I came to this work through many lives.

I have been a performance artist, a singer-songwriter, a published poet, and a cirque aerialist living inside the questions of gravity, risk, beauty, and trust. I have taught Pilates for over twenty-five years, practiced AS A DOCTOR OF chiropractic medicine for fifteen, and worked intimately with the human body as a site of both suffering and intelligence. I have lived across four countries on four continents, rebuilt my life more than once, and learned through experience rather than THEORY, WHAT it means to begin again.

These paths were not detours. They were initiations.

What unites all of my work is a devotion to how life moves through us~~how vitality organizes, how it gets interrupted, and how it can be restored when we are met with attunement, rigor, and imagination. I am often told I work with equal parts precision and poetry, intellect and instinct. That balance is not an aesthetic preference; it is how healing actually happens.

As a Licensed Psychotherapist and Doctor of Chiropractic, my work bridges psyche and soma, attachment and nervous system, symbol and sensation. I specialize in Modern Orgonomy, a depth-oriented somatic psychotherapy that works directly with the rigidified defenses and adaptive strategies that once protected us but now limit our capacity for pleasure, agency, intimacy, and self-trust. Rather than analyzing content alone, we attend to the organization of energy, impulse, and relational patterning in real time.

This work is less about fixing and more about restoring contact~~supporting a return to attunement with self, others, and one’s own vitality, where connection feels embodied, resonant, and restorative.

My sessions emphasize the HOW:
—How you breathe.
—How you orient.
—How you hold back, over-function, disappear, or brace.
—How your nervous system learned to survive within constricting relational, cultural, or hierarchical structures—and how it might now learn something different.

I work deeply with attachment patterns across the lifespan, recognizing that influential bonds are not limited to early life, but are continually shaped by relationships, environments, and power dynamics over time. When these dynamics become coercive, oppressive, or misattuned, they contort self-expression and fragment our sense of agency. Healing involves not only insight, but a lived re-patterning of safety, choice, and embodied presence.

My background in performance, movement, and physical medicine allows me to listen closely to the body’s language: subtle cues of collapse, charge, withdrawal, or readiness. When appropriate, I offer somatic and nervous-system-informed interventions to support regulation, coherence, and sovereign self-contact. The body is not treated as an accessory to therapy, but as a primary source of truth.

Alongside Orgonomy, my work is informed by Attachment Theory and Jungian Psychology. I hold deep respect for the imaginal life…the symbolic, dreamlike, and mythic layers of experience….where psyche speaks in metaphor and pattern. In this sense, therapy becomes a form of alchemy: a slow, grounded process of composting what no longer serves, so something more vital can grow.

At its core, my work is relational, creative, and exacting. All parts of you are welcome: your contradictions, defenses, longings, and unlived lives. What has been disowned does not disappear; it waits. Together, we listen for what is ready to return.

Joanna works with Individuals and all FORMS of Relationship:

I work and advocate for womyn at all stages of life to free the energy trapped by oppressive demands on their physical and emotional bodies, to unenmesh from hypervigilant caretaking behaviors, and to reclaim vitality, assertion, and presence.

• Perimenopausal and menopausal womyn who are seeking support during this transformative life stage in navigating the epic shift into a new form of empowerment. This transition invites shedding old expectations and cultivating a bold, authentic relationship with your body and with others, even as it resists culture’s pressures to maintain a youthful, nubile ideal.

• Young womyn looking to know and empower their authentic self, setting a strond foundation for an embodied life, and build their distinctive voice in the world.

I work with men who are ready to engage with their emotional bodies beyond anger and/or shut down, greet the stranger inside, expand their range of vitality, and move beyond numbing, dissociative, or achievement-driven patterns…..finding purpose, presence, and attuned connection.

I support elders navigating a world that can feel isolating or out of step with them, wishing to honor and uplift their life’s wisdom, optimize their later years, and sustain connection and integrity.

I work with gender-expansive and non-binary individuals, anyone forging a life of their own, building it on their own terms, reclaiming self-trust, and cultivating authentic, resonant connection in a world that is in great need of celebrating and uplifting diversity.

I also work relationally with all types of relationships: monogamous, polyamorous, friendships, and families, through a depth-oriented lens. Rather than teaching skills alone, we explore learned behaviors, unconscious strategies, compensations, and collective and cultural patterns that shape connection, intimacy, labor, and pleasure. Together, we cultivate healthier relational dynamics, attuned engagement, and embodied connection that feels alive, resonant, and sustaining.

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I function as a steady guardian and witness in the therapeutic process…. at times a psychological midwife… supporting what is ready to emerge, integrate, and take form.

I understand symptoms as meaningful signals and resistance as intelligent protection: a charged expression of something that longs to be known, yet fears the risk of contact.

My work engages trauma, addiction, grief and loss, developmental and life-stage transitions, mood disorders, and somatic expressions of psychological pain…..always with respect for the body’s timing, the psyche’s defenses, and the wisdom inherent in both.