Jeffrey Young
Created schema therapy for entrenched life patterns.
Founder of schema therapy, extending cognitive therapy to treat lifelong self-defeating patterns rooted in unmet childhood needs.
techniques
Change cannot be hit-or-miss. It requires constant practice.
Who they were
Jeffrey Young trained at the University of Pennsylvania and did postdoctoral work with Aaron Beck. Finding standard CBT insufficient for personality difficulties, he developed schema therapy by integrating cognitive, experiential, attachment and psychodynamic methods. He founded the Schema Therapy Institute and authored the clinical text Schema Therapy and the popular Reinventing Your Life.
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their big idea
Schema Theory
Frederic Bartlett showed that remembering is not playback but reconstruction. We file experience into mental frameworks called schemas, and when we recall, we rebuild the story from those frameworks, quietly reshaping it to fit what we already expect.
The approach they founded
Schema Therapy
Reaches the old patterns formed by unmet childhood needs, and reworks them through emotion and the relationship.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Young — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.