Jeffrey Young Schema Therapy Association

20/07/2026

"Whose need are you protecting by never pushing?"

For two months, Dana had avoided bringing one particular client to supervision. Whenever she named an emotion, the client froze, and Dana was convinced she was doing something wrong.

She could not quite bring herself to let the group look too closely. Then, in a peer space built around curiosity rather than comparison, she finally said it aloud.

That was when a colleague asked the question above.

Because everyone in the room shared the same schema therapy language, they could see a pattern Dana could not yet see for herself. Her own Self-Sacrifice and Subjugation schemas were shaping the work. She was softening every intervention to protect the client from discomfort, and perhaps to protect herself from the possibility of disapproval.

Her care was genuine. But care had quietly become avoidance.

That insight did not emerge because someone knew more than Dana. It emerged because she felt safe enough to be honest, and because her colleagues understood the patterns beneath the moment.

This is what we mean by a professional home. Not coursework or credentials, but a place where clinicians can speak candidly, examine the filters they bring into the room, and find support from people who understand the weight of the work from the inside.

JYSTA exists because clinicians should not have to do deep, demanding work alone. Whether you are looking for support, ready to share hard-won experience, or hoping to help shape the future of schema therapy, there is a place at the table for you.

Our newest article explores what belonging to a schema therapy community can offer across an entire career:

https://buff.ly/CSMinlq

16/07/2026

Some conversations deserve more than a tight edit.

Liz Lacy, LCSW-R, sat down with Wendy Behary for a full 60-minute discussion on compulsive sexual behavior and narcissism, giving the clinical thinking room to unfold naturally. Nothing edited for time.

Now fully subtitled in 10 languages, making this conversation accessible to clinicians across much of the world: Arabic, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

It joins a growing clinical library that already includes conversations with Ida Shaw and Joan Farrell on dissociative identity disorder and with Wendy Behary on Jeffrey Young's earlier discussion.

Members can now watch the full recording in JYSTA's Mighty community. Join at: https://buff.ly/WSPCRNb

If you're part of the schema therapy community, we'd love to know: who would you like us to invite into the series next?

22/06/2026

Six months into the work, a man's wife joined her first session and opened with one line:
"You're John's good mommy, right? The mom he never had."
She'd seen it before he could say it. The therapist, Liz Lacy, hadn't softened the behavior or excused the betrayal. She'd done something schema therapists are trained to do, and few others are: she found the lonely child under the arrogance and refused to look away.
That's the moment that stays with you from Friday's In Dialogue, where Liz sat down with Wendy Behary to work through one of the hardest, most stigmatized presentations in clinical practice. Not the behavior. The person underneath, and the long road back to a marriage everyone assumed was over.
The full conversation, along with Liz's complete presentation, will be dropping shortly in the JYSTA member library.
Membership is how you get in the room for these, every month. Come join us.

18/06/2026

You will not want to miss this hot topic! For clinicians, and for anyone interested in Schema Therapy. Everyone who is interested in Schema Therapy may join at a Community level. Connection is the key. The need for love and we sabotage ourselves over and over again. On Friday at noon, we can count on Wendy to explore this need with Liz at its deepest level!

Your toughest case could get worked through live, by two of the field's most experienced clinicians.
That's what In Dialogue actually is. Not a webinar you watch from a distance, but a live room where you're in the chat with Liz Lacy, Wendy Behary, and other clinicians as the conversation unfolds. You can ask questions in the moment. And questions sent in ahead get chosen for deeper discussion, which means your stuck case could be the one they take apart on Friday.
The time-sensitive part: questions are open through tomorrow. Submit by Thursday, and yours is in the running.
Tune in Friday, June 19, at noon ET. Live for JYSTA members, recording dropped afterward in the JYSTA social platform, Mighty, alongside Ida Shaw on DID, Wendy Behary's Opening Keynote with Jeffrey Young, and the full In Dialogue series.
Become a member, then send your question. Both before Friday.
Join link below.
What's the case you'd put in front of and
?

17/06/2026

Your toughest case could get worked through live, by two of the field's most experienced clinicians.
That's what In Dialogue actually is. Not a webinar you watch from a distance, but a live room where you're in the chat with Liz Lacy, Wendy Behary, and other clinicians as the conversation unfolds. You can ask questions in the moment. And questions sent in ahead get chosen for deeper discussion, which means your stuck case could be the one they take apart on Friday.
The time-sensitive part: questions are open through tomorrow. Submit by Thursday, and yours is in the running.
Tune in Friday, June 19, at noon ET. Live for JYSTA members, recording dropped afterward in the JYSTA social platform, Mighty, alongside Ida Shaw on DID, Wendy Behary's Opening Keynote with Jeffrey Young, and the full In Dialogue series.
Become a member, then send your question. Both before Friday.
Join link below.
What's the case you'd put in front of and
?

16/06/2026

You'd have called her the difficult one too. She interrupted, she monitored, she had a timeline of every lie. Her husband sat quietly beside her looking wronged, and the easy read in the room was that she was the problem.
The easy read was backwards. She was frightened. She had begun to realize she might be living with someone she didn't really know, and the vigilance everyone found exhausting was what fear looks like when the floor of a marriage gives way. She wasn't a critical overcontroller. She was a person whose sense of reality had been quietly pulled apart, and almost no one around her, sometimes not even the therapist, saw it for what it was.
That case gets missed constantly, and the numbers are part of why. Compulsive sexual behavior is more common than bipolar disorder and about twice as common as OCD. You screen for both of those on instinct. This one rarely shows up as itself, so it arrives in disguise: the affair, the p**n fight, the marriage that went cold, the "difficult" spouse. Treat only the behavior and you'll keep mistaking the frightened partner for the controlling one. Schema therapy works a layer underneath, and that's where Liz Lacy and Wendy Behary are headed Friday.
Friday, June 19, noon ET. Live for JYSTA members, recording in your portal afterward, alongside Ida Shaw on DID, the Jeffrey Young keynote, and the full In Dialogue series.
To be there Friday, become a member before Friday: https://buff.ly/eomFn93
Who's the "difficult" partner in your caseload who might be the frightened one?

14/06/2026

Friday, June 19, noon ET. Liz Lacy and Wendy Behary, In Dialogue.
The topic is one most of us have sat across from and fumbled at least once: what happens when a client's hunger for connection becomes the coping style itself. The longing for love, running the whole case.
Two clinicians worth an hour of anyone's week, thinking it through in real time. The kind of conversation you don't get to watch often, how experienced people actually reason through a stuck case, not the cleaned-up version in a textbook.
It's live for JYSTA members, and the recording stays in the Mighty Network for members afterward. Both sit behind the same door. If you want to be in the room Friday, the time to join is before Friday.
Become a member: https://buff.ly/eomFn93

13/06/2026

There's a kind of client who fills the room. Drops by between sessions. Sends the four-page letter. Finds you online. And every warm bone in your body says, just let it go, they need this.
Setting that limit feels like rejection. So you don't. And the relationship slowly becomes the exact dynamic that brought them in.
Liz Lacy has spent years inside this pattern, where the hunger for connection turns into its own trap. On June 19 she's in conversation with Wendy Behary for JYSTA In Dialogue, getting into what it takes to hold the boundary and meet the need at the same time. Two clinicians worth an hour of your week, on something most of us have fumbled at least once.
Live June 19, then yours to rewatch through the JYSTA Mighty Network.
Save your spot: https://buff.ly/eomFn93
When did you last let a boundary slide because holding it felt unkind?

11/06/2026

He described the affairs in the same flat voice you might use for a commute. No tears. No defensiveness. Then his face changed, just for a second, and a frightened boy surfaced and vanished behind the calm.

That flicker is the whole case. Not the behavior. The boy.

On the JYSTA blog, Travis Atkinson, LCSW, LICSW writes about what schema therapy sees in hypersexuality that other models miss: the unmet needs underneath, the mode cycle that drives relapse, and the moment a case turns when a clinician stops chasing the behavior and goes looking for the child.

Liz Lacy, who built the Addicted to Love, Starved for Connection framework, brings a case like this to life with Wendy Behary in our next In Dialogue: Friday, June 19, 12 to 1 PM ET, live inside the JYSTA community on Mighty. Come with your questions. If you can't make it live, the recording waits for you in the member library.

Read the article and join us: https://buff.ly/flHrW6h

04/06/2026

The conversation just got even better.

Joining Liz Lacy for In Dialogue on June 19 is Wendy Behary, President of JYSTA, who has worked on this material alongside Liz before. Two clinicians who trust each other, unscripted, on healing hypersexuality through schema therapy.

In Dialogue Featuring Liz Lacy with Wendy Behary. June 19, 12:00 PM ET, live on Mighty.

Become a member to take part → https://buff.ly/b8LYREb