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Maladaptive schemas lead us to neurotic solutions. On the one hand,these solutions are strategies for filling basic human needs and wishes,like being loved., understood, or accepted. On the other hand, they are self-defeating, because they sabotage the very attempt. Their goals are compelling, but their methods are flawed.



MALADAPTIVE RESPONSES * While visiting a beach in a nature preserve, I saw a line of seven ducklings without a mother duck emerge from a nearby pond and waddle down the beach at a frantic, confused pace. They were just a few days old, and they faithfully followed fthe tallest baby duck, who seemed just as lost and disoriented as all the rest.

They may have sensed the concern of those of us on the beach who saw their plight. They waddled up to several people, any one of whom they might have imprinted as their new mom.

For a while fixated on a woman whose blond hair with dark roots, like the coloring of their own soft down, may have reminded them of their mother.

As we gently scooped them up into a a beach towel to deliver them back to the pond in the woods from where they had come, I had a poignant sense of the panic that must have seized their minds as they searched everywhere for their mother.

I found myself reflecting on the qualities of clients i've had with a strong fear of abandonment. Underneath the desperate attempt to be rescued that many people feel who have this emotional pattern runs a panic so severe that it feels like a fight for a life, a fear of being extinguished.

But for those ducklings, the panic was appropriate, a fitting response to the danger they were in without a mother to protect them. For those with the fear of abandonment, though, once-appropriate feelings can take over when they no longer fit the actual situation. This remains a crucial distinction:schema responses are overreactions, not appropriate responses to difficult situations.

As we explore emotional habits,we should keep in mind that many or most of our emotional reactions are probably appropriate to some situations. It is only when these reactions no longer work that they become maladaptive.

For instance, I once had a client who was in a relationship with a man who was physically abusive; after she moved out he even threatened her with a gun. Her fears of him were based in reality. Her reaction-to get a restraining order against him-was a completely appropriate. But she also had schemas triggered in that relationship, particularly a fear of abandonment, which had kept her staying with him despite the abuse. It's maladaptive nature of our responses that set these habits apart from the rest of our emotional repertoire.

MAPPING DESTRUCTIVE HABITS* Contrast an adaptive emotional schema with a maladaptive one. A child who is much loved and well cared for, for example, will grow up with the highly adaptive schema that psychoanalyst Erik Erickson called basic trust. Throughout her life this person will tend to first assume that people and the universe pose no threat to her. She'll see people as trustworthy unless they show themselves to be otherwise. People with basic trust make friends more easily, because they they approach people with an attitude of goodwill,assuming the best about others. For the same reasons their relationships tend to be stable.

By contrast, a child who is abused in his early years is likely to grow up with a very maladaptive schema: mistrust. His first assumption about people will be that they cannot be counted on to care about his needs, and may too readily misinterpret neutral or even positive acts as threats or as proof of his assumption of untrustworthiness. That, of course, was an appropriate self-protective response in childhood. But as adults, those with basic mistrust still approach others with suspicion, and so find it more difficult to make friends and sustain intimate relationships.

Because they so readily see hostility or negativity in what people do, their closest relationships become battlegrounds.

This mistrust is the attitude underlying schoolyard bullies: they misinterpret neutral cues as threats and so attack under the false assumption that they are being threatened. A similar dynamic goes on on some husbands who batter their wives: they often have an intense fear of abandonment-that their wife will leave them. This breeds a suspicious radar that perceives symbolic abandonment in something innocuous she does, like walking out of the room during an argument. That simple act-and the misreading of it is abandonment-triggers in them by turn hurt,rage,and inexcusable violence. And so the basic mistrust schema distorts everyday relationships and thrusts people into a hostile and dangerous realm.

This mapping of destructive emotional habits is a modern-day constitution of the task undertaken by the ancient mind scientists of the task undertaken by the ancient mind scientist of early Buddhism, who spoke of anusayas,dormant tendencies in the mind that erupt in episodes of mental and emotional disturbance. Buddhist psychology sees that even thought the tendencies may not dominate our live, their potential for springing into action makes them comparable to a mental minefield. At the least misstep, we are caught up in emotional chaos and mental confusion. Similarly, modern psychology speaks of schemas as storage systems that preserve specific emotional learning-resentment at feeling treated unfairly,for instance,along with the corresponding range of acts that we have learned to be sensitive to, as well as how we have learned to be sensitive to, as well as how we have learned to react when we feel treated that way. These storage systems not only preserve what we have learned but continue to be added to or experiences throughout life. These patterns lie dormant,waiting for a moment when something happens that brings the schema to mind. Then the old feelings, and the old responses, automatically recur.

Wether because of temperament or serendipitous timing, some children may be more resilient than others, emerging from the cauldron of early life relativity schema - free while a sibling grows up burdened by several such patterns. One reason has to do with the fact that in a psychological sense,every sibling grows up in a different family:and oldest child for example, may have left home already by the time a parental divorce creates an absent parent for the youngest sibling.

CORE CONFLICTS* To some extent, our schemas embody ways we have given up part of what is possible for us. Abraham Maslow put it powerfully: "If the only way to maintain the self is to lose others, then the ordinary child will give up the self." Some schemas- and the ways we've learned to respond to them - represent a sense in which we've sacrificed our potential in a bargain to preserve connection.