Schema therapy works with the early life patterns — schemas and modes — that drive long-standing relationship, self-worth and self-sabotage problems. It blends CBT, attachment, gestalt and limited reparenting.
What Schema helps with
- Personality patterns
- Chronic relationship problems
- Childhood emotional neglect
- Self-sabotage
- Treatment-resistant depression
- Complex trauma
How Schema works
- 1Identify your early maladaptive schemas (abandonment, defectiveness, mistrust, emotional deprivation, etc.).
- 2Map the modes you switch into — vulnerable child, punitive parent, detached protector, healthy adult.
- 3Use imagery rescripting and chair work to heal the original emotional need.
- 4Strengthen the Healthy Adult mode until it can lead under stress.
Core techniques
- Schema and mode mapping
- Imagery rescripting
- Chair work
- Limited reparenting
- Empathic confrontation
- Behavioural pattern-breaking
Schema FAQs
How is schema therapy different from CBT?
CBT works on current thoughts and behaviours. Schema therapy goes deeper — into the early life experiences and unmet needs that wired those thoughts in. It is usually longer and more relational than standard CBT.
Is schema therapy only for personality disorders?
It was developed for chronic, treatment-resistant cases, but it is now widely used for anyone with long-standing relationship patterns or self-defeating cycles that brief therapies have not shifted.
Start Schema today — three ways
- · Free 24×7 AI Psychologist — practise Schema techniques anonymously, in 100+ languages.
- · Schema Mastery in 30 Days — for clinicians, counsellors and trainees, with AI mock-client sessions and a capstone certificate.
- · Book Dr. Nitnem Singh Sodhi for an online or in-person consult at Apollo Clinics, Lucknow / Gorakhpur.