Good Resources on Mental Schemas

Mental schemas are an approach to understanding the kinds of issues that come up in our lives over and over, usually problems that we didn’t get a chance to work out when we were young that are still sticking with us today, like feeling abandoned or alienated, having trouble with trust or self-control, and so on. A brief introduction to mental schemas and a list of all of the schemas can be found on my mental schemas page, where you’ll also find links to the individual articles on each of the schemas that I’ve been adding to the site over time.

If you’re interested in learning more about mental schemas, here are some useful resources.

Dr. Tara Bennett-Goleman’s book Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart delves into using mindfulness to make use of the insights of schema therapy. The link between mindfulness and schemas is an important one, because unless we learn to be aware (that is, mindful) of our schemas and notice when they’re kicking in, we have little hope of making progress in overcoming them.

Schema Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide is a substantial, informative, readable book by the man who developed schema therapy, Dr. Jeffrey Young, with Janet Klosko and Marjorie Weishaar. It’s available in book form as well as for the Amazon Kindle, and most of it can be found online through Google Books.

Finally, a 13-page PDF called A Client’s Guide to Schema Therapy, by Dr. David Bricker with, again, Dr. Young, is available online for free. This gives a variety of helpful examples in the course of providing an introduction to the subject.