Schemas and lifetraps: a self-check
Two ways in. Start with the 11 lifetraps: 11 short scenes, about 3 minutes, and answer 7 more afterward if you want all 18 schemas, keeping your answers. Or take all 18 scenes for Jeffrey Young's 18 schemas at once, about 5 minutes. For each scene you say how much it sounds like you lately. The result lists a few places to read first, opens with a short summary Conscious Living AI writes from your answers, and each pattern opens to how it can feel from the inside.
A place to start reading, not an assessment. It points to schemas worth reading about first. For a fuller picture, a psychologist or schema therapist can go through the pattern with you.
Our own scenes, written for this guide from the library's plain description of each pattern, and untested. There is one scene for each of the 18 schemas Jeffrey Young described. This is not the Young Schema Questionnaire, the published instrument, and it doesn't measure how strong a pattern is or whether you have it. One short scene for each pattern is very little, so the order is a rough guide to where to read first, and ties are common. A schema here is no diagnosis, and it doesn't say anyone is to blame.
- Abandonment: Expecting that the people you need will leave or can't be relied on.
- Mistrust and abuse: Expecting that others will hurt, use or deceive you.
- Emotional deprivation: Expecting that your need for warmth and understanding won't be met.
- Defectiveness and shame: Feeling flawed or unlovable underneath.
- Social isolation: Feeling different and as if you don't belong anywhere.
- Dependence: Doubting you can cope with everyday life without help.
- Vulnerability to harm: Fear that disaster, illness or loss could strike at any moment.
- Enmeshment: Being so close to someone that it's hard to know who you are apart from them.
- Failure: Expecting to fall short of other people.
- Entitlement: A sense of being owed special treatment and exceptions.
- Insufficient self-control: Trouble holding back impulses or staying with dull tasks.
- Subjugation: Giving in to others to keep the peace, and setting your own wants aside.
- Self-sacrifice: Putting others' needs first, with guilt at doing otherwise.
- Approval-seeking: A sense of worth that rises and falls with other people's approval.
- Negativity and pessimism: A steady focus on what is going wrong or could.
- Emotional inhibition: Holding feelings in to stay in control or avoid disapproval.
- Unrelenting standards: A rule that nothing short of excellent will do, with little rest.
- Punitiveness: The sense that mistakes, yours or others', deserve punishment.