What are schemas?
The objective is to change those maladaptive patterns that cause you discomfort or that intercede in your daily life.
Automatic thoughts are learned messages that are at the most accessible level of consciousness. When we observe our thoughts, this level is the easiest to identify.
Intermediate beliefs are assessments, assumptions, and rules.
They are ideas that are on a deeper level. They juxtapose and imply each other, that is, we can exaggerate a fact while elaborating hypotheses or assumptions to cope with it and developing norms or rules to verify them.
The evaluations or evaluations are considered by some authors the central element to modify the ideas.
Assumptions or assumptions can be positive or negative.
The rules or norms are the self-demands or "I must" that we impose on ourselves or what we demand of others with the consequent disturbing consequence if they are not fulfilled.
The central or nuclear beliefs: they are at the deepest level of our consciousness.
They constitute the fundamental values of our identity, the most global and resounding statements about ourselves, the world and others. They can be flexible and realistic and adapt to circumstances.
Most of us hold positive and adaptive beliefs, but we also develop different types of negative core beliefs:
Negative central beliefs about ourselves, most of them related to helplessness and the inability to be loved.
Negative core beliefs about others ("people can't be trusted", "people can hurt me").
Negative core beliefs about life ("life is very difficult," "life is absurd").
Negative core beliefs about the world ("this world is disgraceful," "the world is chaos").
These negative beliefs that are usually global, rigid and unrealistic, we accept and believe them as if they were absolute truths, that is, they are "ego-syntonic".