Schema Maintenance – Vicious Cycles
This worksheet helps clients identify and understand the vicious cycles that maintain their early maladaptive schemas (EMS).
Schema Maintenance – Vicious Cycles
Schemas are negative themes or patterns that repeat throughout your life. People develop schemas when their core emotional needs are not met as children, like the need for love or protection.
Because schemas are painful, we do our best to cope with them. When a schema is triggered, you might respond by:
- Surrendering. You accept it and believe it’s true.
- Escaping. You try to avoid it.
- Counter-attacking. You act as if the opposite is true.
Unfortunately, these coping responses can make it harder for you to meet your emotional needs and tend to strengthen schemas in the long run.
The Schema Maintenance – Vicious Cycles worksheet will help you explore what keeps your schemas going and how to break these unhelpful patterns.
Overview
Formulation is a key component of schema therapy. Helping clients recognize how their EMS are maintained and breaking the patterns that perpetuate them is an important task in therapy. This Schema Maintenance – Vicious Cycles worksheet offers a practical framework for exploring and addressing schema perpetuation. Therapists can use this formulation to identify self-defeating patterns that sustain clients’ EMS, explore the negative consequences of schema-driven coping responses, and develop strategies to break these cycles.
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