The 18 Schemas: Understanding How They Impact Your Life
Schema Therapy describes 18 early maladaptive schemas: long-standing patterns involving beliefs, emotions, memories and expectations about ourselves and our relationships with other people.
Within the Schema Therapy model, these schemas are organised into five broad domains relating to emotional needs and early experiences.
A schema can influence how we interpret situations, what we expect from other people and how we respond when particular emotional themes are activated.
However, schemas are not psychiatric diagnoses or fixed personality types. Recognising yourself in one of the descriptions below does not mean that you definitively “have” that schema.
This guide explains all 18 schemas, with everyday examples of how they might appear.
If you are completely new to the model, you may prefer to begin with Philip’s introduction to Schema Therapy.
What Are Early Maladaptive Schemas?
Schema Therapy was developed by psychologist Jeffrey Young and colleagues.
The International Society of Schema Therapy describes early maladaptive schemas as broad, persistent themes concerning ourselves and our relationships with other people that develop early and can continue to be elaborated throughout life.
Within the model, schemas are understood as developing through an interaction between temperament and experiences, particularly where important emotional needs are repeatedly not met.
Once established, a schema may influence:
- what we notice
- how we interpret another person’s behaviour
- what we expect to happen
- how strongly we react emotionally
- the situations we approach or avoid
- the coping strategies we use
Schemas can remain relatively quiet until something happens that activates the particular theme.
The Five Schema Domains
The 18 schemas are grouped into five domains:
- Disconnection and Rejection
- Impaired Autonomy and Performance
- Impaired Limits
- Other-Directedness
- Overvigilance and Inhibition
Each domain groups together schemas concerned with broadly similar emotional needs and patterns.
1. Disconnection and Rejection
This domain concerns expectations that needs for safety, stability, care, empathy, acceptance or connection may not reliably be met.
1. Abandonment / Instability
This schema involves an expectation that important relationships will not remain reliably available.
Someone may be particularly sensitive to signs that another person is withdrawing or may fear that people they love will eventually leave.
Example: Your partner is unusually quiet one evening and you quickly become convinced that they are losing interest in the relationship.
2. Mistrust / Abuse
This schema involves an expectation that other people are likely to hurt, deceive, humiliate, exploit or take advantage of you.
It can make trust difficult even where there is little current evidence of danger.
Example: Somebody offers to help you and your immediate reaction is to wonder what they want in return.
3. Emotional Deprivation
This involves an expectation that important emotional needs will not be adequately met by other people.
Within Schema Therapy, this may involve needs for emotional support, understanding, affection or protection.
Example: Even within a caring relationship, you assume that nobody will really understand or support you when you are struggling.
4. Defectiveness / Shame
This schema involves a deeply established sense of being flawed, inferior, undesirable or somehow unworthy of love and acceptance.
Someone may fear that if other people really knew them, they would eventually reject them.
Example: Receiving criticism about one piece of work quickly turns into the belief, “This proves I’m fundamentally not good enough.”
5. Social Isolation / Alienation
This involves feeling fundamentally different from other people or believing that you do not belong.
The person may experience themselves as an outsider even when they are technically included.
Example: At a social gathering, you assume everyone else naturally fits in while you are somehow different from the group.
2. Impaired Autonomy and Performance
This domain concerns beliefs about being able to function independently, cope with everyday responsibilities and succeed.
6. Dependence / Incompetence
This schema involves believing that you cannot manage ordinary responsibilities adequately without significant help or reassurance from other people.
Example: You repeatedly ask someone else to make relatively ordinary decisions because you do not trust your own judgement.
7. Vulnerability to Harm or Illness
This involves an exaggerated expectation that serious illness, emotional catastrophe, financial disaster or some other major problem is likely to occur and that you will be unable to prevent it.
Example: A minor physical symptom rapidly leads to fears of serious illness despite reassurance or lack of evidence.
8. Enmeshment / Undeveloped Self
This schema involves excessive emotional involvement with one or more significant people to the extent that developing a separate sense of identity or independence becomes difficult.
Example: Making an important decision independently produces strong guilt because it differs from what your family expects.
9. Failure
This involves a persistent belief that you have failed, will fail or are fundamentally less capable than other people in areas such as education, work or achievement.
Example: You avoid applying for a new role because you assume other applicants will inevitably be more capable than you.
3. Impaired Limits
This domain concerns difficulties with realistic limits, responsibility, frustration tolerance and pursuing longer-term goals.
10. Entitlement / Grandiosity
This schema involves an expectation of special status, privileges or freedom from ordinary limits, sometimes alongside difficulty recognising the impact of behaviour on other people.
Example: Becoming disproportionately angry because normal rules or boundaries apply to you when you believe they should not.
The name of this schema can sound strongly judgemental. Within Schema Therapy it is intended as a formulation of a pattern rather than a moral judgement or diagnosis.
11. Insufficient Self-Control / Self-Discipline
This involves persistent difficulty tolerating frustration, regulating impulses or maintaining effort towards longer-term goals.
Example: You repeatedly abandon important tasks as soon as they become uncomfortable or boring, despite wanting the longer-term outcome.
Difficulties such as impulsivity and executive functioning can also arise for many reasons outside Schema Therapy, including neurodevelopmental conditions. A schema label should therefore not be used to explain behaviour automatically.
4. Other-Directedness
This domain involves an excessive focus on the needs, reactions or approval of other people at the expense of your own needs or preferences.
12. Subjugation
Subjugation involves excessively surrendering control to other people, commonly because asserting your own wishes feels likely to result in conflict, anger, retaliation or rejection.
This may involve suppressing your needs or your emotions.
Example: You continually agree with a partner even when you strongly disagree because saying what you really think feels unsafe.
13. Self-Sacrifice
This schema involves repeatedly meeting other people’s needs at significant cost to your own wellbeing.
The behaviour may be connected with guilt, responsibility or concern about causing distress to others.
Example: You regularly take on additional responsibilities for everyone else despite already being exhausted.
Helping and caring for other people are not themselves unhealthy. The issue within the schema model is the persistent pattern and the cost to the individual.
14. Approval-Seeking / Recognition-Seeking
This involves placing excessive importance on approval, recognition or acceptance from other people when evaluating your own worth.
Example: An achievement feels valuable only when other people praise you for it.
5. Overvigilance and Inhibition
This domain involves an excessive emphasis on suppressing feelings, avoiding mistakes, anticipating problems or meeting demanding internal standards.
15. Negativity / Pessimism
This schema involves persistently focusing on possible problems, mistakes, disappointments or negative outcomes while finding positive possibilities harder to trust.
Example: After receiving nine positive comments and one criticism, your attention remains almost entirely on the criticism.
16. Emotional Inhibition
This involves excessively restricting emotional expression, spontaneity or communication, often because expressing feelings is expected to result in shame, disapproval or loss of control.
Example: You are distressed but automatically tell everyone you are fine because showing vulnerability feels unacceptable.
17. Unrelenting Standards / Hypercriticalness
This schema involves feeling compelled to meet extremely demanding internal standards, often accompanied by pressure, self-criticism or difficulty relaxing.
It can appear as perfectionism, rigid expectations or a persistent belief that you should always be doing more.
Example: Completing something successfully provides little satisfaction because your attention immediately moves to how it could have been better.
18. Punitiveness
This involves believing that mistakes should be met with harsh consequences and finding it difficult to tolerate imperfection in yourself or other people.
Example: A relatively minor mistake produces intense self-criticism and the belief that you deserve to feel bad about it.
Do We Have Only One Schema?
No.
Within Schema Therapy, people may recognise several schemas to different degrees.
Some may be particularly influential while others rarely become activated.
Schemas can also interact.
For example, somebody with strong Defectiveness/Shame and Approval-Seeking patterns might work extremely hard to obtain reassurance from other people that they are good enough.
Another person with Abandonment and Self-Sacrifice patterns might repeatedly ignore their own needs because they fear that asserting themselves could threaten an important relationship.
The purpose of Schema Therapy is not simply to collect labels. It is to understand how these patterns operate together in the individual person’s life.
What Happens When a Schema Is Triggered?
A schema may remain relatively inactive until a situation touches its particular emotional theme.
For example, someone with an Abandonment schema may feel relatively secure until their partner does not reply to a message.
The situation may then trigger:
- a thought such as “They’re leaving me”
- fear or sadness
- physical tension
- an urge to seek reassurance
- memories or expectations connected with previous relationships
The intensity of the response may be greater than somebody would predict from the immediate event alone.
This is one of the reasons Schema Therapy examines recurring patterns rather than considering isolated thoughts in isolation.
How Do People Cope with Schemas?
The Schema Therapy model describes three broad coping styles.
Schema Surrender
The person responds as though the schema is true and behaves in ways that may maintain the pattern.
Someone expecting abandonment might repeatedly remain in unstable relationships.
Schema Avoidance
The person tries to avoid situations, thoughts or feelings that could activate the schema.
Someone fearing rejection might avoid close relationships entirely.
Schema Overcompensation
The person behaves in the opposite direction to the schema, often quite strongly.
Someone who internally feels inadequate might become intensely competitive or determined never to appear vulnerable.
These are broad therapeutic concepts rather than fixed categories. The same person can respond differently in different situations.
Schemas and Schema Modes
Schema Therapy also uses the concept of schema modes.
Where a schema describes a broader long-standing pattern, a mode describes the emotional state and coping responses that are particularly active at a given moment.
For example, somebody might move from feeling vulnerable and rejected into a detached or highly critical state.
Understanding modes can therefore help explain why the same person may respond very differently depending on what has been triggered.
Are the 18 Schemas Diagnoses?
No.
There is no psychiatric diagnosis of Abandonment Schema, Defectiveness Schema or Unrelenting Standards Schema.
The 18 schemas are constructs within the Schema Therapy model used to help therapists and clients formulate recurring emotional, cognitive and relationship patterns.
Recognising yourself strongly in one of these descriptions therefore does not establish that you have a mental health condition.
Nor should an online article be used to determine which schemas somebody has.
How Can You Identify Your Own Schemas?
The descriptions above provide a useful starting point, but identifying a recurring pattern usually requires more than recognising a sentence that sounds familiar.
It can help to look at:
- situations that repeatedly trigger strong reactions
- beliefs about yourself and other people that recur across different situations
- relationship patterns
- ways you respond when you feel threatened, criticised or rejected
- how long the pattern has been present
Philip’s guide to identifying your schemas provides prompts for doing this without turning an informal online checklist into a diagnostic test.
Can Schemas Change?
Within Schema Therapy, schemas are understood as persistent patterns rather than permanent facts about somebody.
Therapy may involve:
- recognising when schemas are activated
- understanding the experiences associated with them
- examining beliefs and predictions
- changing coping behaviours that maintain the pattern
- using experiential techniques such as imagery or chair work
- strengthening healthier ways of responding
The goal is not necessarily to ensure that an old schema never appears again.
It may instead become less dominant, less emotionally intense and less influential over the choices somebody makes.
What Does the Evidence Say About Schema Therapy?
Schema Therapy has a developing research base and has been studied particularly extensively in personality disorders.
A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis identified eight randomised controlled trials involving 587 participants as well as seven single-group trials. Schema Therapy showed a moderate benefit over control conditions for personality-disorder symptoms and was also associated with reductions in early maladaptive schemas.
Read the Schema Therapy systematic review and meta-analysis on PubMed.
Research into schemas also extends across a wider range of clinical difficulties, although the evidence for Schema Therapy itself varies according to the condition being treated.
This means the existence of the 18-schema framework should not be taken to mean that Schema Therapy has been established as the best treatment for every difficulty associated with one of those patterns.
Understanding Your Patterns
The 18 schemas provide a framework for understanding recurring expectations about ourselves, other people and relationships.
For some people, simply recognising a pattern can help make reactions that previously seemed confusing feel more understandable.
The next step is not to define yourself by a schema label but to explore when the pattern appears, what maintains it and whether different responses can gradually become possible.
You can learn more about Schema Therapy with Philip Bruce.
If you would like to discuss long-standing emotional or relationship patterns and whether Schema Therapy may be appropriate for you, you can contact Philip for an initial consultation.
