For Professionals

Schema therapy for trauma combines CBT, emotion-focused and experiential models such as Gestalt therapy, with psychodynamic approaches like Attachment Theory, to create an integrative model. Schemas are neural networks that are triggered by stressful situations or events that remind us of painful experiences from early childhood, when schemas generally develop. Acute trauma can be caused by extreme, once-off incidents such as an assault or an accident.  Developmental trauma relates to traumatic events, sustained over a period of time, incurred in early childhood, when a child’s developmental needs are not met and when its immature brain is growing and developing. Schema therapy aims to discover these unmet needs with the purpose of