The most useful conversations in schema therapy rarely happen on a stage. They happen at the back of a workshop, after the slides are off, when two clinicians who have actually done the work compare notes on what they have learned. In Dialogue is built around that kind of exchange.

On Wednesday, May 13, 2026, from 12:00 to 1:00 PM EDT, the Jeffrey Young Schema Therapy Association opened the series with one of the people who has shaped how the model is practiced with the most complex presentations clinicians ever encounter: Ida Shaw, in conversation with Joan Farrell, on Schema Therapy for Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Translating 50 personalities into 5 modes

For a clinician sitting across from a client with DID, the clinical picture can feel impossibly crowded. Twenty alters. Forty. Sometimes fifty or more, each with a name, a history, an age, a job inside the system. The standard map does not fit. The standard pace does not fit. And the question every schema therapist eventually asks is the same: where do I begin?

Ida Shaw has spent decades answering that question in the room. Her work with severely traumatized clients, including those with dissociative identity disorder, has shown that the schema therapy mode model is not just compatible with DID, it is one of the few frameworks flexible enough to hold it. A system of fifty alters, when listened to carefully, almost always organizes around a familiar set of modes: Vulnerable Child, Angry Child, Punitive Parent, Detached Protector, Healthy Adult.

The names the alters carry are different. The functions they serve are not.

Ida Shaw

Why this conversation matters

Schema therapy for DID did not arrive fully formed. It was built case by case, by clinicians who refused to leave the most fragmented clients without a coherent model. Ida Shaw has been at the center of that effort, integrating limited reparenting, mode work, and schema healing into treatment for clients whose internal world is structured around survival.

What gets lost in formal training is the unscripted part. The judgment calls. How an alter introduces itself and what the therapist does in the first ninety seconds. How a Punitive Parent mode shows up wearing the face of a protector. How limited reparenting reaches a five-year-old part inside a forty-year-old client. In Dialogue is built to surface that part of the work.

What you heard

• How Ida Shaw maps a system of many alters onto the schema therapy mode model, and what she listens for when an alter first speaks.
• How limited reparenting changes when the client in front of you is a child part who has never been safely parented before.
• What Ida wishes she had known earlier in her work with dissociative clients, and what she would tell a clinician sitting with their first DID case next month.
• Where the field has consensus, where it does not, and what is still unsettled in schema therapy for dissociation.

Who In Dialogue is for

This series is built for serious clinicians. Schema therapists working with complex trauma and dissociation. Supervisors training the next cohort. Graduate students who want to hear how schema therapy actually sounds when senior practitioners think out loud together about the hardest cases. JYSTA members at every level are invited.

Frequently asked questions

What is the In Dialogue series?

In Dialogue is a JYSTA member series featuring unscripted live conversations between leaders who have shaped Schema Therapy in clinical practice, training, and research. Each session is one hour, held on Zoom, and recorded for members who cannot attend live.

Who is Ida Shaw?

Ida Shaw is an internationally recognized schema therapy trainer and supervisor and a pioneer in adapting the model for clients with severe trauma and dissociative disorders, including DID. She has trained schema therapists across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and continues to supervise clinicians working with the field’s most complex cases.

When and where was this session held?

Wednesday, May 13, 2026, from 12:00 to 1:00 PM EDT. The session was held on Zoom. The recording is available to active JYSTA members on the Mighty platform in the coming days.

Who can access the recording?

The recording is available to active JYSTA members on the Mighty platform. Membership is open to clinicians, researchers, graduate students, trainers, and supporters of the model. Join JYSTA to access future sessions and this recording.

Where can I find the recording?

The recording of this session is available to active JYSTA members on the Mighty platform in the coming days.

Watch the recording

Schema therapy was built on the conviction that the work has to reach the parts of a client that other approaches leave behind. Nowhere is that conviction tested more than in the treatment of dissociative identity disorder, where the parts are not metaphors. They are real, named, and waiting to be heard.

This is one of those conversations. We hope you were able to join us live.