How to stop your life playing on repeat

Have you noticed certain patterns in your life – themes or dynamics that seem to repeat, even when you try to do things differently? Maybe you’re always putting others’ needs before your own, struggling to assert yourself, staying in relationships that aren’t good for you, or continually doubting your abilities despite evidence to the contrary. These patterns can show up in your work life, friendships, romantic relationships and even in how you treat yourself.

You might have assumed this is just part of who you are – habits of personality or ways you’ve learned to cope. But beneath these familiar experiences, there’s usually something deeper at play. These recurring patterns are often driven by core psychological themes known as your schemas. In this Guide, I’m going to help you identify your harmful schemas and begin to change them.

Schemas are the stories you tell yourself

In simple terms, schemas are deep-seated emotional and cognitive themes that shape how you see yourself, other people and the world. Here are two metaphors I often use with clients to explain schemas:

Schemas as stories. Schemas are like old stories you tell yourself about how the world works and who you are within it. They become mental shortcuts – narratives we keep returning to, such as ‘No one will ever really love the real me,’ ‘If I don’t keep the peace, I’ll be rejected,’ ‘I have to prove my worth to be accepted.’

Schemas as a lens. Schemas also function like lenses through which you view your world. But unlike clear glass, these lenses are emotionally tinted and distorted. They filter reality in ways that confirm your earliest fears and assumptions.

Schemas typically develop in childhood when our core emotional needs aren’t adequately met. These needs include safety, nurturance, autonomy, emotional expression, play and realistic limits. When these needs are frustrated – whether through neglect, trauma, overprotection or poor role-modelling – schemas form as a kind of psychological survival mechanism. They help you make sense of your environment and predict how relationships will unfold. The founder of schema therapy, the US psychologist Jeffrey Young, defined what he and his colleagues called ‘early maladaptive schemas’ (EMS) as ‘Broad organising principle[s] for making sense of one’s life experience.’

The most common schemas

Schema therapy identifies 18 early maladaptive schemas. Here are 10 that often show up in relationships and emotional struggles:

• Abandonment – fear that important people will leave or reject you.
• Emotional deprivation – belief that your emotional needs won’t be met by others.
• Mistrust/abuse – expectation that others will hurt, abuse or betray you.
• Defectiveness/shame – feeling fundamentally flawed or unworthy of love.
• Entitlement/grandiosity – believing you deserve special treatment or are superior to others.
• Subjugation – suppressing your needs to avoid conflict or punishment, driven by fear.
• Self-sacrifice – putting others first to a damaging degree, often driven by guilt.
• Approval-seeking – basing your worth on gaining approval and validation from others, especially those seen to have status.
• Emotional inhibition – holding back emotional expression to avoid judgment or rejection.
• Unrelenting standards – believing you must meet impossibly high standards to be accepted or ‘good enough’.

It’s important to note: everyone has some degree of these early maladaptive schemas. They exist on a continuum, like personality traits. Some are mild and context-specific; others are more intense and pervasive. When it comes to schemas, it’s always a matter of degree. Also, schemas often co-occur. For instance, people with a significant abandonment schema often tend to have a cluster of significant related schemas such as emotional deprivation, defectiveness, self-sacrifice and subjugation. Schemas can vary in how intensely they affect you – some may show up only when triggered in romantic relationships, others may infiltrate every area of your life.

Schemas are stubborn

Once they’re formed, schemas are very resistant to change. They feel true. They fight for survival, influencing you to interpret the world in ways that confirm their message – even when that message causes you pain. Our brains seek cognitive efficiency and emotional familiarity. That is, your brain will always take you to what it already knows – unless you actively and consciously choose something different. You will probably find that you tend to interpret situations in ways that confirm your schemas; choose partners or roles that activate them; and use coping behaviours that unintentionally reinforce them. For instance, with a defectiveness schema, you may see only your flaws, ignoring your strengths. With a mistrust schema, you might interpret neutral behaviour as betrayal. With an abandonment schema, every argument might feel like the end of the relationship.

Schema therapy and helping yourself

A student of Aaron Beck (the founder of cognitive behavioural therapy), Young developed schema therapy in the 1980s as an extension of CBT. While CBT focuses on changing surface-level thoughts, Young realised this wasn’t enough to address deeper personality patterns and long-standing relational issues.

Schema therapy bridges the gap between knowing and feeling. It helps people access the deeper emotional roots of their struggles – not just rationally understand them. Ultimately, the goal of schema therapy is to help you identify and begin to meet your previously unmet emotional needs, modify the core beliefs and patterns that no longer serve you, and strengthen the part of you that can hold it all with wisdom and self-compassion. This is known as your ‘healthy adult mode’ – the grounded, balanced part of you that can respond to challenges thoughtfully, care for your ‘vulnerable parts’, set boundaries, and live in alignment with your values.

The insights and techniques from schema therapy can be beneficial to anyone interested in self-understanding, and you can use them on your own to make positive changes in your life (however, if you’re dealing with severe mental health difficulties, it is advisable to seek out a qualified schema therapist). The self-help steps I will share with you in this Guide can help you understand yourself better, and – especially if you feel stuck in patterns that just won’t shift – help you to adapt. Schemas are not destiny, but they do shape your default responses until you become aware of them.

Understanding your schemas is like uncovering the script you’ve been unknowingly following. Once you see the script, you can begin to revise it. In the next section, I’ll show you how to begin activating your healthy adult mode and make meaningful changes to your script.

In this section, I’ll walk you through a step-by-step approach for working with your schemas and breaking the patterns they fuel.

Identify your recurring patterns

Schemas show up most clearly in the repeating patterns of our lives that feel stuck. These are the moments you find yourself saying: ‘Why does this keep happening?’

Start by looking at the areas of your life that bring you frustration or pain. Here are a few examples:

• repeating relationship disappointments;
• putting others’ needs before your own to your own detriment;
• perfectionism – feeling driven by unrealistic and high standards in different areas of your life;
• feeling not good enough, no matter what you do;
• not speaking up due to fear or feeling controlled by others.

Activity: journal about a recurring pattern (or patterns) in your life. Reflect on how it makes you feel. What seems to repeat? Are there familiar emotional themes? Cross-reference this with the schema descriptions I gave you earlier. Do any of your patterns fit the schema descriptions?

Build a deeper awareness of your schemas

Identifying one or more of your unhelpful schemas is a powerful first step. But awareness alone isn’t enough. Before you can begin your efforts to change them, it will help you to understand more fully where they come from and how they are affecting your behaviour day to day, including the unhelpful ways you are currently trying to cope.

Activity: take each schema that you recognised in the first step and then explore it further in these ways:

• Notice patterns in your emotional reactions: reflect further on whether there are specific situations or experiences that tend to cause you to feel overly anxious, rejected, angry, ashamed or emotionally shut down.
• Reflect on your childhood: now think about early experiences in your life that might explain why these reactions in these specific situations make sense – at least in terms of the schemas you’re currently thinking about.
• Think about the ways you try to cope with these emotional reactions and how these might be understandable, but unhelpful. We don’t choose these responses consciously – they’re survival strategies formed early in life. Schema therapy highlights three main categories of unhelpful coping strategy: surrender, which is giving in to the schema and repeating the pattern (eg, staying in toxic relationships; over-giving or trying to do everything at 100 per cent); avoidance, which means evading anything that might activate the schema (eg, shutting down emotionally, avoiding relationships, disappearing into drugs and alcohol); and overcompensation, which can involve fighting against the schema and acting in the opposite extreme (eg, becoming controlling to prevent abandonment, or acting superior).

Putting these notes and observations together, you might see some clear patterns. Here are some examples of common repeating patterns in life, the schemas involved and the unhelpful coping mechanisms that tend to ensue. Can you recognise any of these in your own life?

• People-pleasing and ‘overgiving’ (such as putting others’ needs ahead of your own to the point of exhaustion, resentment or burnout)
  Schemas involved: subjugation, self-sacrifice
  Unhelpful coping: surrender and burnout
• Perfectionism and ‘overdrive’ (such as always feeling driven to perform well or do more)
  Schemas involved: unrelenting standards, defectiveness
  Unhelpful coping: overcompensation and emotional exhaustion
• Fear of intimacy or abandonment
  Schemas involved: abandonment, emotional deprivation
  Unhelpful coping: clinginess, avoidance or settling (ie, staying with a partner who does not meet your needs in order to avoid the pain of leaving/loss)

Dan and the defectiveness schema

Here is a vignette to help illustrate some of these dynamics. Dan was a client of mine who was a thoughtful and competent team leader. But after giving a presentation at work, he received some critical feedback from a senior colleague in a group setting. The comment was brief and not harsh – something about needing more clarity in one slide – but Dan’s stomach sank.

Over the next few hours, his mood dropped sharply. He replayed the moment in his mind, magnifying it, convinced that everyone in the room thought he looked unprepared. Thoughts like ‘I always mess things up’ and ‘They probably regret hiring me’ took over. He felt a wave of shame, tightness in his chest and an urge to retreat – he even thought about calling in sick the next day.

Dan’s defectiveness schema had been triggered. This core belief – that there is something inherently wrong or inadequate about him – was formed in childhood, when he was repeatedly criticised by a perfectionistic parent and made to feel never good enough.

Understand your trigger chain

To begin the process of overcoming your schemas, the next step is to spend some time working through what I call your ‘trigger chain’. Schemas are often activated by triggers – situations that remind your nervous system of earlier unmet needs. These triggers can be subtle: a tone of voice, a missed call, a critical glance. For Dan, it was the critical feedback he received. What they have in common is that they set off a predictable chain of internal experiences and behaviours – they tap into deep fears and beliefs that feel intensely true in the moment and that then provoke the urge to cope, which, as we heard, can often be counterproductive.

Here’s how this can play out:

• Trigger – something external (or internal) sets off the schema.
• Emotional activation – familiar feelings, thoughts, memories, bodily sensations arise.
• Coping urge – a strong impulse to respond (eg, shut down, lash out, fix it).
• Behaviour – your chosen coping strategy (surrender, avoidance or overcompensation driven by the urge).
• Outcome – often reinforces the schema’s meaning (eg, ‘See, people always let me down’).

If we apply this framework to Dan, it looks like this:

• Trigger: mild public feedback.
• Schema activation: feelings of shame, worthlessness, fear of exposure.
• Coping urge: withdraw, ruminate, avoid future risk.
• Behaviour: emotional shutdown, urge to isolate.
• Outcome: schema reinforced – ‘I’m not good enough. People will find out.’

Activity: choose a recent situation that left you feeling emotionally thrown. Break it down into the steps above. What schema might have been triggered? What did you do in response? How did that response affect you? Did it make things worse?

Respond differently – break the chain

To shift a schema, you must break the chain. That starts with pausing – creating space between trigger and reaction. This isn’t easy, but it’s essential. You’re aiming to act from your healthy adult mode, not from the schema-driven ‘vulnerable child’ part of you. Then, after pausing, you could try some opposite-action strategies, such as:

• Grounding yourself with a few slow breaths.
• Reminding yourself: ‘This is a schema activation – it feels real, but it’s not the full truth.’
• Delaying a counterproductive reaction by doing something else instead, such as going for a walk, reading a book or writing in a journal (whatever you do, try to give it 24 hours before considering that initial reaction again).

Returning to Dan’s story one last time, we can see how he would benefit from breaking the chain. To recap, even though the critical feedback was minor and not personal, his defectiveness schema interpreted it through a distorted lens. Instead of hearing a single suggestion, he heard a global judgment of his worth. But by identifying this pattern and doing some deeper work together with me on his defectiveness schema, Dan was able to question the automatic thoughts, soothe the emotional part of him that felt shamed, and respond with perspective and self-compassion from his healthy adult mode.

A useful tool for helping you break trigger chains that you could try is called a flashcard. Once you’ve made one (when you’re feeling calm), you can use it in the moment whenever you’re triggered, to help challenge your schema’s story and respond from your wiser healthy adult self.

The way to prepare a flashcard is to get a piece of paper/card, or create a digital note in your phone, and then write some prompts on it, such as these:

• What happened?
• What am I feeling?
• Which schema is being triggered?
• Where did this schema come from?
• What’s the unhelpful coping urge?
• What does my healthy adult know is true about me and the situation now?
• What action can I take that honours my needs now?

Here’s an example of using a flashcard. I’ll put Dan’s story aside and draw upon another client, Toni, who had the subjugation schema, and how she used a flashcard after an event that triggered this schema. During a family dinner, Toni had frozen when her father snapped at her daughter. Toni later reflected and used the prompts on her flashcard to respond from her healthy adult self:

I know this is my subjugation schema being activated. I developed this because I grew up with a controlling, angry parent. This schema makes me feel powerless and voiceless – but that’s the past. I now have a choice. I can set respectful boundaries and speak calmly. I am no longer that little girl. I am a capable adult. Unlike before, I can have boundaries and choose who I let into my life.

Activity: the next time that you notice one of your schemas has been activated, try some opposite-action strategies. Or get out your flashcard and use the prompts to reflect carefully on what happened and how best to respond next.

Reparent the vulnerable child part of you

While insight and behavioural change go a long way in weakening schemas, lasting emotional healing often requires working at a deeper level. In schema therapy, this might involve turning toward the most wounded part of yourself – what schema therapists call the vulnerable child (VC) mode. You can make a gentle start on this form of healing by yourself (to find out about more in-depth work with a schema therapist, see the Learn More section below).

The VC mode holds the raw emotional pain, unmet needs and early beliefs that may have formed when you were too young to make sense of your environment. It’s the part that might have felt invisible, unsafe, unwanted, ashamed or unloved – and the part that you might find still gets triggered, for example when you feel criticised, dismissed, excluded or rejected.

As a schema therapist, I’ve seen time and again that when clients begin to connect with this part of themselves (instead of denying it) – and respond with warmth and acceptance rather than avoidance or self-criticism, deep shifts can occur. They begin to change not just how they think about themselves, but how they actually feel at their core.

Schema therapists call this process reparenting: learning how to offer yourself the care, boundaries and emotional attunement you may not have consistently received growing up. And it’s something you can begin to practise gently, on your own.

Four ways to begin reparenting yourself

These simple exercises are designed to foster connection between your healthy adult self and your inner vulnerable child. The aim is not to ‘fix’ your inner child, but to acknowledge their pain, meet their needs with compassion, and create an inner environment that feels safer and more nurturing.

• Letter-writing to your inner child
  This involves imagining that you could communicate with your past self and literally writing a validating and compassionate letter to yourself as a child. You could acknowledge what that younger version of you went through, what they felt, and what they needed but didn’t receive. Let them know that you see them now and will care for them differently. You’ll find your own words, but here’s an example of what you could write: ‘I know you felt alone and scared back then. You did the best you could, and now I’m here to look after you. You’ll never be alone again, I am with you always.’ The purpose is to connect and bridge the gap between the healthy side of you (the healthy adult who is nurturing and wise) and the vulnerable child part of you. It’s a soothing-and-connection exercise. If you like, you can read the letter back to yourself or imagine speaking the words to your inner child, but the processing of the emotion is in the writing.
• The photo exercise
  Look for a childhood photo of yourself (preferably pictured on your own) and place it somewhere you’ll see it often. When you look at it, pause and really see that younger self. What do they need to hear from you? What kind of support, encouragement or protection would have helped them then? Speak those words now, either aloud or silently. In essence, this is a brief self-compassion exercise.
• Inner-child meditation
  A guided meditation can help you connect with your vulnerable child in a grounded and gentle way. I offer one on my Healing for Love podcast (the episode ‘BONUS – Meditation: “Inner Child” Connection and Healing’, available on Apple podcasts, Spotify and elsewhere) which you can follow anytime you feel triggered, unsettled or disconnected.
• Feel – Name – Soothe
  When you’re feeling emotionally activated, pause and ask: What am I feeling right now? Can I name this emotion accurately? Can I respond with kindness instead of judgment? This simple practice creates space between the trigger and the response, allowing your healthy adult to co-regulate the child part – offering reassurance, validation and safety.

By learning to reparent yourself in these ways, you start to build a safety bridge between the healthy adult part of your self and the child parts that you might have once disowned as a way to cope with childhood pain. If that’s what happened to you then, as you grew, you denied your pain and you also denied the parts of yourself that carry this pain. In terms of long-term healing, reparenting these parts is essential.

In my experience, when you can truly look at the vulnerable child parts of yourself that have felt lost, rejected or abandoned, they can start to feel more alive, and you will gradually feel more whole and authentic. What’s more, when you begin to meet the needs of your vulnerable child, you loosen the grip of long-held unhelpful schemas. The more often you do this, the more your inner world will shift. Over time, your emotional reactions become less intense, your relationships more balanced, and your sense of self more integrated and resilient.

Going deeper with a schema therapist

If you have found the previous exercises useful but want to go further and/or you feel your schemas are too entrenched to deal with on your own, I strongly recommend that you consider taking things further with a suitably qualified schema therapist (the International Society of Schema Therapy offers a global directory). They will use experiential techniques to help this healing happen, such as:

• Imagery Rescripting (ImR)
  There are a few different variations of this method but, broadly, ImR involves a therapeutic-guided process where you revisit a vulnerable or painful memory (with the guidance of a therapist) and intervene by rewriting it (telling a new story of what happened) with the support of your healthy adult self. The process allows the vulnerable part of you to receive protection, validation, nurturance and corrective information. The overall aim is to reconnect with your younger (wounded) self, protect them and undo the learned messages from the past. Done well, ImR can be an empowering and deeply transformative experience.
• Chairwork
  Chairwork (or empty-chair work) involves role-playing different ‘parts’ of yourself (eg, your inner critic, your vulnerable child, your healthy adult) to externalise the internal conflict and facilitate compassionate resolution. Again, there are many versions of chairwork dialogues a schema therapist might use to help their client externalise past hurts, resolve uncertainties or process complex emotions such as loss and grief.

These techniques can feel strange at first – but they can be profoundly healing. Many clients describe them as transformative because they bypass logic and speak directly to the emotional brain (ie, different parts of yourself). I’ve often said to clients that one experiential session can be worth more than 10 ‘talking’ sessions.

Whether you rely on self-help or decide to seek out professional support, remember that every time you pause instead of react, every time you speak up instead of silence yourself, every time you comfort rather than criticise yourself, you’re weakening the grip of your schemas and strengthening your healthy adult. Your unhelpful schemas won’t vanish overnight – but they can soften and shift. The more you work with your schemas, the more you change the story they’ve been telling you. And, with practice, you can rewrite that story – into one that’s wiser, freer and more self-honouring.

The book Reinventing Your Life (1993) by Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko is a helpful starting point for understanding and changing life traps (ie, your unhelpful schemas).

The book Your Coping Skills Aren’t Working (2023) by the schema therapist Richard Brouillette draws on schema therapy, CBT and attachment theory to help you break free from the coping habits that keep you stuck in a cycle of self-sabotaging negative thoughts and behaviours.

My podcast Healing For Love (previously The Good Mood Clinic Podcast), available on Apple, Spotify and elsewhere, explores schemas and schema therapy, relationships, emotional triggers and healing strategies in a grounded, compassionate tone; it has released more than 120 episodes so far.

The Aeon Essay ‘Chairwork’ (2021) by Scott Kellogg and Amanda Garcia Torres provides an accessible introduction to the schema therapy technique of chairwork.