"I sat there thinking, Wait-what event? No one told me about an event. As the conversation continued, it became clear that everyone except me had been invited. I could feel my chest tighten as an old, familiar story surfaced: I'm not included. I don't belong. In that moment, my mind began to spiral. I was filtering everything through an old story-my lifelong schema of being an outsider. After the meeting, I took a step back to reflect and ask myself what else could be true."
"I realized there could be many possible explanations, so I decided to reach out by emailing one of the group members. It turned out that I hadn't received the message about the event because my email address wasn't on the group's mailing list. The experience made me think about how easily our minds fill in gaps with assumptions. We all have patterns of thinking that shape how we interpret what's happening around us-sometimes accurately, sometimes not. In psychology, these patterns are called schemas."
Schemas are mental frameworks shaped by early experiences that influence how people perceive themselves, others, and events. Repeated experiences carve deep grooves in thinking that bias interpretation and trigger automatic emotional reactions. An example shows a professional excluded from an event who immediately felt outsider fears, questioned possible explanations, reached out, and discovered a mailing-list error rather than intentional exclusion. Awareness of schemas allows questioning automatic assumptions, reflecting, and testing alternative explanations. Schemas often form to keep children safe or to make sense of pain, but protective patterns that once helped survival can constrain adult thinking, feeling, and relationships.
Read at Psychology Today
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