I think that now I start to get what schema therapy is about.
As an adult I often had that unresolved feeling of wanting someone to have said something in the past. To have said something when I was feeling bad, neglected or ridiculed by my parents. I really wanted to have a memory now of someone having done that in the past, having said "yes you are right, yes you have the right to feel bad in such situation, it's not your fault". I wrote about this feeling of needing it here.
So it turns out that it is possible. I think that schema therapy is doing pretty much this. It is about emotionally going back in time, and with the help of the therapist validating my emotional state, as well as finding adult solutions to the child's problems while maintaining my/our adult's mindset.
It is quite embarrassing that a stranger gets an insider view into my childhood events, it feels embarrassing to me that I need something like that to give myself permission to have lived through my childhood. On the other hand I remember having dreamed during all my childhood about someone who would just understand me. I have even been imagining a friend for a short time, until I was ridiculed by my parents. The therapist is now pretty much this someone.
And it does work. I get the "fog dropping down" effect, similar to what I wrote here, except it is in regards to the past event. I suddenly see clearly how differently I could have interpreted this past situation. It feels sobering, fresh, relieving. What I did next, I have already managed to transfer the framework of what I understood about the past event to some current situations. This is exactly the piece of the puzzle that I was missing here: I knew that what I was experiencing as my identity was not adequate but I had nothing to fall back to. Now this sobering memory related to a past event is what I can fall back onto, and it is how in certain situations I can shut down the inner critic for good.