What is a schema? This is a question I have been asked many times in the five years that I have been working as a schema therapist. And my answer usually starts like this… A schema is like a blueprint in your mind, to help you do things quickly and easily that you do a lot. So you probably have schemas for making tea, tying your shoelaces, riding a bike, driving a car, reading a book, and so on.

Think about it like this – if you go to make a cup of tea, you don’t have to thumb through your tea-making handbook every time. You just think, ‘Make tea,’ and you do. That’s how schemas work. And your brain forms many (probably thousands) of these schemas, because it’s always trying to save energy. Your brain uses a great deal of energy as it’s working hard to run your body/life all day – research shows that although it represents just 2% of your body weight, it accounts for 20% of your body’s energy use..

Each schema saves a little bit of energy, so all of these tea-making, shoelace-tying, bike-riding, car-driving, book-reading schemas are very helpful indeed.

Not all schemas are helpful

In the 1990s, Dr Jeffrey Young developed schema therapy – one of a number of new, ‘third wave’ cognitive therapies springing up around the world. Central to his model was the discovery that there are 18 schemas, which are not very helpful. In fact, these schemas can be really painful for us, causing a great deal of problems in our day-to-day lives.

Let’s illustrate this with the most common schema, which is the ‘core schema’ for virtually all of my clients (and the person writing this), Defectiveness. I always tell people that this is the ‘not good enough’ schema, because it’s the one that gets triggered when you have low self-esteem, lose confidence, think we are boring, stupid, weak, rubbish or any other harshly self-critical way of perceiving yourself.

This speaks to key concept number one: that once you have a schema, you will always have it (unless it’s healed), but it won’t always be active. Sometimes your schemas go dormant, which is like them going to sleep. Then something stressful or threatening happens and the schema gets triggered and wakes up. As schemas comprise cognitive, emotional and physiological elements, this means that your thinking can become distorted or otherwise unhelpful, you feel intense feelings like anger, anxiety or hurt, which show up in your body as a burning in your chest, knot in your stomach or a sinking, heavy feeling all over.

How schemas form

So how do these painful schemas develop? Take that Defectiveness schema – if this is one of yours, it probably developed when you were a child, often between the ages of four and six, which is when we start to get ‘cognitive’ as children. Maybe your older brother was way better at everything than you, so you started to think , ‘I’m rubbish at everything - what’s wrong with me?’ Or you had a harsh, critical parent who always told you that you were lazy, or stupid, or a waste of space.

Both through your thoughts about yourself and negative messages received from people around you, the schema started to form in your brain. And neuroscientists teach us that, ‘neurons that fire together, wire together,’ meaning if you think a certain thought 10,000 times, you develop a powerful neural network in your brain, to make thinking that thought easier/energy-saving. And then, 30 years later, you don’t even know it’s a thought, this is just a fundamental truth for you – that you’re lazy or stupid, or some other bad thing.

How schemas heal

I know, this can all seem a bit depressing. But the good news is that schemas can be healed. In fact, there is a whole model of psychotherapy – schema therapy – devoted to exactly that outcome! In my therapy practice, we heal people’s schemas in many ways – through our warm, safe, compassionate relationship; by rewriting a negative, self-critical life story to make it a much kinder, more compassionate (and truthful) story; using techniques like ‘imagery rescripting’ to process painful memories and so gradually weaken the schemas they would otherwise feed on a daily basis.

Helping people with their painful, life-limiting schemas is also one reason I founded Heal Your Trauma. And is one reason I am writing this post – because knowledge is power, so reading blogs like this, attending my webinars, or of course any other helpful/healing resources you come across will all contribute to healing your schemas, rewiring your brain, healing childhood trauma, or whatever words we use to describe it.

I hope that helps – and do watch this space for future posts on this topic.

Warm wishes,

Dan