Schema Therapy Blog

My ex-partner and I both developed mistrust/abuse schemas while growing up. This occasionally caused problems for us. I think his mistrust schema was a bit deeper than mine.

After having my car serviced at the dealership one day, I mentioned during a phone call that I didn’t have the oil changed this time. He was surprised by that, expecting that the oil absolutely needed to be changed at the time of each 5,000-mile service.

He started becoming angry about this, speaking in a very defensive tone, insisting that I go back and get the oil changed, and that the car dealership was intentionally ripping me off. Since he’s more knowledgeable about cars than I am, I listened to him, but I was skeptical.

I usually trusted his judgement, but, due to childhood experiences, I can switch from trusting to intensely mistrustful in an instant if signs of uncertainty or certain triggers appear. It’s a learned defense mechanism that was probably necessary as a child, but it’s harmful to intimate and professional relationships as an adult when it deploys at the wrong time.

Although I didn’t realize it immediately, my partner’s louder-than-usual voice and demanding way of speaking was subconsciously reminding me of my father’s way of ranting about things as if he were an authority, even when he wasn’t correct.  As a young child, I would sometimes notice my Dad speaking authoritatively about things that I already knew were incorrect, and there were many other reasons why my father was not to be trusted.

So, in addition to feeling uncertain about the legitimacy of my partner’s complaints about the service I had received, I began to feel even more mistrust toward my partner because he was acting a bit like my father. He could have chosen to speak in a different manner, but didn’t.

I told him that my oil changes were always every 10,000 miles, and not every 5,000 miles as he expected, and that it seemed unlikely to me that a major automobile manufacturer would expose itself to liability by consistently skimping on service that’s known to be required.  Nonetheless, I entertained the possibility that he might be right, since corporations have earned a reputation of not always being the best-acting citizens.

He continued insisting that the dealership was ripping me off, and I became increasingly annoyed. I started feeling that I was an object of his frustration in addition to the dealership because I was refusing to act on his advice in any way unless I learned for certain that he was right.

My mistrust was kicking in and I was starting to feel angry toward him, just like I would feel as a kid when my father would verbally assault me with his know-it-all attitude. I don’t want to mistrust people, even though I sometimes must. I especially don’t want to mistrust my own partner.

Unknowingly, I started to internalize the situation and feel like perhaps I was at partially at fault for all of this, that I was somehow defective for not recognizing that I needed an oil change every 5,000 miles instead of every 10,000 miles, and that I was weak and unassertive for not demanding the oil change. Perhaps I deserved the implied or assumed criticism of myself…  Not!

He largely monopolized that phone conversation with that negative energy  (like many others), but I eventually got fed up with his ranting and lack of proof that I had been “taken.”

So… what if maybe he were right?  While we were still on the phone with each other, I did an Internet search and learned that, yes, my vehicle only requires an oil change every 10,000 miles using the synthetic oil that is prescribed for it.

It’s often a good feeling when one learns that one is right about something which initially appeared unsure.

Still, this didn’t feel like a victory of any kind to me because I wasn’t seeing the situation as a competition.  I merely felt relieved to know that his annoying rant would now end and that my vehicle service was done properly … just like when my Dad would end a fit of verbal abuse directed at me, I felt relieved.

Due to my own mistrust schema, I could easily have verbally lashed out in self-defense at him in return for the perceived disrespect that I received during that phone call. But I didn’t. That probably helped our relationship, at least temporarily.

Looking back, the self-control that I managed to muster during those moments was my victory. “Winning” the argument didn’t matter. With some couples, this could have resulted in a major argument with each partner telling the other, in raised voices, that they don’t know what the heck they’re talking about.  Some folks seem to thrive on arguing with their partners; that’s just not me.

I could have explained to my partner how I felt after that phone call, in case it were important to him, but I never did. My mistake.

I was just learning to understand my feelings back then, and that they actually mattered to my overall well-being (all new to me), but he had already made it clear that he didn’t want to talk about such things.

So much unmitigated pain accumulated in me from so many little, unacknowledged and individually unimportant, negative incidents in my life like this over the years that I finally imploded, first with Major Depression, then a year and a half later by leaving my partner, even though it’s not really his fault.

Although I had my own emotional victory on this phone call in my self-restraint, excessive self-restraint isn’t always correct either (emotional inhibition schema, I own that one too). Frustration and anger do need to be expressed, constructively, to make sure it doesn’t turn into depression at a later date. Depression is often called “anger turned inward.”

After that phone call ended, I didn’t have a warm loving feeling about my partner for a few hours at least. I was glad that I was sleeping in my house that night, and he in his.  At best, it felt like just another situation I would have to tolerate in the name of love, if I really wanted love, over and over–much like I had to tolerate constant aggression in my family home growing up, never feeling much true love.

The problem with a mistrust/abuse schema (or any other schema for that matter) is that reality gets distorted and we tend to automatically overreact or under-react to situations.

For example, perhaps my partner has a good point to make, but because I mistrust his intentions, I automatically refuse to accept his useful information or advice. Perhaps if he presented his argument more gently, I would listen and not mistrust him, even though it’s the same information presented.

Or perhaps I’ve reacted negatively or sarcastically to his opinion a few times because I’m not trusting him, and now he shuts down and forever stops talking about those certain things that might be useful for me to know because he doesn’t want to endure more negative reactions from me.

You can leave two people’s schemas fighting in a room and come back later, assured that they’ll still be there, automatically fighting each other, yelling and screaming, and pushing each others’ buttons.

Trust is really hard for me to do, but I realize that without it, I’ll have no  relationships with anybody.  I don’t need large numbers of friends like some people do, but I do need to have a few, and most of us do.

If we allow ourselves to live life with an unconscious attitude of constant mistrust toward other people and the world in general, it can be difficult to keep friends and acquaintances, to relate to coworkers, and to keep our romantic relationships stable and satisfying.

Our own excessive mistrust can turn back on us and contribute further to our own unhappiness.

Basic mistrust is a useful and necessary thing, taught to us as children so that we can protect ourselves from people who might have questionable intentions.

However, some of us learned excessive mistrust–much more than we need–as a result of verbal, emotional or physical abuse during childhood, from family or peers.

With a mistrust/abuse schema, we become cynical and doubting about others’ intentions, perhaps downright fearing them, perhaps feeling like the world is always out to get us, to rip us off, to annoy us intentionally.

We might develop an automatic reaction to turn inward and dismiss or disbelieve things that people tell us, and we might fear getting too close to people in general, especially those who are different from us in some way, which we’re not able to evaluate.

We might also mistrust people who in some ever-so-small way remind us of the people who abused, bullied or failed to protect us when we were younger.

In a romantic relationship, we might be able to hide our mistrust schema for a while.  Then, as the relationship deepens, as we know more about each other, we might start doubting or even unconsciously fearing our partner, worried that we’re going to be taken advantage of in some way that we can’t control–a bit like it was when were growing up.

In this way, we actually start pushing our partner away, though they may have no idea why we’re acting so aloof.

We might go even further and end up feeling that it’s not only other human beings that can’t be trusted.  Perhaps we feel that we can’t even  trust our own selves to do what’s right for ourselves, since we’re human too (this hooks into the defectiveness schema).

Development of my mistrust/abuse schema

Although my childhood was stable in some ways, neither of my parents were all that stable emotionally.  What a pair…  they constantly argued and yelled at each other, both of them having control issues and needing to be right about everything.

I rarely saw true love–in fact, as a youngster, I used to roll my eyes at expressions of love in movies because it seemed so phony.  My parents thought that was funny, though they should have been concerned.

What I did see was my mother trying her best, in vain, to be the hard-working, stereotypically good wife, 1960s’ style, with a grumpy, demanding and narcissistic husband that she rightfully didn’t trust, and who was occasionally absent for long stretches of time due to his job.  She had an alcoholic father who was largely absent in her childhood.

They yelled at us kids a lot, and hit us a bit.  They called it punishment.  Today it would be considered abusive, but we never thought about that back then.  We thought that the only abused kids were the ones who had visible bruises.

At dinner time, I sometimes tried not to speak too much, and I would leave the table as soon as possible after eating, hoping to not get in another argument with my father.  I could never tell what would annoy him and start a shouting match, but I could be certain that something would.

From a very young age, I did not trust my parents and never felt I could fully confide in them.  I remember a moment when I was around 6 or 7 tears old, Mom was trying to sweetly coax me to tell her the truth about something (“You can tell me, I’m your mother”), but I had already learned to not tell her anything she doesn’t want to hear.  I was already too familiar with her hateful side, even though she could be quite loving much of the time.

Besides, I had already figured out that telling the truth didn’t always matter because they would believe what they wanted to believe.  I couldn’t trust them to listen to me and I knew I could occasionally get punished for things I didn’t do (my brother was a good liar).  My brother and I–he four years younger than I–learned to argue in raised voices about everything just like our parents did.  What a mess…

My parents kept a roof over our heads, good homemade food on the table, and they worked hard.  I thank them for that; it’s so easy to take good stuff like that for granted, especially when it’s time to look back at the not-so-good stuff.

But that wasn’t enough to earn my trust.  They verbally abused us kids (and each other) daily.  I looked forward to a day when I would be big enough to get some revenge and abuse my father in return.  I usually felt completely alone, with a partial connection with my mother, and none with my father or brother.

There’s more…  for me, mistrust wasn’t just something I learned through abusive experiences with my parents.  My mother actively taught us not to trust people because, as far as she was concerned, they would only have their own interests in mind.  She apparently grew up with a mistrust/abuse schema of her own, and its power over her likely grew stronger from her endless bad experiences with my father.

Ironically, it was probably helpful that she taught us not to trust people, since us children would soon learn that we couldn’t trust her either.  At a young age, I couldn’t understand why her “little white lies,” as she called them, were OK to tell.

This story isn’t just about my mistrust/abuse schema; it ties in with my subjugation and emotional deprivation schemas as well.  Schemas overlap each other and aren’t clean-cut entities; they are merely intellectual constructs that allow us to more easily pinpoint and investigate stories of our negative patterns of feelings and actions, along with their origins.

My mistrust/abuse schema in my adult years

Just recently, I was speaking with my aunt (my late Mom’s sister) about trust issues and she cautioned me that I shouldn’t ever say too much because what I say might be used against me.

I agreed with her in principle, but added that if I never expose anything of myself to anyone, nobody has anything to like about me either, so I’ll never develop any friendships.  Sadly, I’ve only recently learned this lesson, after decades of self-alienation.

In my early adult years, I didn’t notice my mistrust for people.  I thought it was correct and intelligent to feel that way, since that’s how I was brought up, and apparently my aunt feels that way too.

Nonetheless, I would sometimes notice people who were more mistrusting than me, and think that their feelings were exaggerated and unrealistic.  It would never occur to me that I was like that too, just to a lesser degree.

As a “gifted child,” my learned mistrust served me well in college where I was able to translate it into a strong ability to analyze and dissect ideas in so many courses involving critical thinking.  I still today pride myself on this strength that not everyone has.

But I was not to have any kind of romantic relationship for several years, so I wasn’t yet seeing that my intellectual success wouldn’t guarantee any kind of emotional competency in the bedroom.

Surprisingly, I had no conscious trust issues in my first long-term romantic relationship, which lasted about seven years.  A major reason for this is that I didn’t fully give myself to the relationship.

I had a confidence and detachment during that period of my life where I was most concerned with pursuing my own life path, so when our paths began to diverge, we simply separated.  I was devastated by my loss, but accepted that the time had come to move on, and I did, despite the panic attacks that went on for close to a year.

Immediately following that break-up, I took a chance and moved to the West Coast to pursue a budding relationship, again having no problems trusting this new partner, fully knowing that it was all a gamble that might fail.

That relationship didn’t even last a year, but I had no bad feelings about our separation, beyond general disappointment and a vague feeling of having been used.  I was starting to really like some aspects of this new place, while disliking other aspects.

Emotionally however, problems that I wouldn’t notice for years were starting to accumulate.  My new job in my new city was more corporate than the creative or working-class environments where I had previously worked.

I highly mistrusted the people in this semi-corporate environment, even though they were mostly friendly and in my age group.  The result was that I made almost no new friends during the 3.5 years I worked there.

My interests were quite different from most people there since I had spent most of my early adult life in creative and academic environments.  I had no interest in discussing the things they talked about in the lunch room–sports, nice clothing, cars, financial success–all that came off as shallow to me.

Despite all my cultural studies in college, I was unable to accept these coworkers who I presumed were so different from me.  My ever-present mistrust prevented me from connecting to these people on any level except for the most meaningless small talk.

Several schemas cross paths in this story in addition to mistrust: social isolation, emotional deprivation, and defectiveness. I hope to write about those later.

I was a victim of what I now call “the curse of the working class,” an learned assumption that those who step too far out of their working-class upbringing to embrace work in a more white-collar environment have somehow betrayed their blue-collar roots and become inauthentic.  In reality, a job in a corporate environment is a job like any other, with many pluses and minuses, one you can choose to like or dislike.

When I was laid off from that job during an economic downturn, I can’t help but wonder if I was one of the first to be sent away because I was so distant, even though I was superficially friendly.

I was technically more competent than many people at that company, and I was paid a salary that was lower than my worth.  I was certainly not laid off for reasons related to my competency.

Perhaps people at that company just found it creepy that they knew little about me after working with me for 3.5 years.  Thanks to my mistrust schema, I simply felt so alienated by the office environment there that I couldn’t open up to most of my coworkers.

My next job would last 12 years at an unstable company, one year at a time, with omnipresent threats of layoffs, and I would socially sabotage myself there too. I stayed aloof and unapproachable, again due to my learned mistrust of people, always afraid I would be thrown out with the next round of layoffs if I let people know who I really am, although I did really well there technically too.

Though I hadn’t recognized it yet, depression was slowly slipping into my life around the time I finally changed jobs again a few years ago.  I found myself in a new work environment even more corporate than the previous one, but a bit more supportive and relaxed in some ways, contrary to my expectations.

These days, as I work through therapy and see how much mistrust I’ve uselessly carried into the present from my past, unintentionally alienating others as well as myself over the years, I find myself working on cultivating acquaintances at my new workplace.

It’s likely that most of these acquaintances at work will never become deep, close friends due to our many differences, and that’s perfectly OK. Not everyone needs to become a close friend.  However, becoming part of a network of acquaintances where I actually belong helps me to feel more grounded.

I’ve found that it is possible to develop respectful professional relationships with people at work with whom I have little in common, just by virtue of the service that the other person and I provide for each other on the job. I don’t need to agree with their political or religious views and we don’t usually have a need to discuss those things. I can recognize intrinsically good people when I interact with them.

I’ve even gone so far as to carefully hint at the taboo topics of depression and psychotherapy in conversation with several people at work (after much deliberation, since I don’t want to talk about these subjects with just anyone).  By doing so, I now have “secret bonds” with a few folks at work with whom I’m not otherwise strongly connected.

Many of these “workplace acquaintance interactions” are not that deep, but I’ve noticed that they are generally positive and trust-building in tiny ways.  If I have many of these little positive interactions during a day at work, and the day has few negative experiences to counter them, I can end the day feeling reasonably happy.

That is an accomplishment: keep doing anything that makes you feel better, whatever it is, however small it is, it all adds up.  Don’t just try to paste on a phony smile, that may not help.

Depression seems to develop the same way: hundred or thousands of little tiny things that aren’t important individually kept piling up ever-so-slowly until I felt totally negative about everything in the world, including myself.