit of the doubt, No real allowance for human imperfection, no real empathy for other people's feelings, just punishment. So they are the eighteen maladaptive schemes that Jeffrey Young identified in his work. Maybe you're related to some of those. Maybe you can see some of those in the people around you. And like I said, this is really just about understanding that often these have developed in early life as a result of or in response to this is suation we find ourselves as children, and not just external circumstances.

24:04 There's obviously a mixture of temperament, like our natural personality and how it interacts with the world around us in the situation and the family that we find ourselves in the experiences that we have, and therefore we form these mental constructs. And like I said, they can often lay dormant, they're just there. There's almost become personality like you go through life believing that this is just how you are and natural fact. Often they've been developed as a result of these experiences, and then we don't necessarily question them, and then they get activated, they get triggered in certain situations. We find ourselves in a situation and long and behold upcomes the failure schema, the abandonment schema, the approval seeking schema, whatever it might be. And so until we have some understanding of what's going on, we can really just be at the mercy of them, because they run like the soft they're like attachment styles. They just run like the software of the computer. They're just the operating system, and they're really heavily influencing your responses and your reactions and the way you interpret events in life, the way you interpret situations, what you bring to relationships, so it can be really really useful to understand them. Where schemas get a little more complicated, this is the interesting thing I find is that it's not just that we automatically go with the schema. Like if I've got an abandonment schema

25:34 and I completely yielded to that, then I would always be putting myself into situations where I'm likely to be abandoned. And that is one way that schemas play out, is that we surrender to it. We just go with it. Like if I've got a failure schema and I'm just a failure, like I'd literally just fail at everything. I don't try it. I put myself forward for anything, and I just put myself in situations that continue to reinforce this view, this worldview, that I'm a failure, that I will never ever be good enough. That's what it means to yield or surrender to the schema. But that's not always what we do. Sometimes what we do is we overcompensate. So, for example, you might imagine that if I have an abandonment schema and I'm overcompensating or kind of trying to counteract or counterattack it so that it doesn't run my life, then I might become a very avoidant person. Instead of being the one who is overly anxious and needy and insecure all the time, constantly believing that you're going to leave me, maybe I'm the one who always leaves you.

26:41 Maybe I don't let myself get too close because I don't want to put myself in that situation. Maybe I become the opposite of that schema as a way of coping. If I have a failure schemer, maybe I push myself and push myself to AI as a way of squashing down that core feeling that I'm somehow a failure and inapt or unintelligent or unworthy. Maybe I push myself to achieve, to try to compensate or counteract for my failure schema, to prove to everybody, including myself, that I'm actually not a failure. But deep down, that's actually what's driving it.

27:23 Similarly with the you know I talked about the grandiosity the entitlement schema, which can look like narcissism. What about if there's a defectiveness or a shame schema that we're compensating over compensating for by behaving more superior to other people. So it's not necessarily as simple as we just play out the same pattern. Sometimes what we do is we actually flip it and we do the opposite. So it's actually not always that easy to spot. And I think this is where if you're into this sort of thing, or if you know that something's going on with you and needs you know, you want to work on, it can be really useful to see somebody who's a therapist, a trained psychologist or psychiatrist, or somebody who's got some experience and understanding of schemers, because they can help you kind of dig in an unpack what's really going on or what's really driving that behavior. Similarly, the third strategy is escape escape, So there's basically surrender, there's compensate or counterattack, and then there's escape, and that is where we just avoid any situation that might activate our schema, or we actually just do a lot of those emotional avoidance kind of behaviors, whether that is numbing out, using drugs or alcohol, maybe just avoiding relationships altogether, avoiding situations that might trigger us into feeling like we are somehow defective or a failure.

28:47 Like so, escape and avoidance is the third kind of strategy that sometimes people use. I hope that that has been somewhat helpful. As I said, I think it's just a really useful it's a tool. It's a useful way of thinking about humans and why we do what we do, and what drives us and where we might be tripping ourselves up in life and in relationships. I don't think we all necessarily need to dig right into schemers and understand scheme theory and scheme of therapy, And honestly, schemo therapy gets way more complicated than that. I've given you the very basics. I did do some training in it quite a few years ago, but I don't consider myself to be like a very effective scheme of therapist or anything like that. I really only understand the basics of it.

29:34 But it can be useful if you're interested in that sort of thing and want to develop a little self understanding or you recognize yourself in any of those schemers, then I hope that that can be helpful for you. I guess the only thing that we haven't talked about is what you do about it. And obviously, similar to attachment styles, right when you recognize that something is playing out and that it's being triggered by an early experience, this is not how you want to be in life or in relationships, then it really is a case of understanding, developing that psychological insight, the awareness, and then having tools to help you to stop in that moment and pause and choose to do something different. And doing something different will feel deeply uncomfortable if this is the way you've done things your whole life, and especially in relationships, deeply uncomfortable to flip that on its head and to do something different and to train yourself into a different way of being. And that's why it could be really helpful to have the support of a therapist or a coach or somebody who can work with you to gradually recognize and start to take more steps to change some of these patterns if you really recognize that they're not serving you.

30:50 If you'd like to know any more about that, obviously, hit me up and I will do my best to answer any more questions that you have. Certainly you should rush out and buy my yellow book, Crappy to Happy Love who You're With, which talks about attachment styles and schemers, as well as lots of other good, useful tips for having healthier relationships with yourself and with other people. Until next time, give us a five star rating or review. If you enjoy the show, send me your questions and I'll catch you next week on another episode of Crapy to Happy listener