John Gasiewski, PhD, LCSW
Treasurer
A psychotherapist who has spent two decades doing the work most clinicians would rather hand off.
John Gasiewski has been seeing clients as a cognitive-behaviorally oriented psychotherapist since 2002, though the work he does now rests on more than thirty years of experience that started long before the practice did. Earlier chapters of that career moved through corporate and partnership life, hospitals, academic settings, and private practice, which is a wider arc than most clinicians get. The pattern tends to surface in session. People who have spent years inside complicated organizations sometimes look up mid-sentence and ask, with a kind of relief, whether he has lived this himself. John usually has.
The clinical focus has narrowed over time toward terrain most therapists are happy to leave to someone else: narcissism, the wear it leaves on the people around it, and estrangement.
None of these are tidy subjects. John came to them through Schema Therapy in the mid-2000s, after starting training and supervision with Wendy Behary, author of Disarming the Narcissist. The collaboration with Wendy has continued for years and remains a central thread in how he thinks about the work. As an Advanced Certified Schema Therapist and ISST-approved supervisor in Individual Schema Therapy, he has presented internationally and across the New York metropolitan area on anger modes, and has published on estrangement as a route to schema healing, which is a less obvious framing than it might sound. Distance, in some cases, is the form repair takes. Other clinical interests include limited reparenting, the use of imagery and play in therapy, and helping patients integrate modes in ways that hold together rather than fracture under stress.
The training is layered, and the layers are not decorative.
A Master of Social Work from New York University and a PhD in Social Foundations of Education from the University of Virginia anchor John’s academic side. His doctoral focus was on developmental and learning theory alongside managerial psychology. Psychoanalytic training at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City sits next to ongoing EMDR work and decades of personal practice in insight meditation, yoga, mantra, and controlled breathing. Some of that material has gone outward as well, into corporate and non-profit settings, where John has presented on Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy as a way of working with anxiety and depression.
Within the broader schema therapy world, John has put in the kind of committee hours that hold a field together.
Twice, John has chaired the ISST Election Committee. For several years, he served as ISST US/Canada Regional Certification Coordinator, and he currently sits on the ISST Supervisory Skills Development Committee as both a member and co-trainer. The private practice spans New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, and his memberships include the International Society of Schema Therapy, the National Association of Social Workers, and the New Jersey Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapists.