Most of us have come across terms to describe mental health problems such as: depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic and so on.
BUT, what if the nature of your problems don’t fit so easily into one of these categories? You might even have had treatment from your GP or a counsellor for depression and /or anxiety but the treatment didn’t quite work for you and your problems continued such that you kept getting stuck in the same old familiar traps.
Meet Chelsea and Martin:
Chelsea:
Chelsea is in her mid 30s. She is the mother to a kindergarten aged girl and is married to her Highschool sweetheart. Chelsea’s husband is forging a name for himself in his career and has had great career success of late. Chelsea feels torn between investing in her own career development and being the best mother she can. It seems that she always feels guilty, when she is working she feels guilty that she is not spending time with her daughter and when she is spending time with her daughter she feels guilty that she is neglecting work. Added to this, Chelsea struggles to let her husband know what some of her needs are, in fact she feels that she shouldn’t impose her needs on her husband.
Chelsea has had therapy in the past. When she was at Uni she saw a Clinical Psychologist who did Cognitive Behaviour Therapy with her for depression. This helped to a point. Chelsea doesn’t have strong depressed mood these days but she has this lingering bad feeling in the background of her life. She feels that something isn’t quite right with her even thought her GP has said that she doesn’t have “Clinical Depression” or “Anxiety”.
Martin:
Martin is in his mid 40s. He was full of potential during his youth both academically and with sports, but he always felt that he didn’t quite fit in with his peers and his “potential” never actualized into success. At work he keeps his head down to meet the expectations of him and to not drawn any unwanted attention. He is pretty sure that a few of his colleagues don’t like him and gossip about him behind his back. Martin hasn’t married or had children and this has caused him to become more at a loose end on the weekends because pretty much everyone in his small group of friends have partnered and have children and family activities occupy their time. It’s not that Martin has been short of girlfriends, he has had many of those. But, Martin is starting to see that many of the girlfriends he has had have been what he would call “unstable” and “moody”. Martin has recently met a girl that he likes, she seems to be less self-focused and reactive than the others, but as the months tick by Martin is getting scared that he might do something to cause his girlfriend to end the relationship. To save himself the pain of being rejected Martin ends the relationship before he believes she has a chance to do what he anticipates she will. Martin isn’t sure if he needs to see a Psychologist. He has done some research on “mental health” problems and while he has been a “struggler” in life he wouldn’t exactly say he has “mental illness”.
Do the experiences of Chelsea or Martin resonate with you? It may be that the nature of your problems are in the form of one (or some) of the following traps:
It might be that you just can’t seem to find the right life partner or when you do find a partner the relationship turns bad. Maybe anger just erupts from you without warning and this causes problems, or you just feel angry all the time at yourself and /or others? It might be that for a long time you have felt cut off from others or different from others (a weirdo, misfit, broken in some sort of way or just different to others). Maybe your self-esteem is fragile and you frequently get hurt and feel small in response to words and gestures from others? It could be that for as long as you can remember you were a worrier and procrastinator, always fearful that something terrible might happen. Maybe you have always felt a little bit sad or empty? Do you drive yourself super hard and strive to achieve excellence to the point of not being able to stop until you are sick or have burnout? Is it that drinking too much alcohol or being excessive with other drugs causes things to come unhinged for you? Is your relationship with food tricky territory? It might be that you have strong impulses to eat more than is good for you or that you struggle to eat as much as you need.
Jeffrey Young, one of the initial developers of Schema Therapy, calls the above lifetraps. Lifetraps are when we keep getting caught in the same snare (or snares) throughout life, even when we have engaged in treatment for mental health issues or have made other dedicated efforts to address our “issues”. Lifetraps of this nature occur when there is a complex childhood history lurking behind the scenes. You might have been the child victim of sexual abuse, domestic violence or cruel acts pretreated by an adult or another child(ren). It might also be that it wasn’t so much that bad things were done to you but that there was simply not enough of the right sort of care and attention directed toward you. It might be that you were supported in particular ways (for instance afforded education and an expensive school) but that there were great expectations of you. Or, it might be that you were at the receiving end of bullying by peers or you were not adequately integrated into your school community.
Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko in the book Reinventing Your Life (1993) define a lifetrap as
“… a pattern that starts in childhood and reverberates throughout life. It begins with something that was done to us by our families or by other children. We were abandoned, criticized, overprotected, abused, excluded, or deprived – we were damaged in some sort of way. Eventually the lifetrap becomes part of us. Long after we leave the home we grew up in, we continue to create situations in which we are mistreated, ignored, put down, or controlled and in which we fail to reach our most desired goals.”
Schema Therapy is a needs based therapy and is based upon the premise that all humans at any point along the lifespan have at least 5 fundamental emotional needs. These are as follows:
- Attachment and close bonding such that one feels emotionally safe and secure.
- Express oneself / one’s needs and to be understood.
- Develop competencies and autonomy.
- Operate within a context of appropriate boundaries regarding oneself and others.
- Adequate opportunity for spontaneity and playfulness.
When one grows up in an environment where there is a significant deficit regarding one or a number of these needs being met damage ensues. This damage may lead to one or a number of lifetraps or what we refer to in Schema Therapy as schemas.
A lifetap or schema may be thought of as a filter or interpretation that we apply to ourselves and our circumstances. Within the context of schema therapy this filter develops within our early experiences when fundamental emotional needs are not met. Within this dysfunctional context the lens made sense and may in fact have been helpful. The problem is that as we grow up we carry this filter forward with us and it no longer makes adequate sense and is not only not helpful but very unhelpful.
An illustration of how Schema Therapy understands schemas as lifetraps is made with the following visual illusion. When we look at the image below what colour do we see the coke can to be?
Most would agree that the can appears red. The coke can in actual fact in in black and white print. However, our mind, having been exposed to the brand coke many, many times has developed a coke “schema”. Our coke schema is triggered and the schema serves as a filter that actively imposes an interpretation on what actually is. So, a schema is in essence a mechanism by which our brains organize the complex array of information that it is exposed to moment to moment. Just as we have a “coke” schema we have a schema for “mother”, “surgeon”, “brother”, “teacher”, “good citizen” and so on.
In Schema Therapy, the focus is on situations where significantly unmet fundamental emotional needs in childhood cause us to develop schemas which we carry into adulthood that cause us psychological and interpersonal difficulties. Schema Therapy first of all identifies the unhelpful schemas one may have and then seeks to dismantle the unhelpful schemas for more helpful and constructive schemas for adult life.