Travis Atkinson, LCSW
Vice President of Media
Thirty years inside the schema therapy community, and a graduate degree in management with a focus on marketing brought to bear on the work of building it.
Thirty years inside the schema therapy community, and a graduate degree in management with a focus on marketing brought to bear on the work of building it.
When Travis Atkinson joined the Executive Board of the International Society of Schema Therapy as Media Coordinator in 2014, ISST had a presence. By the time he stepped down six years later, it had an audience. Membership quadrupled during that period, the result of sustained, strategic work in communications and outreach that he treated as seriously as any clinical problem.
As a founding member of the Executive Board of the New York Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy in 2010, Travis helped shape the communications foundation of one of the field’s most respected regional training organizations. Bringing that experience to ISST four years later was the natural next step. By that point, more than a decade had been spent thinking carefully about how clinical communities grow, and why most of them don’t.
Combined with thirty years of clinical practice, it is an uncommon pairing, and it is what allows Travis to think about field-building as a discipline rather than an afterthought. Organizations have been built with the same care he brings to training clinicians. As founder and director of the Schema Therapy Training Center of New York, he delivers ISST-approved certification programs entirely online, covering all required coursework for both individual and couples Schema Therapy. Clinicians across the world have completed their full certification coursework through these programs.
That recognition is reserved for those whose contributions have shaped the field over decades. Training with Dr. Jeffrey Young began in 1994, and Travis is one of the co-founders of Schema Therapy for Couples. Advanced Certification as a Schema Therapist, Supervisor, and Trainer in Individual and Couples Schema Therapy sits alongside certification as an Emotionally Focused Therapist and Supervisor and as a Gottman Method Couples Therapist.
What Travis brings to JYSTA is uncommon: graduate-level training in marketing, six years of measurable results at the international association level, and three decades inside the clinical community he is now helping to reach. The work in media and communications has never been separate from his clinical identity. It has been an extension of it. The same conviction that drives his training programs, that Schema Therapy deserves the widest possible reach without sacrificing the integrity of the model, drives everything he builds in the public sphere.