Scheme Therapy: What It Is And How It Works

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In this article, I want to write an introductory guide to schema therapy, tell you what schemas are and how schema therapists work with them. I will illustrate the information with examples.

Scheme therapy is a modern integrative approach that includes elements of other psychotherapeutic approaches. It is one of the most explored approaches and has been empirically proven to be effective.

What are schemas

You've probably heard the phrase "we all come from childhood." Early experience shapes our beliefs about ourselves, the world, and the people around us. For example, if a child is often scolded, accused, told something like “you are nobody”, he may develop a so-called defectiveness scheme. But "schema" is not just cold, rational conviction.

A schema is a state that includes a complex of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, memories, and specific behaviors. For example, when a person is in a scheme of defectiveness, he may think that he is bad, no one, feel sadness, sadness or shame, experience physiological symptoms, such as chest pain, heaviness in the abdomen, he may recall failures, criticizing phrases of his parents. And he behaves in some way, for example, he becomes isolated in his grief, or vice versa - by clenching his teeth, he proves to everyone around that he is better.

Another example: if a child is often abandoned, left alone, he may develop a pattern of abandonment - instability of the relationship. In adulthood, such a person can react very painfully to any, even minor, signs that he is being abandoned. For example, someone doesn't answer a phone call. The caller gets thoughts that he was abandoned, he is not needed, he feels loneliness and sadness, he may be scared. And at the moment of activation of this scheme, he is, in fact, the same little child who was abandoned by his parents in childhood.

That is, despite the fact that schemes are formed mainly in childhood, they manifest themselves in the present: in relationships with other people, quarrels, divorces, seemingly insignificant situations. Circuits are very sensitive to starting situations (triggers) from the outside. An event that is insignificant from the point of view of another person can trigger a very strong emotional reaction in the owner of the scheme, because as a "key" it reminds of something very important, not necessarily conscious, from the past.

If in childhood a child learned that in order to be loved one must be good, quiet, interested in the mood of his parents, then he may develop a scheme of sacrifice - a tendency to ignore his own emotions, for the sake of others, in order to achieve their love or acceptance.

A total of 18 dysfunctional schemes have been described. Each person has his own sensitivity, each needs a different "volume" of negative experience for their formation.

Everyone handles schemas differently. There are three possible options:

- come to terms with the scheme - humility

- avoid schema - avoidance

- actively fight against the scheme - overcompensation

For example, a person with a scheme of abandonment can find a life partner who will periodically abandon him, be unstable in a relationship, cannot be relied on, and will not create a clearing of stable attachment - this is humility.

Avoiding any relationship so as not to feel abandoned - avoidance.

Example overcompensation - keep an eye on your companion all the time in order to negate the likelihood of being abandoned.

All this dysfunctional copings (a way to deal with negative emotions). Because in all of them the scheme is confirmed:

In the case of humility, a person constantly feels a sense of abandonment, in the case of avoidance, he will never find a relationship in which his schema would change.

Even in the case of overcompensation, whatever the relationship initially, out of fear of being abandoned, the owner of the scheme will most likely harass his companion with checks and calls and eventually he will be abandoned, which in turn will confirm the scheme.

That is, if we see such a super confident, at first glance, a narcissist, macho, it may be overcompensation, behind which the scheme of defectiveness is hidden.

What does the schema therapist do?

The scheme is a very deep emotional state, it is all-encompassing, when a person plunges into it, it is very difficult for him to get out of it. It is almost impossible to "reach out" to him with any rational arguments. If a person is in the scheme of negativism-pessimism, it is almost impossible for him to see a glimpse of something good. That is why a depressed person should not be told how beautiful this world is, because he hears in it only that you do not understand it.

At some point in my work in schema therapy, a metaphor was born that a schema is like a black hole in which everything disappears. Just talking is not enough to correct the schemes. In order to change the established scheme, energy is needed. A black hole cannot be bombarded with rational arguments. A person's experience is often shaped on a pre-verbal, emotional level. Therefore, schema therapy uses "emotional" techniques.

One of the most effective schema-therapy techniques is rescription - "rewriting" the situations of the past in which the schema was formed. Each scheme has its own history, it is formed as a result of the so-called developmental trauma - the constant dissatisfaction of some need of the child.

For example, the carrier of the incompetence scheme probably remembers situations when one of the parents said something like “your hands are crooked”, “you’re no use” or “you broke everything again”. In this case, in the technique of rescription, the client is offered to close his eyes, relax and tell the situation on behalf of his little one, as if it is happening here and now. At some point, the client's “adult self” interferes with the memory, it protects its “little self”, for example, explains that everyone makes mistakes and this is normal and puts in the place of the parent, takes care of itself in the past.

Recording techniques are very emotional, the client experiences what is happening in the imagination as if it were real. Our brain, of course, distinguishes between reality and imagination, but experiences emotions in imagination and reality in the same way. Thus, the client develops an experience that he did not have in childhood and that, in my opinion, it is more important to have a voice in his head that appreciates, accepts and supports him, which he has never heard. The client learns to take care of himself, to satisfy those needs that he lacked in the past, to form positive schemes in himself. Scheme therapy is a very warm method, it has a lot of emotions.

At the beginning of the therapy, a lot of work is done on the conceptualization of the available schemes, the client, together with the therapist, understands where his reactions, experiences in the present, in relationships with people come from, with which schemes they are connected and what experience in the past formed them. The client learns to determine the moment of activation of certain schemes. The goal of the therapy scheme is to increase the so-called “healthy adult self” of the client, so that he begins to react differently to situations that previously caused the activation of the schemes and acted in a different way. Thus, we limit the impact of dysfunctional patterns on a person's life.

Naturally, it is impossible to describe in one article all the variety of techniques and methods of the therapy scheme, I just formed your idea of this approach. To understand deeper - it is best to experience it personally.