Schema therapy is an evidence-based psychological approach that supports individuals to understand and change long-standing emotional patterns, coping responses, and relationship difficulties shaped by early experiences. Schema therapy goes beyond insight alone, using experiential techniques and the therapeutic relationship to support deeper, longer-lasting change.

Schema Therapy for Individuals

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What is Schema Therapy

Schema Therapy is an evidence-based approach that helps uncover the deeper patterns that sit beneath distress, dissatisfaction, and unhelpful cycles of behaviour. Rather than just treating symptoms, Schema Therapy works at the root—addressing unmet emotional needs and long-standing patterns that can leave people feeling stuck or unfulfilled.

Many people come to Schema Therapy after trying approaches like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) or solution-focused therapy. They may have made progress but still find themselves repeating similar patterns—especially in relationships, work, or times of stress—and are looking for something deeper and more lasting.

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Schema Therapy may be a good fit if you:

•   Often feel disconnected, hurt, or disappointed in your relationships but aren’t sure why.
•   Find yourself reacting strongly to certain situations and later wondering why.
•   Know, logically, that a certain pattern isn’t helping—but find it incredibly hard to change.
•   Feel like you’re always striving to do the right thing or be “good enough,” but still feel fundamentally flawed.
•   Feel that you are “too much” or “not enough” in relationships, or find yourself either over-accommodating others or keeping them at arm's length.
•   Have had difficult early experiences or trauma that continue to shape how you see yourself or others.
•   Want to understand yourself more deeply and grow into a stronger, more grounded version of yourself.

More Information About Schema Therapy

The word schema comes from the Greek word for “form” or “pattern.” In psychology, schemas are deep mental structures or templates that guide how we interpret the world, ourselves, and others. They are formed early in life—often in childhood or adolescence—and are shaped by our experiences, particularly those involving our emotional needs.

Some schemas are helpful, but when certain needs go unmet (like the need for safety, connection, autonomy, or being valued), we can develop maladaptive schemas that continue into adulthood. These might lead us to believe, for example, that we are unlovable, defective, or that our needs will never be met.
While schemas are the underlying beliefs or themes, modes refer to the emotional and behavioural “states” we shift into in the moment—especially when our schemas are triggered. For example, you might find yourself shutting down in conflict (Detached Protector mode), reacting with intense emotion (Vulnerable Child mode), or becoming overly critical of yourself (Punitive Parent mode).

Understanding your modes can be deeply empowering. It allows you to pause, recognise what’s happening beneath the surface, and begin to respond in new, healthier ways.
Schema Therapy is an integrative approach. It combines aspects of CBT, attachment theory, emotion-focused therapy, and psychodynamic approaches. It is both structured and experiential, drawing on tools such as:
•   Emotion-focused techniques (like chair work or imagery rescripting) to heal painful experiences.
•   Cognitive techniques to help identify and challenge deeply held beliefs.
•   Behavioural strategies to build new, healthier patterns.
•   Therapeutic relationship as a secure base from which to explore unmet needs and strengthen the healthy adult self.
Schema therapy integrates cognitive and behavioural strategies with experiential, relational, and trauma-informed elements.
It shares a focus on thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. However, it goes deeper, targeting the lifelong patterns behind emotional struggles, and placing greater emphasis on understanding their experiences as a child, meeting unmet emotional needs, and building a healthy inner “Adult.”
Schema Therapy is typically considered a longer-term therapy because it involves working through a number of schemas and modes and understanding how they show up across different areas of life. This takes time, care, and often occurs in layers.

That said, many people do start to notice meaningful changes within the first 3–4 sessions, such as clearer insight, feeling less alone in their patterns, and gaining tools to manage triggers.Many people begin to notice helpful changes within the first few sessions, such as greater clarity about what is happening for them, feeling less alone with long-standing patterns, and learning practical ways to manage emotional triggers. Deeper change—such as building a stronger sense of stability, healing past emotional wounds, and developing new ways of relating to oneself and others—tends to take more time and ongoing commitment.

If you are seeking deeper, lasting change, I encourage you to view therapy as a long-term investment in your wellbeing. But this doesn’t mean you have to attend forever. Even short-term Schema Therapy can provide valuable insight and direction.

Life circumstances can sometimes bring new layers to the surface—especially during stress, transition, or new relationships. The good news is, once you understand your schemas and modes, you’ll be better equipped to handle these moments with awareness and self-compassion.
For those seeking therapy that honours their spiritual beliefs, Schema Therapy offers a framework that can integrate well with values reflected in many religious faiths, including Christian values. At its heart, Schema Therapy aims to strengthen the “Healthy Adult”—a mature, grounded, and compassionate self, capable of care, service, courage, and wise decision-making. This aligns with many spiritual principles, such as growth in character, truthfulness, and the call to love both self and others well.
Schema therapy doesn’t introduce new beliefs or impose ideas that contradict a person’s faith. Rather, it brings to the surface patterns and beliefs that are already present—often shaped by early life experiences, emotional memory, or repeated relational dynamics.

These beliefs often live in what’s called implicit memory—they may not be part of your conscious thoughts, but they influence how you feel, relate, and respond. Schema therapy helps make these patterns more conscious so they can be gently examined in light of your values, goals, and spiritual beliefs.

The aim is not to undermine your faith, but to offer a space where internal beliefs can be explored and, if needed, reshaped—especially if they are rooted in fear, unmet needs, or early pain.
✦ Example:
A person may genuinely believe that compassion and care for others are central to their faith. They may also value selflessness and service. However, through earlier experiences—perhaps in family, school, or church—they may have developed a schema like Self-Sacrifice or Subjugation, where they feel responsible for others’ emotions or needs to the point of burnout and resentment which is impacting on your life and relationships.

Some aspects of this schema may reflect values they want to hold onto, like kindness or responsibility. But other aspects—such as the belief that their own needs don’t matter or that setting boundaries is selfish—are not serving them well, especially if they lead to exhaustion, resentment, or a loss of joy in relationships.

Schema therapy supports the person in untangling what aligns with their faith and values, and what might be an internalised burden that no longer fits. It allows space to keep what is life-giving and release what is harmful.
Clients often find schema therapy to be more emotionally engaging than other forms of therapy. Alongside conversation, it may include gentle experiential techniques such as guided imagery to revisit and reshape difficult memories in a safe way, or structured exercises such as chair work, that help different thoughts and feelings be expressed and understood. These approaches are used carefully and collaboratively to support healing of emotional wounds that may have been overlooked or silenced over time.
This process involves revisiting traumatic and painful memories in a safe way, that helps the individual to better understand was experienced and needed at the time—such as protection, nurturance, or validation. This doesn’t change the facts of what happened, and the person is fully present and conscious throughout the experience. However, imagery rescripting helps shift how traumatic and painful memories are stored and experienced emotionally. Many clients find this technique deeply healing, especially if they’ve experienced early trauma or emotional neglect.
Chair work allows clients to externalise and interacts with different parts of themselves—for example, the vulnerable or wounded part, the inner critic, or the part that avoids or detaches. By bringing these internal dynamics into the open, clients can gain new understanding and strengthen the healthy adult self. It can be emotional, confronting, and powerful—all within a safe and supportive environment.

These methods are used with care, pacing, and consent. Clients are never pushed to do anything before they feel ready.
Yes. Schema Therapy was developed with complex and developmental trauma in mind. It provides a gentle but powerful framework for understanding how early experiences shaped your emotional life—and offers a path toward healing.
Schema Therapy can involve emotional depth, but it is always approached safely, collaboratively, and at your pace. Some sessions may feel lighter, focusing on building insight, reflection, or learning new strategies. Others may explore more vulnerable areas—particularly during techniques like imagery rescripting or when connecting with early emotional memories.
For many people, this may be the first time they’ve gently touched on certain experiences or emotions that were previously avoided or held beneath the surface. That doesn’t necessarily mean the work is overwhelming—many clients describe it not as "intense," but as relieving or validating, especially when difficult feelings are met with warmth and understanding.
You are never pushed into anything you’re not ready for. There is time to pause, check in, or simply sit with what’s coming up. Emotional depth is not forced—it’s supported.
Yes. For clients experiencing Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Schema Therapy can be a helpful part of treatment. I usually integrate Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)—a highly effective, evidence-based treatment for OCD—with Schema Therapy to address the deeper emotional drivers.

Many people with OCD experience underlying schemas around responsibility, imperfection, control, or fear of harm. These beliefs often develop early in life and may be reinforced by personal, relational, or even religious experiences. Schema Therapy helps to identify and shift these deeper patterns, supporting longer-term recovery—not just behaviour change.

This combined approach is especially helpful for people whose OCD symptoms are shaped by moral or spiritual concerns, perfectionism, or fear of doing harm to others.
Many people with OCD experience underlying schemas around responsibility, imperfection, control, or fear of harm. These beliefs often develop early in life and may be reinforced by personal, relational, or even religious experiences. Schema Therapy helps to identify and shift these deeper patterns, supporting longer-term recovery—not just behaviour change.

This combined approach is especially helpful for people whose OCD symptoms are shaped by moral or spiritual concerns, perfectionism, or fear of doing harm to others.
Schema therapy is my primary approach, as it provides a strong framework for understanding long-standing emotional and relational patterns. However, as I have training in a range of modalities as a psychologist, therapy is tailored to each individual or couple, and at times I integrate other evidence-based approaches when this is likely to be helpful.
For example, for some clients EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) may be offered to support trauma processing where appropriate. For couples, elements of the Gottman Method and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) may be incorporated to support communication, emotional connection, and relationship repair. For concerns such as OCD, phobias, or social anxiety, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) may be used alongside schema work to address avoidance and anxiety-driven patterns.
Any integration is done thoughtfully and collaboratively, with schema therapy remaining the guiding framework.

Schema Therapy helps you make sense of your feelings, reactions, and experiences, while developing a clearer understanding of how context has shaped them.

Key Components of Schema Therapy

Identify Early Maladaptive Schemas & Modes

This involves identifying long-standing emotional patterns and moment-to-moment coping responses that shape how you experience yourself, others, and relationships, particularly under stress.

Engage in Experiential Techniques

Experiential techniques help access and work with emotions and memories linked to these patterns, supporting deeper change through approaches such as imagery and chair work rather than insight alone.

Reality Testing and Cognitive Restructuring

This step focuses on examining and gently challenging schema-driven beliefs, helping develop more balanced, compassionate, and realistic ways of understanding yourself and your experiences.

Limited Reparenting and Building Healthier Patterns

Through a supportive therapeutic relationship and practical strategies, unmet emotional needs are addressed while new, healthier ways of relating, coping, and setting boundaries are developed over time.

Why Schema Therapy is my Primary Modality

Schema Therapy my primary therapeutic modality, which offers a well-researched, integrative framework that helps make sense of complex emotional and relational patterns shaped by early experiences, ongoing stress, and trauma. It provides both structure and flexibility, allowing therapy to be tailored to the individual while remaining grounded in evidence-based practice.

Why I find Schema Therapy so helpful

I find Schema Therapy particularly helpful because it offers a compassionate, structured way to understand why certain emotional patterns and relationship difficulties keep repeating, especially for people who have experienced long-standing stress, trauma, or complex relational histories. Rather than focusing only on symptoms, it works at a deeper level to help clients make sense of their experiences, build healthier coping patterns, and create meaningful, lasting change.

Who Schema Therapy can be helpful for

Schema Therapy can be especially beneficial for people who feel stuck in recurring patterns despite insight or previous therapy, including those experiencing chronic anxiety or low mood, relationship difficulties, effects of childhood or relational trauma, faith-related harm, or long-standing self-criticism and shame. It is also well suited to clients who want to understand themselves more deeply, strengthen emotional regulation, and develop healthier ways of relating to themselves and others over time.

Common Schema Therapy Modes (A Basic Overview)

In Schema Therapy, modes describe the emotional states or “parts of the self” that tend to show up in the moment — particularly under stress, in close relationships, or when old patterns are triggered. Most people move between different modes throughout the day, or in a short amount of time when they are exposed to a trigger (also known as mode cycles).

Rather than listing every possible mode, this overview offers a high-level snapshot of the main categories to help you recognise patterns that may feel familiar. In therapy, modes are often individualised in collaboration with clients, including using language or names that feel meaningful and relevant to their lived experience.

Why Understanding Modes Matters

Understanding modes helps explain why reactions can feel intense, sudden, or “out of character,” particularly in close relationships or high-stress situations. Rather than viewing these responses as personal failings, Schema Therapy understands them as meaningful patterns that once served a protective purpose.

Schema Therapy focuses on increasing awareness of modes, reducing the impact of unhelpful coping or critical states, and supporting the development of a strong, compassionate Healthy Adult.

Coping Modes

Coping modes develop as ways of managing or avoiding emotional pain. They often emerge automatically and can be difficult to recognise in the moment. While these modes may have been adaptive at an earlier time, they can limit emotional closeness, flexibility, and wellbeing over time.

Detached Protector
Emotional withdrawal, numbing, distraction, or shutting down to avoid overwhelm or emotional pain. This mode can create distance in relationships and reduce access to feelings and needs.

Compliant Surrenderer
Giving in, people-pleasing, or prioritising others’ needs to avoid conflict, rejection, or disapproval. Over time, this can lead to resentment, exhaustion, or a loss of self.

Overcompensator
Attempts to counter vulnerability through control, perfectionism, dominance, achievement, or self-reliance. This mode often masks underlying fear, shame, or insecurity.

Critical and Demanding critic Modes

These modes reflect internalised rules, expectations, and judgments that developed in response to early experiences of pressure, criticism, or conditional acceptance. While they are often intended to prevent failure, rejection, or harm, they can become harsh, inflexible, and emotionally costly over time.

Punitive Critic
An inner voice that attacks, shames, or blames, often reinforcing feelings of worthlessness or failure.

Demanding Critic
Internal pressure to meet high standards, be productive, or “do better,” often at the expense of rest, emotional needs, or self-care.

Together, these modes can create an internal environment that feels relentless or unsafe. Schema Therapy focuses on helping people recognise when these critical states are active, understand where they came from, and gradually reduce their influence.

Forensic Modes

Forensic modes may emerge in situations involving threat, power, conflict, or survival. These are understood as situational states rather than fixed traits and can occur in people with no involvement in forensic or legal systems.

Bully and Attack
Responding to perceived threat or vulnerability with aggression, intimidation, or attempts to dominate in order to regain a sense of control.

Predator
Emotional detachment combined with goal-focused behaviour, where empathy is temporarily switched off to achieve an outcome or avoid perceived danger.

Conning and Manipulative
Using charm, deception, or manipulation to protect oneself, maintain control, or avoid consequences.

Paranoid or Suspicious Mode
Heightened mistrust, hypervigilance, or readiness to perceive threat, often shaped by past experiences of betrayal, danger, or injustice.

Schema Therapy approaches forensic modes with curiosity and containment, focusing on understanding what activates them and strengthening alternative, healthier responses.

Vulnerable Modes

These modes reflect emotional needs, reactions, and developmental responses.

Vulnerable Child

Feelings such as sadness, fear, shame, loneliness, or helplessness. This mode often emerges when a person feels criticised, rejected, unsafe, or emotionally exposed.

Angry or Distressed Child

Emotional responses such as anger, frustration, or distress when needs feel ignored, boundaries are crossed, or a person feels treated unfairly.

Entitled Child

A state where emotional needs feel urgent and non-negotiable, leading to strong expectations that others should meet those needs immediately. This mode often develops when limits were inconsistent, or when entitlement functioned as protection against deeper vulnerability or deprivation.

Healthy Adult Mode

The Healthy Adult mode represents emotional balance, insight, and psychological resilience. It is the part of the self that can hold difficult feelings, reflect rather than react, and respond in ways that are aligned with values and long-term wellbeing.

The Healthy Adult can:

recognise and soothe vulnerable parts

set boundaries with critical or coping modes
tolerate emotional discomfort without acting impulsively
balance needs, responsibilities, and self-care
respond to others with empathy, firmness, and flexibility

The Healthy Adult can hold complexity — acknowledging pain while also recognising strengths, limits, and context. It allows space for rest, self-care, and enjoyment, alongside commitment and responsibility.

A central aim of Schema Therapy is to strengthen and stabilise the Healthy Adult, so it becomes more accessible in everyday life and especially during moments of stress or relational difficulty.

About Kylie

Hi, I’m Kylie Walls, a registered psychologist

My work is shaped by professional training, research, and experience across education, community, and private practice settings. I work with adults and couples experiencing a range of concerns, including anxiety, depression, trauma, OCD, stress, burnout, relationship and communication difficulties, and challenges related to identity, belonging, and life transitions.

A central focus of my work is supporting individuals and couples who experience long-standing or recurring patterns that affect emotional wellbeing and relationships. These patterns may involve self-criticism, emotional withdrawal, people-pleasing, fear of abandonment, emotional reactivity, anxiety associated with the family system, or repeated relationship difficulties. I primarily use schema therapy, an evidence-based approach designed to help people understand where these patterns developed and how to change them in meaningful and lasting ways.

I also use a schema therapy for couples approach to work with couples to understand and change unhelpful relational patterns, strengthen emotional connection, and process and recover from infidelity in a structured and supportive therapeutic space.

My approach is compassionate, structured, and ethically grounded, with careful attention to both individual experience and the relational dynamics that shape behaviour, emotions, and connection. Schema Therapy includes experiential, relational, and cognitive strategies to support healthier ways of relating to yourself and to others.

Learn More About Kylie here

Common Early Maladaptive Schemas

Disconnection & Rejection

Abandonment Schema
Fear that people will leave or can’t be trusted to stay emotionally present.
Mistrust/Abuse Schema
Expecting others to hurt, abuse, or take advantage of you.
Emotional Deprivation Schema
A sense that your emotional needs won’t be met by others.
Defectiveness/Shame Schema
Feeling flawed, not good enough, or unworthy of love.
Social Isolation/Alienation Schema
Feeling different from others or like you don’t belong.
Impaired Autonomy & Performance

Dependence/Incompetence Schema
Feeling incapable of handling daily responsibilities alone.
Vulnerability to Harm or Illness Schema
Fear that catastrophe (illness, accidents, etc.) is about to happen.
Enmeshment/Undeveloped Self Schema
Feeling too emotionally fused with others or unsure of who you are.
Failure Schema
Belief that you will fail or are fundamentally inadequate.
Over-vigilance & Inhibition

Negativity/Pessimism Schema
Focusing on the negative and expecting the worst.
Emotional Inhibition Schema
Suppressing emotions to avoid disapproval or upsetting others.
Unrelenting Standards/ Hypercriticalness Schema
Feeling you must meet high standards to avoid criticism.
Punitiveness Schema
Believing people should be harshly punished (including yourself) for mistakes.
Other-Directedness

Subjugation Schema
Surrendering control to others to avoid conflict or rejection.
Self-Sacrifice Schema
Putting others’ needs ahead of your own at your own expense.
Approval-Seeking/Recognition-Seeking Schema
Overly focused on gaining approval or status.
Impaired Limits

Entitlement/Grandiosity Schema
Believing you're special and don’t need to follow rules or consider others.
Insufficient Self-Control/Self-Discipline Schema
Difficulty tolerating frustration or delaying gratification.