Wendy Behary

Wendy Behary, LCSW

President

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.

That longevity is not simply a matter of tenure. It reflects something about how Behary approaches the work itself: with the kind of sustained attention that produces genuine expertise rather than accumulated familiarity. Over thirty-five years, she has developed a clinical specialty so specific and so thoroughly researched that she has become, by any reasonable measure, the leading practitioner in her field on the subject of narcissism.

The specialty chose her as much as she chose it. Narcissistic personalities are among the most difficult clients in any therapist’s caseload, and among the most misunderstood. Where others saw impossibility, Behary saw a person organized around unmet needs, defended against vulnerability by patterns that had once served a purpose. She built a treatment approach around that insight, and then she wrote the book on it. Literally.

Disarming the Narcissist has been translated into sixteen languages. The third edition, released in 2021, was selected by Oprah Daily as one of the top books on narcissism. It is not a book about dismissing or defeating difficult people. It is a book about understanding what drives them, and finding a way through. That distinction is characteristic of everything Behary does clinically.

Her standing in the field runs the full length of the model’s modern history. She served as President of the Executive Board of the International Society of Schema Therapy from 2010 to 2014, having first served as Training and Certification Coordinator from 2008 to 2010. She currently chairs the Schema Therapy Development Programs Sub-Committee for ISST. She is a founding fellow and consulting supervisor for the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, Aaron Beck’s institute, and is the founder and director of the Cognitive Therapy Center of New Jersey and the Schema Therapy Institutes of NJ-NYC-DC.

Her publications span three decades and include chapters in the major handbooks of the field: 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.

She is known for something that cannot be trained directly: the ability to make complex clinical material feel alive. Her demonstrations of actual client interactions in the treatment room have become a signature of her teaching, and the praise she receives for them is consistent across audiences and decades.

Her private practice is devoted primarily to treating narcissistic personality disorder, the partners and people navigating relationships with narcissists, and couples in serious difficulty. It is specialized work, and she has spent her career making herself the person best equipped to do it.

Wendy Behary serves as President of the Jeffrey Young Schema Therapy Association. It is a role that fits her history in the field: she has never simply participated in the development of Schema Therapy. She has helped lead it.