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.

read this first

I'm a 45 year old woman.  I'm single, never been married, no children.  I'm smart, funny and look nice.  The longest relationship I've had was about three years.  I've spent significant periods struggling with different forms of unhappiness - some diagnosable, others not.  In trying to help myself over the years I've read lots of self-help books, I've spent lots on psychotherapy, hell I've even done a PhD in psychology.  These days I'm more happy than not, but things aren't what I'd like them to be. 

After a recent disappointment, a dear friend pointed me back in the direction of the book Reinventing Your Life by Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko.  Yes, a self-help book.  And one I'd read before.  It explains schemas and schema therapy which I'd found highly informative last time but reading it again, something hit home.  I understood why, after all these years of working on myself, I was still creating the same unfulfilling circumstances in my life. 

So I've taken the book's challenge to reinvent my life.  I'm starting to work my way through the self-help strategies in the book.  And partly because I can't find any professionals in my area who specialise in schema therapy, I've decided to journal the process.  And because I think it will be good for me, I'm making the journal public.  So welcome.