Schema Therapy in Glasgow for Complex and Enduring Difficulties

What Schema Therapy is

Schema Therapy suits difficulties that are longstanding, relational and rooted in early experience, rather than a recent stressor.

Schema Therapy was developed by Dr Jeffrey Young as an integrative approach for people whose difficulties had not responded to shorter-term therapies. It draws on cognitive-behavioural, attachment, psychodynamic, and experiential traditions to create a comprehensive treatment that works at the level of deep emotional patterns.

When our emotional needs are not met in childhood (safety, connection, autonomy, self-expression, realistic limits), we develop schemas. These are enduring patterns of thinking, feeling and relating that carry into adulthood. Schemas often operate outside our awareness, yet they powerfully shape how we respond to situations, particularly in close relationships and during times of stress.

Schema Therapy also works with modes, the moment-to-moment emotional states that are triggered when schemas are activated. You may recognise shifting between a critical inner voice, a vulnerable or frightened part of yourself, and coping responses such as emotional withdrawal or people-pleasing. Mode work helps you understand these shifts and develop a healthier, more grounded way of responding.

The evidence base for Schema Therapy is strong, with research showing significant and lasting improvements for people with personality difficulties, chronic depression, and complex presentations.

Who Schema Therapy helps

Schema Therapy is particularly well suited to people who experience longstanding or recurring patterns that feel deeply ingrained, difficulties that may not have responded fully to other approaches. You may benefit from Schema Therapy if you experience:

• Personality difficulties: including traits associated with borderline personality, avoidant personality, or other patterns of emotional intensity, instability, or withdrawal. These patterns are understandable responses to difficult early experiences, not character flaws.
• Chronic or treatment-resistant depression: where low mood has persisted across years and may be connected to deep feelings of defectiveness, failure, or emotional deprivation.
• Complex trauma: particularly developmental or relational trauma from childhood, where the effects are woven into your sense of self and your relationships.
• Enduring relationship patterns: such as repeatedly choosing partners who are emotionally unavailable, difficulty setting boundaries, fear of abandonment, or patterns of conflict and withdrawal.
• Longstanding low self-worth: a persistent sense of being not good enough, unlovable, or fundamentally different from others, often accompanied by harsh self-criticism.

Schema Therapy is also helpful for people who feel they understand their difficulties intellectually but struggle to change how they feel and react at an emotional level.

How Schema Therapy works

Schema Therapy begins with a thorough assessment phase, during which your psychologist works with you to identify your core schemas and understand how they developed. This often involves exploring your early experiences, completing validated questionnaires, and mapping the patterns that show up in your current life. Together, you build a shared formulation that makes sense of your difficulties.

The therapy then moves into active change work, using a combination of approaches:

• Experiential techniques: including imagery rescripting, where your psychologist guides you back to difficult early memories and helps you experience them differently, providing the care and protection that was missing. Chair work allows you to give voice to different parts of yourself and shift the balance away from critical or punitive modes towards self-compassion and strength.
• Cognitive strategies: examining and challenging the beliefs that maintain your schemas, such as "I am unlovable" or "People will always let me down," and developing more balanced and realistic perspectives.
• Behavioural pattern-breaking: identifying and gradually changing the habitual responses that keep schemas in place (surrender, avoidance or overcompensation: giving in to the schema, avoiding it, or fighting against it), and practising healthier alternatives.
• The therapeutic relationship: through limited reparenting, your psychologist provides, within professional boundaries, a consistent, warm and boundaried relationship that itself becomes a vehicle for change. This helps you experience what it is like to have your emotional needs met in a healthy way.

Progress is reviewed regularly, and your psychologist will adapt the approach to what is most helpful for you at each stage of therapy.

Our Schema Therapy specialists

Schema Therapy is delivered by psychologists with specialist training in the model. Dr Aisha Tariq, our Clinical Director, also works this way.

Dr Humera Millar uses Schema Therapy for long-standing patterns behind anxiety, OCD and perfectionism, drawing on CBT, DBT and EMDR where they help.

Dr Jessica Wainman-Lefley brings expertise in Schema Therapy alongside broader clinical experience with complex presentations.

Laura Clark works with Schema Therapy where perfectionism, self-criticism and trauma have shaped how someone sees themselves.

Dr Louise Legg offers Schema Therapy alongside CBT and compassion-focused work, including with neurodivergent adults.

View our full team to find the right psychologist for you.