Are therapies saying the same thing, differently?

Over time, I’ve started to reflect on something interesting about the major schools of psychotherapy. Are they all trying to say the same thing, but in different ways?

Attachment theory proposes that early relationships form internal working models, expectations about ourselves and others. Schema theory feels like the cognitive articulation of those same internal working models, enduring schemas of abandonment, mistrust or defectiveness. In many ways, an internal working model is an attachment-shaped schema, a relational blueprint that becomes a lens.

Freud described personality as structured through the id, ego and superego, with defence mechanisms managing internal conflict. Internal Family Systems (IFS) echoes this structure in more contemporary language. Instead of drives and prohibitions, it speaks of parts: exiles carrying pain, managers preventing rejection, firefighters numbing distress. Where Freud described ego defences, IFS describes protectors. Different tone, similar architecture.

Rogers wrote about conditions of worth distorting the self. Maslow described self-actualisation as what unfolds once safety and belonging are secure. Schema therapy speaks of the healthy adult mode, the integrated part capable of self-soothing, boundary-setting and compassion. Self-actualisation and the healthy adult appear closely aligned.

Even CBT, often framed as present-focused and practical, works on beliefs that developed from those earlier blueprints.

Perhaps these theories are less in competition and more in conversation, mapping the same human architecture through different lenses.