schema manifestations

Schemas manifest themselves through our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, in the ways that we cope with their toxic effects.  Young and colleagues refer to these as coping styles.  As with many other psychological phenomena, behaviour is usually the easiest symptom to read. There are three ways of coping with maladaptive schemas - surrender, avoidance and overcompensation.  Surrender is giving in to your beliefs about yourself and acting in ways that reinforce them.  Avoidance occurs when you act to stop the feelings your schema creates.  Overcompensation is channelling large amounts of energy into acting against what your schema tells you about yourself.  They're not mutually exclusive, you can swap from one to the other, or do a bit of each. 

One of the early schema therapy exercises is to examine your behaviour for all the ways in which your schemas mainfest themselves.  Below is the list I drew up with elaboration of some items, its a conglomeration of surrender, avoidance and overcompensation strategies and I them I see manifestations of my defectiveness, emotional deprivation and failure.

1. Alcohol - this has been my demon and it operates in a number of ways.  First it is an escape from feeling awful about myself.  Second, after I get very drunk I have strong feelings of shame.  Third, it handicaps me, disrupting my sleep, muddying my thoughts and making it hard to do the things I want to do, thus reinforcing feelings of failure.
2. Being judgemental and critical - both of myself as well as others.  I can see as clear as day that this drives people away, but I still do it. 
3. Spend inordinate amounts of time fantasising about idealised scenarios, in work, in love life. 
4. Trying hard to prove I'm okay - even the outcomes of small tasks become means of making me feel that I'm not a bad person.  Two of my big adulthood achievements (finishing PhD and running marathon) were also these try-hard efforts.  Somehow I thought my identity would change for the better after doing these but the effect was short-lived. 
5. Passive aggressive e.g. late (especially with my family), unreliable, withholding.
6. Angry outbursts, being unconscious of my impact on others, or not caring.
7. Failing to make my needs/preferences known (being 'easygoing') then being passively resentful.
8. Don't begin or complete tasks that would give me satisfaction.  Procrastinate, don't follow through on plans.
9. Being drawn to withholding people most particularly in my intimate life.
10. Put others up on a pedestal, seeking their validation.
11. Dissociate, sometimes unconsciously, othertimes through compulsive self-soothing behaviours (I've got a whole repetoire of these).
12. Scapegoat passive people - this one is very scary as I can see myself doing it but it's like no matter how hard I try I can't stop myself.  I did it to a lovely man I dated earlier this year - it was ugly and distressing.
13. Get very attracted to people who are emotionally unavailable or not particularly validating.
14. Am hypersensitive to perceived signs of exclusion and rejection.  Brings up a lot of anxiety and compulsion to close the distance. 

I'm sure there are plenty more where those came from.  I'll come back and edit this as they come to mind.