Schema Therapy
At our women’s mental health clinic, we understand how emotional patterns from the past can continue to show up in the present – even when you’re doing your best to grow, heal, and take care of yourself and others.
Schema Therapy offers a powerful, compassionate approach for women who find themselves stuck in cycles of self-doubt, over-responsibility and self-sacrifice, people-pleasing, perfectionism or chronic anxiety, avoidance or detachment.
What Is Schema Therapy?
Schema Therapy is a modern, integrative evidence-based therapy that helps you uncover and shift long-standing emotional patterns – called “schemas”. These patterns develop early in life and are typically formed in response to unmet emotional needs, (like safety, connection, validation and understanding, or healthy boundaries). Over time, they can influence your relationships, your self-worth, and how you approach and cope in life.
Many women we work with struggle with inner beliefs like:
- “I have to be perfect to be accepted.”
- “My needs don’t matter.”
- “If I’m not in control, something will go wrong.”
- “I’m too much – or not enough.”
- “There’s something wrong with me”
- “I don’t fit in and belong”
At Una Psychology we use Schema Therapy to help you explore where these beliefs came from, how they impact your life, and how to honour your individual needs to build healthier, more empowering ways of relating to yourself and others. Schema Therapy offers a path to self-understanding, inner healing, and the confidence to reclaim your voice to create something different. It goes beyond insight and supports deep, lasting change.
What Makes Schema Therapy Distinctive?
Schema Therapy goes deeper than surface-level coping strategies. We’ll help you:
- Understand your patterns: We’ll help to identify core beliefs and emotional themes that have shaped your thoughts, feeling and behaviours (these are often outside of our conscious awareness).
- Work with “schema modes”: We all shift between different emotional states or “modes” – like our vulnerable child self, our harsh punitive critic, or our strong but detached protector. We will use Schema Therapy to help you recognise and work with these parts of yourself in a compassionate, healing way.
- Heal unmet emotional needs: Using imagery, guided dialogue, and supportive exercises, we will help you meet needs that may have been neglected earlier in life – such as feeling nurtured, seen, or protected.
- Build new ways of coping: You’ll learn practical tools for boundary-setting, emotional regulation, and self-compassion that support lasting change, especially when life feels overwhelming.
- Be integrative and trauma-informed: Schema Therapy weaves together cognitive, behavioural, attachment-based, and emotion-focused techniques. It’s especially effective for long-standing patterns that haven’t improved through other types of therapy.
Many women come to us feeling that they have lost themselves, burdened by old roles, invisible expectations, or emotional wounds that still shape their daily lives. Whether you’re navigating anxiety, burnout, low self-worth, depression or complex relationship patterns, we’re here to support you with warmth, clarity, and care.
If you would like us to walk alongside you as you reconnect with your values, needs, and inner strength using Schema Therapy, please get in touch.
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