I Keep Getting Stuck in the Same Place
Good Fit
- Readers who feel the same problems keep repeating in relationships and life and want to think about why
- Parents and parents-to-be: the book shows how childhood experiences resurface in adulthood
- Anyone who wants to meet schema therapy through a simply written introduction
Not a Fit
- Readers looking for a clinical, scientific, evidence-based psychology book: the explanations are at a popular level
- Anyone expecting a diagnosis and treatment plan: the book has suggestions for noticing a schema but no therapy
- People with severe childhood abuse and abandonment trauma as a sole source: the text touches on these subjects and in places refers readers to professional support
The book opens with a list of «your ideas about yourself»: «I find it hard to say no», «I sacrifice myself for others' needs», «I lack self-confidence», «I feel my life is controlled by others», «I feel a strange emptiness». The author calls these negative beliefs formed in childhood: our personality was shaped in the family environment from the womb, the unconscious recorded everything second by second; as a child could not judge, it believed what it was told. Sentences such as «skilful/unskilful, clever/stupid, men cheat, money is hard to earn, don't trust even your father» settle deep in the unconscious as belief-schemas.
Schemas are «cognitive structures that help us understand ourselves and our surroundings, carrying feeling and thought». The author presents the mind as «a very advanced computer whose manual we have not read»: without antivirus (blocking schemas) we cannot get the expected efficiency from it. Then he takes the question «what is the unconscious?» through the Masnavi's story of the elephant and six blind men: each holds a part of the elephant and gives a different description, there is no whole picture. The unconscious is Freud's «invisible part of the iceberg»; consciousness lies in the cortex, the unconscious in the subcortex, which works independently.
The «working principles of the unconscious» are given in ten points: it takes childhood experience as reference (a child afraid of a bespectacled loud uncle clings to her mother's neck on seeing a man in glasses), does everything for our safety, generalises from one or two experiences (a cat scratched — «all cats are harmful»), may meet unmet needs in unhealthy ways (comfort by eating), prefers the familiar option, tries to complete unfinished stories, learns through matching, focuses on solving problems, has a long-term memory capacity and has no concept of time. The last is useful in therapy: traumatic memories can be reprocessed.
In «When do schemas begin to form?» the author takes prenatal and perinatal psychology as examples: a pregnant woman's stress passes to the baby through cortisol and adrenaline; the «Bucharest Early Intervention Project» (Charles Nelson) finding abnormalities in the brains of orphanage children; the relation of early maladaptive schemas to depression, anxiety, social phobia and eating disorders. The style is plain and rich in examples; the weakness is that some claims (for example the unconscious working «like Google») are simplified and research citations are brief.
- The chapters introduce the schemas one by one, each ending with examples and exercises
- Abstract concepts are explained with everyday examples (computer, Google, stove, Merve)
- The signs of each schema are given in short lists
- The author addresses the reader directly and proposes individual exercises
The main popular book on schema therapy; the source the author refers to
A book on attachment styles and recurring patterns in relationships
A book explaining the effect of parent relationships in adulthood
At the end of the chapter the author defines «blocking schemas»: schemas are needed to survive and be protected from danger, but some lower quality of life, often trigger negative feelings such as worry, anger and sadness, and damage self-confidence and close relationships. Example: four-to-five-year-old Merve tells her father «when I grow up I will marry you», her father pushes her away, her mother says «how rude» and smacks her and sends her to her room. Merve feels guilt, and beliefs such as «hugging men is bad» and «I must suppress my feelings» may form — in adulthood leading to consequences such as avoiding relationships, sexual problems and clinging to a partner. The author says he will also write a different, informed-parent variant for the same family.
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