Schema Mode Inventory (SMI)

What are Schema Modes?

As children, we don't have many ways to respond to difficult or dangerous situations. A child's coping strategies are simply fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. We use them to reduce distress in ourselves or others by pleasing others, staying quiet or detaching from what is happening.

As we get older and we are no longer in the same environment, our old coping strategies don't fit anymore and start to cause us problems. Our once adaptive childhood survival strategies become maladaptive in adulthood. Schema Modes are one way of categorising and labelling different coping strategies that have the tendency to become problematic.    

Identifying your own Schema Modes can help you see the problems they are causing. You can then choose whether to stick with that childhood coping mode or enact a different choice. Sometimes it is appropriate to use fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, but perhaps not as often as you have.

The Schema Mode Inventory (SMI)

Developed in 2008 and revised in 2009, Jeffery Young and his team created a questionnaire for measuring the strength of Schema Modes. Using 124 questions, it measures 14 modes, including Innate Child Modes, Maladaptive Coping Modes, Dysfunctional Parent Modes and Healthy Modes.

It is important to note that there is contention with the Schema Modes measured in the current version of the SMI. Particularly in relation to the Enraged Child, Impulsive Child and Undisciplined Child modes. Some Schema Mode Therapy practitioners feel these labels feed into the messages that the child was the problem, instead of remembering that the child is Vulnerable and the problem is with the dysfunctional parents.

This online version has been developed by Unpack Psychology and The Psych Collective.

You can complete the SMI for free below: