Jeffrey Young

But if I'm doing that thing where I say, oh my gosh, closeness equals this, and it is a, you know, a coping skill that kept me safe in my early years, then I might have a more challenging time really pouring into those connections that are supposed to be deeper connections.

So there's a concept from schema therapy, and it was developed by Jeffrey Young, that I find really useful here.

So think of it like this.

Early relational patterns create schemas or templates.

You most likely are dealing with quite a bit of social-emotional deprivation if we're thinking about it from a schema therapy lens.

So if you are familiar with the book by Dr. Jeffrey Young, what is it called? um the book on life traps is i forget let me look it up really good no never mind i'm not going to look it up anyway this is a book on jeffrey young if you want to learn more about schemas and life traps that social and emotional deprivation might have skewed our understanding of how human connection uh reinventing your life is the name of that book by the way sorry random had to come back that is how we determine You know, how we're going to get along with others in the world, which is so important.

You know, your soft skills, interpersonal skills are more important really than your technical skills and for most areas in life, for your ability to progress and to achieve your goals that require connection, of course.

Now, something that I'd like to raise to your awareness is again that we have power here, but that does not come by manipulating other people, like literally changing the way that you talk to them.

Okay.

So Jeffrey Young created schema therapy, and he was interested in schemas that become deeply rooted and can cause problems.

Because I said everything is filtered through our experiences, that means technically experiences would change our schema, so they're flexible in that sense.

But if you have an entrenched belief about something that doesn't change despite evidence or something like that, that is potentially gonna cause problems.

For one thing, it's not aligned with reality.

So schemas that become deeply rooted and cause problems, Jeffrey Young calls early maladaptive schemas.

Enduring patterns involving your beliefs, emotions, memories, and bodily reactions that usually start in childhood when important emotional needs aren't being adequately met.

So maladaptive obviously doesn't mean that there was anything wrong with you for developing it.

And there's a lot of room for integration with other approaches, too.

Jeffrey Young's approach to helping people with personality problems.

is very similar to approaches in psychoanalysis to understanding and helping people with personality problems.

So, you know, in some ways, a good therapist is a good therapist across orientations.

And 30 years ago, I was overwhelmed and triggered and doing all the wrong things, making lots of mistakes, and I was so curious about why I could feel so incredibly intimidated when a certain type of person came into my treatment room.

I was also in the middle of working with a phenomenal team of clinicians under Dr. Jeffrey Young in Manhattan, who was developing schema therapy, which is the model that I practice, and I was so fortunate to be part of that developing team.

And so my reports of being just flooded and floored by narcissistic people led to, "Okay, you're assigned the task of working with us to figure out how we can modify and adapt this model to treat that population." Um, so it became really clear very early on that one has to be very sturdy to work with someone who's narcissistic, par- particularly the more severe form, you know, the, the higher end of the spectrum, where they become abusive and loud and cynical and critical, demanding, entitled, all of that, or interrupting you all the time.

Um, a lot of limit setting is necessary, a lot of accountability.

[laughs]

Um, it is an evidence-based model, has a lot of science support.

It was, uh, founded by Dr. Jeffrey Young.

And it evolved out of CBT and attachment theory.