Understanding self-defeating life patterns is an important part of your schema therapy intervention. In this blog I explain what life patterns are, how to identify your client’s life patterns and how they provide the foundations for your schema therapy intervention. I’ll bring it to life with an example of a life pattern involving the overcontroller mode.
What are life patterns?
They detail all of the links between the unmet childhood emotional needs and the problem a client brings to therapy.
They include a mode cycle, sometimes described as mode flipping, where activation of the vulnerable child mode is followed quickly by activation of critic and coping modes.
They are a pattern that is repeatedly triggered.
They are self defeating, as the coping mode perpetuates the feelings of both the child modes and the messages of the critic mode.
Focusing on accurately understanding and describing the life patterns during the assessment phase will provide you with the foundations for your schema therapy intervention; helping you to accurately identify the different focus points for your work.
How to identify life patterns
Understanding self defeating life patterns is a key task of the assessment phase. I like to use tools including the affect bridge, where we link present triggers to early childhood experiences. The childhood experiences can then be explored in detail through imagery to identify unmet needs and how they contributed to the schemas developing. Schema inventories are helpful at this stage too. For clients who are able to reflect on their thoughts, emotions and past experiences, the Young Schema Questionnaire provides a great guide to possible schema patterns. The Young Parent Inventory is a good alternative when clients find it harder to observe their internal world.
The schema therapy case conceptualisation (find it here) guides you through the process of understanding life patterns. If writing a conceptualisation takes more time than you have, focus on understanding core unmet needs, schemas, presenting problems and a mode map for each problem to be addressed, which should then direct you to the therapeutic goals.
When you come to the stage of behavioural pattern breaking you can fine tune your mode maps to ensure you understand problematic behaviours in detail via interview or reimagining a recent event step by step (what was the triggering moment, why did that moment distress you, how were you feeling, what did you do exactly, what were you thinking?).
Overcontroller Mode Example
To demonstrate a self-defeating life pattern, let’s have a look at an example. In this mode map you can see the role of an overcontroller mode in maintaining the life pattern and preventing the individual from getting their needs met. The situation was being repeatedly triggered for this person, contributing to the problem brought to therapy: loneliness, frustration and disconnection in the marriage.
The overcontroller modes, which are one division of the over compensatory coping modes, protect from perceived or real threat by focusing attention on detail and exercising extreme control (David Edwards, 2022).
Repairing the Life Patterns
In the early stages of your schema therapy intervention it is important to clearly depict the life pattern(s) with your client, using a mode map. Prior to starting any behavioural pattern breaking work, Young et. al. (2003) suggests that clients need to understand how their schemas developed and have a good awareness of the life pattern. Imagery rescripting with early memories will help clients to get a deep understanding of the links between the present and the past, as well as providing a good basis for change, as rescripting opens up new perspectives to challenge the schemas and reduces sensitivity to triggers.
Young et. al. (2003) advises to work on one behaviour at a time, not the whole pattern. You can see from the intervention map some of the possible ways to shift this life pattern, with the overall focus on getting the individual’s needs met in a healthy way. In this particular example the overall aim was to aid connection and support between the client and her husband.
Conclusion
Understanding life patterns, both as therapist and client, is a key part of schema therapy interventions. Take your time in the assessment phase to explore and get to grips with the patterns and lay them out using the mode map to provide you and your client with a road map for your intervention. This will help you to act with precision: directing and fine tuning your efforts to address the right schemas and modes.
Reference
Young, Klosko & Weishaar (2003). Schema Therapy. A Practitioner's Guide
Would you like to deepen your therapeutic skills and train in schema therapy? Check out the certification training I am facilitating later this year.
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