Schema Therapy
About this training. Schema Therapy, created by Jeffrey Young, sets out to understand and treat the dysfunctional schemas laid down in childhood. Schemas emerge from the meeting of innate temperament, life experience, and the satisfaction — or repeated frustration — of basic emotional needs. Young names five such needs: attachment, autonomy, limits, emotional expression and spontaneity. When one or more go chronically unmet, up to 18 maladaptive schemas can take shape, clustered into thematic domains such as abandonment or impaired autonomy.
Schemas colour thought, emotion and behaviour — usually outside awareness — and express themselves through three coping styles: surrender (passively accepting the schema), avoidance (steering clear of situations that touch it) and overcompensation (acting against it). Protective as these strategies may look in the short run, over time they feed the schema and entrench it, which is exactly what makes change hard.
Mode work is the other pillar of the approach. Where schemas are enduring structures, modes are momentary emotional states or behavioural patterns. The child modes (vulnerable, angry, impulsive) matter especially, together with the healthy adult, whose strengthening allows the other modes to be regulated — and the happy child mode, seat of play, joy and spontaneity, which therapy seeks to reawaken.
The clinical work combines cognitive techniques (identifying and understanding schemas), emotional techniques (limited reparenting, controlled expression of anger) and behavioural interventions (rehearsing new, adaptive responses). Used together, these methods gradually weaken schemas and transform entrenched patterns, always with the healthy adult as the growing centre of gravity.
Schema Therapy thus offers a structured yet personalised route into complex clinical problems — personality disorders, trauma and chronic life patterns.
Educational objectives
- Grasp the founding principles and key concepts of Schema Therapy.
- Gain confidence with its techniques so as to deploy them effectively in clinical practice.
Training materials. The course consists of video modules on Schema Therapy; a 20-question multiple-choice test is available at the end.
Course outline
- Introduction to Schema Therapy — definition and origins of the approach according to Jeffrey Young.
- Foundations — the three ingredients of a schema: innate temperament, early experience, and the frustration or fulfilment of core emotional needs.
- The five core needs — attachment and belonging; autonomy, identity and competence; limits and self-control; emotional expression; spontaneity and play.
- The 18 maladaptive schemas and their domains — disconnection and rejection; impaired autonomy and performance; impaired limits; other-directedness; overvigilance and inhibition.
- Dysfunctional coping styles — surrender, avoidance, overcompensation.
- Modes and their role in therapy — the child modes (vulnerable, angry, impulsive, happy); the healthy adult as conductor; strategies for strengthening it.
- Techniques — cognitive (bringing schemas and modes into awareness), emotional (limited reparenting, controlled anger expression, imagery) and behavioural (learning fitting new responses).
- Clinical applications and effectiveness — personality disorders, trauma, persistent life patterns; the evidence base.
- Conclusion and outlook — the gains of Schema Therapy and the questions still open to research.
The instructor: Benoît Demonty, Psychologist. Psychologist, psychotherapist, trainer and supervisor; lecturer at the University of Mons-Hainaut.
How does it work? The course is available without time limit and consists of video modules you complete at your own pace. A 20-question multiple-choice test closes the course: with at least 70% correct answers you receive a certificate of completion, valid for your professional development or CV. If you do not pass, you may retake the test free of charge.
Who is it for? Psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, physicians, sex therapists, psychiatric nurses — and students of psychology, psychiatry and related disciplines.