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Childhood trauma creates painful mental schemas, which shape your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.

These schemas can be healed with trauma-informed approaches like schema therapy.

As schemas loosen their grip, your thoughts become more helpful and you feel calmer, happier, and stronger.

This is the first post in a series.

We now know that childhood trauma is far more widespread than mental health professionals previously understood. And traumatic experiences are on a spectrum, from milder to more severe. While the focus had been on profoundly traumatic experiences such as physical or sexual abuse, many experts now argue that apparently milder experiences, such as being bullied or growing up in a high-conflict home, can also be traumatic for kids. These traumatic experiences are mediated by a child’s temperament and their core emotional needs.

If these developmental needs were not met for you on a consistent basis, you might have developed one or more painful mental schemas.1 In this first of two posts, we will examine two of these schemas. It is a good idea to read the description of each schema and then make some notes about whether it resonates with you or not. If you would like to check which of the schemas you have, take the Young Schema Questionnaire (YSQ), which is available on Dr. Young’s website.2

Abandonment/Instability

This schema often develops when you’re a small child. You may have lost a caregiver when you were little—perhaps you were adopted and given up by your birth parents. Or one of your parents might have died, which would have been extremely painful and potentially life-changing. But often, people with this........

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