Even couples in healthy relationships get into cyclical fights.
On the surface, your issues might be about household chores or lateness. But they’re really tied to how you view the world — in other words, your schema, Avigail Lev, a San Francisco therapist specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), told Business Insider.
To help her clients, Lev incorporates schema therapy, which involves each partner learning about how their core beliefs. Often, she’ll have them take a questionnaire on her website to learn which schemas they identify with the most.
She said she can predict what a couple’s arguments are before she even meets them 90% of the time.
“When we look at what people believe, it tells us about how they behave,” Lev told Business Insider. Learning about your schemas can not only solve problems with your partner but also help you become more vulnerable or assertive.
Your beliefs shape your relationship behaviors
Schema therapy was founded by psychologist Jeffrey E. Young in 2003 and identifies a range of schemas that can develop based on childhood experiences. A person can have multiple schemas, such as abandonment, entitlement, negativity, dependence, and self-sacrifice.
Lev found Young’s questionnaire long and difficult to fill out, so she created a condensed version geared toward relationships. In it, she asks participants to rate each statement on a scale from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree,” such as:
For instance, after collecting results for 12 years, Lev said the most common schema across all genders and cultures is unrelenting standards, a form of perfectionism. In relationships, it translates to “feelings of disappointment, being not good enough, trying harder, working harder,” she said, both in yourself and toward others.
Couples often have complementary — but opposing — beliefs
Beyond being able to predict most couples’ fights, Lev said that after looking at one person’s schema results, she can almost always predict what their partner’s schema will be. For instance, she’s never seen a client with entitlement issues whose partner didn’t have a tendency to self-sacrifice.
Essentially, schemas function as more detailed versions of attachment styles, where partners can attract or be attracted to people who trigger their attachment wounds.”One person fears abandonment, the other person fears engulfment,” Lev said.
This is what can make fights so painful and impossible to wade through: they touch upon our most persistent beliefs about ourselves and the world.
For example, someone with unrelenting standards can criticize their partner for how they wash the dishes. If the other person has a fear of failure, they feel like they’re walking on eggshells.
“The more they expect to get it wrong, the more they mess up, and then the more they get it wrong, the more the perfectionist criticizes,” Lev said. “It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for both people.”
Accepting your schema can help break a vicious cycle of arguments
Lev, who integrates acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) into her practice said schema therapy has changed a lot in the past decade. Before, “we’d try to help them change the actual belief,” she said.
Now, her approach is to help clients learn how their thoughts create limitations in their lives. If someone has an abandonment schema and worries their partner will leave them, Lev asks them what that thought prevents them from doing. They might realize it keeps them from setting boundaries or expressing their needs.
“This thought, it’s a cue,” Lev said. “It’s a sign to move toward being assertive or vulnerable.”
The goal isn’t to fix childhood wounds or radically change a person’s core beliefs. It’s to help people move closer to emotional maturity — or recognize when a relationship just isn’t good for them.
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