A Model Worth Protecting. A Mission Worth Joining. Amazing
JYSTA exists to advance schema therapy without losing what makes it work. That means keeping Jeffrey Young’s original framework at the center of how the model is taught, practiced, and developed across the Americas and beyond.
Our Mission
Increase awareness and promote visibility of Schema Therapy in the Americas through education, training, professional development, and networking. All clinicians who value protecting the science and the integrity of the evidence-based model, which is the heart of Schema Therapy, are welcome to join.
The schemas are not a starting point. They are the point.
Jeffrey Young spent decades building something the field did not yet have. A model that identifies the core emotional needs every human being carries. A model that maps precisely what formed in childhood to block those needs from being met. And a model that provides a specific pathway to dismantle those blocks and build new patterns so those needs are actually met. Not approximated. Not managed. Not supplemented with other approaches. Met. That is schema therapy. That is what this association exists to protect.
OUR STANDARD
What We Refuse to Compromise
Every association claims to advance its field. Few are willing to say what they will not do to grow.
JYSTA will not promote training that treats Schema Therapy as a technique menu rather than a complete model. We will not blur the framework into adjacent approaches for the sake of broader appeal. We will not treat the schemas as a starting point to move past on the way to something else.
The reason is simple. Clinicians who use Schema Therapy seriously are doing some of the most demanding clinical work in the field, and the patients they treat are often the ones other approaches could not reach. That work requires a model practiced at full depth, taught by people who understand it from the inside, and held to a standard that does not erode under pressure to scale.
That standard is what JYSTA exists to hold.
Where Conviction Becomes Practice
Standards live or die in rooms. JYSTA’s work happens in the rooms where clinicians actually meet the model: symposiums, training events, case consultations, and the smaller conversations that follow.
Members come to challenge each other’s thinking, not confirm it. They bring cases that did not go the way they hoped. They ask questions that do not have clean answers. They pressure-test the model against the patients sitting in their own consulting rooms.
Every conversation, every training, every exchange within this community is oriented around the same question: are we advancing the model, or diluting it? That question is not rhetorical. It is the standard against which JYSTA measures everything it does.
The work of protecting a model this precise does not happen in position statements. It happens in rooms where serious clinicians do serious work together.
Our Community
JYSTA’s membership spans licensed clinicians, pre-licensed therapists, researchers, educators, and students across disciplines and career stages. Some are encountering schema therapy for the first time. Others have practiced it for decades. What connects them is not where they trained or how long they have been in the field. It is how they approach the work: with curiosity, with rigor, and with genuine care for the people sitting across from them in the room.
The community is rooted in the Americas, where schema therapy remains vastly underserved relative to the number of clinicians hungry for serious training and sustained engagement with the model. North and South America are where JYSTA is planted. But the work does not stop at any border, and neither does membership. Clinicians, researchers, and students from anywhere in the world who take the original framework seriously belong here.
CONNECTION
Clinical work can be isolating. The problems schema therapists encounter rarely have simple answers, and the best thinking about them rarely happens alone. JYSTA connects practitioners across the Americas and beyond so the work does not have to happen in isolation.
EXCHANGE
The model grows through dialogue. JYSTA creates structured opportunities for clinicians to share clinical experience, challenge assumptions, and engage with the questions that serious schema therapy practice keeps generating. Not surface-level conversation. The kind that actually sharpens the work.
GROWTH
Schema therapy demands ongoing development from the people who practice it. JYSTA supports that development through educational events, training opportunities, and sustained engagement with a community serious enough to push individual practice further than it could go alone.
OUR DIRECTION
Looking Ahead
JYSTA is building the infrastructure a field this important deserves. Live and virtual events, expanded educational resources, and a growing member platform designed around sustained engagement rather than passive access.
Schema therapy is not finished evolving. Neither is JYSTA. The association is in its early stages with a clear direction: to become the most serious professional home for schema therapy in the Americas and a meaningful presence in the broader global field. That means events where clinicians do real work together, not just listen. Educational resources built around depth rather than breadth.
And a community platform that makes sustained engagement with the model feel less like professional development and more like belonging somewhere that takes the work as seriously as you do.
This is not a directory. It is a home.
JYSTA is open to clinicians, researchers, trainers, educators, and supporters at every stage of their relationship with schema therapy. What connects members has nothing to do with credential level or years of experience. It has to do with how seriously they take the work. If you believe schema therapy deserves to be practiced with precision, taught with integrity, and advanced without losing what makes it work, you already understand why this community exists. The only question is whether you are in it.