Schema Therapy
Navigating turbulent waters

Schema Therapy is an approach developed by Dr. Jeffrey Young in the 1980s as a therapeutic response to severe personality disorders. Over the years, research has shown that this approach is also highly effective in treating people without personality disorders who suffer from a range of life problems and symptoms. In short, this approach is trauma- and unmet-needs-based — we could call it a "therapy of unmet needs." In this approach, we view various symptoms as arising from attempts to dampen the pain created by emotional unmet needs, both conscious and unconscious. In fact, an experience of unmet need that is intense enough is experienced as traumatic, and we respond to it with a mini-flashback — a flashback that includes the original emotions experienced in the event (but not the sights and sounds associated with it). That is, when we encounter a present-day reality that is perceived as somehow similar to the original unmet need, it serves as a trigger for the surfacing of overwhelming emotions of pain, fear, and shame. In order not to fully experience them, we choose a variety of ways — addictions, emotional disconnection, rage outbursts, obsession, denial, suspicion, idealization of the self or the other, dependency, depression, self-harm, self-sacrifice, and many more. For example — if I was not loved in my childhood, I might today choose excessive clinging to my partner, or alternatively avoidance of romantic relationships or avoidance of romance within relationships; I might become addicted to food or sink into depression — but the source is the same "pit" that opened up, rising within me again and again.

Schema Therapy charts a path for us, and we attempt to work in reverse — from the symptom to the unmet need that ignited it, and then to treat the unmet need itself. In effect, we revive the unmet need in a controlled way during the therapy session, and then attach to it a corrective experience that also takes place during therapy. This is not solely about insight into the source of the unmet need, but about an attempt to experience during therapy both the emotional pain and the remedy. For this reason, Schema Therapy belongs to a family of therapeutic approaches called "experiential therapies." This family also includes EFT, AEDP, and others.

In the lectures on this website, you will be able to hear both about Schema Therapy itself and about the integration of its ideas and techniques with ideas and techniques from other experiential approaches, as well as with the ideas of the great psychoanalytic writers.