About This Resource: This interactive tool from Stafford & Associates Counseling presents four complementary ways to picture how dysfunctional schemas form — tracing early influences, the repeating patterns they create, and the symptoms that eventually bring people into therapy. It also illustrates how schemas can travel down the generations within a family, and how a therapist can “read backward” from a client’s present-day symptoms to the developmental origin of a schema. Based on the developmental model of Arntz & van Genderen (2009), this resource helps clients build a clearer picture of where their patterns come from.