All humans are born with core emotional needs that need to be met on a consistent enough basis for optimal well-being. Examples of these needs are unconditional love and acceptance, safety, autonomy, freedom to express thoughts and feelings, limits and boundaries and fun and spontaneity.
If these emotional needs are not consistently met in early life and adolescence, people go on to form unhelpful schemas. A schema is like an emotional learning or emotional wound, that forms a narrative about who you are, about relationships and about the world. A schema consists of thoughts, feelings, memories and body sensations. An example of a schema is the Defectiveness/Shame schema that might form when a person has repetitive experiences in childhood of being criticised, told they are not good enough or bullied. Whilst a schema is formed in the past, it can be triggered in the here and now by events that seem and feel the same as the past when the schema was formed. For example, a person at work giving you helpful feedback might trigger the Defectiveness schema.
Because it can feel very painful and overwhelming when schemas are triggered, people form ways of coping with the thoughts, sensations and emotions attached to schemas. In Schema Therapy we call these coping strategies or “coping modes’ because they are like parts of ourselves that come in to protect from the pain of schema activation. For example, a person could start dieting and losing weight, eventually developing an eating disorder, to overcompensate for feelings of shame and beliefs about not being good enough. Or a person might make themselves excessively busy to avoid the hurt of not feeling loved and emotionally supported by people. Coping modes usually help reduce pain at the beginning but often people need to keep using them more and more to avoid schema activation, and eventually the coping strategies become a problem and the reason someone attends therapy.
Schema Therapy aims to help you better understand which core emotional needs were not met consistently in your life, how they led to the development of your schemas and which coping modes you may be using to manage emotions and thoughts. We aim to find different ways of coping, heal the emotions and memories that led to the formation of the schema and eventually help you have your core emotional needs met in an adaptive way. The good thing about Schema Therapy is that it looks at the underlying issues driving your concerns and addresses these issues, meaning you do not need to work on one problem at a time. Another unique aspect of Schema Therapy is that is incorporates experiential strategies to bring about change, so that we are working with not only reframing unhelpful beliefs, but also making changes on an emotional level so that you also truly feel and believe the changes, not just intellectually know them in your head.
