Schema Therapy is evolving. The question is: how does it continue to develop without losing the foundations that made it effective in the first place?
In the latest episode of What’s the Schemata?, Chris Hayes and Rob Brockman are joined by Associate Professor Julie Krans, a researcher and psychologist from the Netherlands whose work sits at the intersection of Schema Therapy and CBT.
Julie describes Schema Therapy as being in something of an “adolescent” phase — experimenting with its identity, expanding into new areas and asking what parts of the original model are truly essential.
Her research offers an interesting answer.
Julie works with people experiencing anxiety, OCD and PTSD who have already received guideline treatments such as CBT but have not recovered. Her research explores whether Schema Therapy concepts can help explain why CBT sometimes becomes stuck.
One finding is particularly interesting: the Vulnerable Child mode may interfere with a person’s ability to learn during exposure therapy. If someone becomes overwhelmed during exposure, they may leave the experience still believing the situation is dangerous — even when the exercise was designed to teach them otherwise.
Rather than abandoning CBT, Julie’s team uses Schema Therapy to help people engage with it more effectively.
Schema modes can identify what is getting in the way. Core emotional needs can give exposure exercises more personal meaning. Imagery rescripting can help address earlier experiences influencing the present. CBT then contributes something Schema Therapy can sometimes lack: highly structured behavioural experiments, measurement and systematic testing.
The result is something the episode describes as “schema-informed CBT.”
It is also a reminder that therapies do not have to compete with each other. Decades after Schema Therapy emerged from the cognitive behavioural tradition, some of its most interesting developments may come from bringing those traditions back together.
Listen to the full conversation with Julie Krans on What’s the Schemata?
