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Trauma schemas are evoked in current behaviors outside the session as well as increasingly by behaviors inside the session. Trauma schemas are interpersonal, relational structures that serve to stabilize the client’s inner feeling of uncertainty regarding the boundaries between the past and the present, and between danger and safety. When these trauma schemas are employed, they usually surface as means by which the client externalizes his or her fear or shame and experiences danger emanating from the environment, usually from another person. The other person (in this case the therapist) will feel misunderstood and unfairly blamed. The unfortunate paradox is that in the attempt to reduce ambiguity (and the possible reexperience of fear), the trauma schema re-creates the division between victim and perpetrator from the original event, imposing the past upon the present, again. When this occurs within the therapeutic interaction, it is called the gap.
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