Wendy Behary, LCSW
President
Thirty-five years inside the development of Schema Therapy, and one of the leading clinical voices on the treatment of narcissism.
Thirty-five years inside the development of Schema Therapy, and one of the leading clinical voices on the treatment of narcissism.
Wendy Behary began working with Jeffrey Young in 1989. At that point, Schema Therapy was still being built. She has been helping build it ever since.
The length of Wendy’s involvement reflects something about how she approaches the work itself: with the kind of sustained attention that produces genuine expertise rather than accumulated familiarity. Across thirty-five years, she has developed a clinical specialty so specific and so thoroughly researched that she stands as one of the leading clinical voices in the field on the treatment of narcissism.
Narcissistic personalities are among the most difficult clients in any therapist’s caseload, and among the most misunderstood. Where the field tended to register impossibility, Wendy registered something else: a person organized around unmet needs, defended against vulnerability by patterns that had once served a purpose. A treatment approach was built around that insight, and then she wrote the book on it. Literally.
The third edition, released in 2021, was selected by Oprah Daily as one of the top books on narcissism. The work is not about dismissing or defeating difficult people. It is about understanding what drives them, and finding a way through. That distinction is characteristic of everything Wendy does clinically.
From 2010 to 2014, Wendy served as President of the Executive Board of the International Society of Schema Therapy, having first held the role of Training and Certification Coordinator from 2008 to 2010. The Schema Therapy Development Programs Sub-Committee for ISST is currently under her chairmanship. As a founding fellow and consulting supervisor for the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, Aaron Beck’s institute, she also founded and directs the Cognitive Therapy Center of New Jersey and the Schema Therapy Institutes of NJ-NYC-DC.
Chapters in the major handbooks of the field include the Wiley Handbook of Schema Therapy, the APA’s volume on pathological narcissism, Beck’s Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders, and the Routledge collection on advances in Schema Therapy. Her most recent book, Deliberate Practice in Schema Therapy, co-authored with Joan Farrell, Anoushka Vaz, and Tony Rousmaniere, was published by the American Psychological Association in 2023. Wendy lectures to professional and general audiences internationally on Schema Therapy, narcissism, interpersonal conflict, and the particular challenge of difficult relationships.
Demonstrations of actual client interactions in the treatment room have become a signature of Wendy’s teaching, and the praise she receives for them is consistent across audiences and decades. The private practice itself is devoted primarily to treating narcissistic personality disorder, the partners and people navigating relationships with narcissists, and couples in serious difficulty. Specialized work, and Wendy has spent her career making herself the person best equipped to do it.