assessment

Usually when you start psychotherapy with a professional, they take your history and in doing so sometimes use an assessment tool (usually a questionnaire which is scored) to measure your 'symptoms'. 

Since I'm doing my own therapy, the history is already known.  And I will take you through bits and pieces of it in time.  Reinventing Your Life has assessment tools at the start of each chapter on the differnt schemas/lifetraps.  Jeffrey Young has also authored/coauthored a number of questionnaires or inventories that measure schemas and the ways people use to cope with them. 

I, like others, show manifestations of more than one schema.  The two most obvious are Defectivenss and Emotional Deprivation, which seem to go hand in hand.  I can also see bits of Subjugation and Failure. 

You're meant to choose your most dominant or core schema to work on first, but I can't really pick whether I should work on the Defectiveness or Emotional Deprivation.  I'm tending toward the former because its where the shame comes from, and the shame is what comes the most, because its there under everything else.

Defectiveness it is.