It is a structured, longer-term therapy (usually at least 2 years). In therapist-y terms it is based on CBT and with elements of gestalt. The relationship with T is of central importance. It is recommended for people with personality disorders, but it's not only for people with PDs but for anyone who has long-standing problems that have been with them throughout their life.

In my layman terms, basically it's about identifying core beliefs that are causing problems in life. These are the schemas, in my therapy we call them lifetraps. Examples are the defectiveness lifetrap, which is the core belief that "I am a bad and fundamentally flawed person", or the abandonment lifetrap, "anyone I love and care about will ultimately leave me". You spend time exploring how those beliefs came about - it's usually because you didn't have important emotional needs met during childhood. So that means that these kinds of beliefs were adaptive during childhood, in the sense that they helped you to survibe, but they are maladaptive now. In my therapy we picture the lifetrap as a little green monster and practice talking back to it, which is something I eventually internalised as a kind of positive self-talk.

Next you collect a lot of evidence about those beliefs, and working out that they are not true. You also do a lot of imagery work. For me, I could understand the evidence that the lifetraps were not true, but I wasn't able to really believe that they were not true, until we did the imagery work. Imagery work targets your emotions rather than your logic, and I found it very powerful.

Then once you have agreed that the lifetraps or schemas are not true and not desirable, you start working on thinking differently, and also behaving differently,using lots of different strategies and techniques.

I also notice that my T is using the therapeutic relationship to teach me about what a healthy relationship looks like - that part is not in the book, because I think the book is designed so it could be a self-help book if your lifetraps are not too difficult to work on alone!

It is in-depth work and it takes a long time, but it has been truly life-changing for me.

The book is called "Reinventing your life" by Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko.