What Are Core Needs in Schema Therapy – and Why Are They So Important?

Image by Tani Eisenstein

What do you think you needed as a child? Things like food, water, air, of course. A warm, dry house to live in. Clean clothes, the chance to go to school. Good friends to play with, caring teachers to learn from, perhaps a pet. But what else? What were the key developmental ingredients that meant you would thrive as an infant, child, adolescent and then adult?

Well, schema therapy sees these core developmental needs as fundamentally important. Schema therapists like me spend a great deal of time educating our clients about them and finding out which needs were met and which unmet when they were young. The primary focus of schema therapy – and one of the key healing ingredients in this or any other type of therapy – is helping people get those needs met as adults.

We believe there are five core needs, that every child has in any culture and any period of history – we all need the same basic things to flourish as humans:

1. Love and a secure attachment

2. Safety and protection

3. To be valued as a unique human being

4. The ability to play, be spontaneous and express our emotions freely

5. Boundaries and learning right from wrong

In my opinion, the most important of these needs (after safety and protection, of course, without which we would not survive long as vulnerable little people) is the first – love and a secure attachment. But what does that mean, in concrete terms? Let me explain…

Secure vs insecure attachment

What do we mean by secure attachment? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a photo of exactly what secure attachment looks and feels like. Both grandma and granddaughter have an attachment system in their brain (one of the most powerful systems we have, up there with the threat system in terms of neural dominance), which kicked in the moment that lucky little girl was born.

As a tiny infant she attached, probably first to mum, then dad, then siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, school friends, and so on, encompassing every key relationship throughout her life. And grandma attached to her, from the moment she first held that wonderful little bundle in her arms, sang her songs, whispered loving words, promised to cherish her forever.

I say ‘lucky’ because all of this love, warmth, safety and cherishing would help this girl feel securely attached and so develop a secure attachment style, which would stay fairly constant throughout her life – and help her have a series of close, nourishing relationships as an adult.

When attachment goes wrong

Sadly, most of my clients did not have this experience with their key attachment figures (mum, dad, other close family members). Perhaps mum was cold and unloving, not able to form a close bond with her child. Maybe dad was drinking heavily, so his moods and behaviour were too erratic to feel consistent and safe. Sometimes we are not the favoured or best-loved child, so we feel that keenly throughout our early life, on the outside looking in to the warm, loving relationships we crave.

If any of these experiences sound familiar, you may have an insecure attachment style, which is usually either anxious (being worried about people leaving or rejecting you, so clinging on too tightly in relationships) or avoidant (dreading intimacy, so avoiding commitment or long-term relationships and keeping people at arm’s length). Our attachment styles generally stay consistent throughout life, unless we do something to change them.

How to get your needs met now

As I am always saying in these posts and my webinars and workshops, it is never too much and never too late to heal. And that includes your attachment style, as well as any other needs that were unmet for you as a child. For example, research shows that people with an insecure attachment style become more secure, if they have a long-term, loving relationship with a partner who is securely attached. That’s why finding a caring, supportive partner is one of the most healing things we can do.

I would also suggest finding a skilled, trauma-informed therapist to help identify which needs were not met for you as a child, then help you get them met now. Some of this needs-meeting will be done by the therapist (especially if it’s an attachment-based model, like schema therapy) and some will involve learning new ways of thinking and behaving with other key people in your life – partners, family members, friends, colleagues…

Other models, such as CBT, compassion-focused therapy or internal family systems, place greater emphasis on transforming painful thoughts and feelings, as well as calming your nervous system; or on ‘internal attachment’ – helping you attach to and care for the wounded inner child whose needs did not get met when you were growing up.

The most important takeaway from this post is that you are not ‘needy’ (a word I particularly dislike), however much you might struggle in relationships and your day-to-day life. Having needs is a normal, healthy thing – it’s just problematic if those needs were not met when you were young. But getting them met now is both crucial and entirely doable, with the right help and support.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

Healing the Wounds of Childhood Emotional Neglect

Image by Kelly Sikkema

Sometimes, when I’m working with people struggling with problems like chronic anxiety, depression or disordered eating, it’s hard to figure out where these problems came from. They describe reasonably happy families, with loving parents who did their best to raise happy, confident children. And sometimes what we figure out together is that there were ‘small misses’ – subtle issues with their parents’ attunement to that little boy or girl that led to lifelong problems.

Of course, sometimes these misses were not small and there was a deep lack of love, care, support, safety or any of the other things children need to meet their core developmental needs. And whether this lack of what you needed in childhood was small or large, what we are talking about is emotional neglect – an incredibly common problem that’s a key factor in many mental-health difficulties.

What is emotional neglect?

In schema therapy, we see this neglect showing up as an Emotional Deprivation schema. This means that, as a child, you were deprived of some of the key emotional nutrients you needed in order to thrive. And of all the schemas, this can be one of the hardest to detect in people, because it’s primarily about the absence of good things, rather than the presence of bad things. Let me give you an example.

*Jean comes to see me and in her first session, explains that she has a lifelong history of depression. She also recognises that she has low self-esteem, feeling bad about herself across the board and lacking confidence at work, as a mum, in her friendships and in terms of her body image.

When I ask about Jean’s childhood, she paints a rosy picture. ‘Oh, family life was great,’ she tells me. ‘I had such a happy childhood. Mum and dad were good to us, we had a nice house and everything we needed.’

But as our sessions unfold, it becomes clear that things were not quite so great for Jean. She was a shy, sensitive child who needed lots of love, warmth, support and encouragement from her parents. Although her dad was a kind man, he was also a workaholic, spending long hours at the office. Jean recalls barely seeing him throughout her childhood. ‘He was always at work,’ she says. ‘But I understood, because he paid for our house and all the lovely things we had as kids.’

Sadly, these ‘things’ were how her mother showed love to her children. She was quite a cold person, who was not good with emotion, so showed her kids love in practical ways – cooking meals, making sure school uniforms were pressed and clean, giving them toys for birthdays and Christmas.

She never told her kids that she loved them, never hugged them and scolded them when they were scared or hurt. She just couldn’t handle what she called ‘weak’ emotions like fear or sadness. So Jean didn’t get any of the love and hugs that she needed – an absence of good things, which didn’t help build her self-esteem and left her vulnerable to the depression that has plagued Jean throughout her life.

Healing the wounds of childhood

If Jean’s story resonates with you, it’s possible that you might have experienced emotional neglect as a child. And if so, what can you do to make sure this neglect doesn’t cast a shadow over the rest of your life? First, as I often say in these posts, knowledge is power. Start by reading up on neglect, in my blog and others like it.

You may also like Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, by Jonice Webb. It’s an excellent self-help book that explains exactly what this form of neglect is, the different styles of parenting that can cause it (from the well-meaning but unattuned to the destructive and traumatising), and offers lots of helpful techniques and strategies to help build your sense of self-worth, confidence and resilience as an adult.

Second, if your wounds are really deep, you might need some help from a mental-health professional like me. Schema therapy is really effective for problems like neglect, but lots of other approaches will also help, like CBT, internal family systems or compassion-focused therapy. All of these approaches will help you identify painful, self-limiting beliefs and behaviours that maintain the sense of being unlikable, unlovable or not enough in some way.

Finally, remember that experiencing neglect as a child was categorically not your fault. You didn’t choose your family, or whatever issues they had that didn’t allow them to give you all the love, support and affection that you needed. So whatever problems that neglect caused in later life are not your fault either. You were just unlucky, got dealt a bad hand as a child, so you’re now struggling with the consequences.

But enough is enough. Don’t let the neglect you experienced define you as a person. Don’t let it define your life. You deserve to be loved, valued and cherished as much as any other human on this planet. Make today the day that you commit to healing and happiness. I very much hope that you find both.

Warm wishes,

Dan

*All of the case studies on this blog are composites of actual people – I would never reveal any personal or identifying information about my clients.