A Therapeutic Community for US! Ongoing support, learning and experiencing together

Dates: February 11, 2025 – May 20, 2025

Day:   Alternate Tuesdays 2:15-3:30 8 sessions EST

Location: Zoom

Fee:  $65 per session (75 minutes) 

Our Lives as Therapists

with Joan Lavender Psy.D.

Have you had this situation? You really need to share a clinical dilemma about a patient with a trusted colleague.  Yet, as you try to describe the situation, a sense of futility sets in - the context is too nuanced to get across quickly - the essence of it is lost in translation. 

Yet many of our most difficult or transcendent moments may occur within our therapy relationships. How do we hold the vast complexity – the startling, the extraordinary, and the dark – that emerges within us as well as in our clients while living within the greater context of our lives?   We hold all this and more in our bodily felt senses.  How do we find self-care to that goes the heart of the issue professionally and personally?

Over the last 30 years I’ve been a member of therapeutic communities based on the process experiential ideas of Eugene Gendlin.  He’s the therapist-philosopher who developed Experiential Focusing, possibly the first form of embodied psychotherapy. Gendlin’s “bodily-felt sensing” takes us through, step by step,  the holistic inner process of becoming more in touch with ourselves,  our patients and others. 

These communities have been priceless to me personally as well as in my work.  Peer support, relevant reading,  respectful leadership and appreciation for the beauty inherent in our work have sustained me to grow into my own way of working in this “impossible” profession.

Our group will include case discussion, readings (over a broad range of theories) as well as an introduction to Gendlin’s experiential focusing.   It promises to be an intimate learning group that refreshes our lives (personally and professionally) as therapists.

Please reach me for further details.

Warmly,

Joan

Joan Lavender Psy.D.                                                                 [email protected]                                              212-866-0461

Joan Lavender Psy. D. is a clinical psychologist and relational psychoanalyst with over 40 years experience.  Her initial training as a dance therapist serves as a unique perspective that unifies her clinical work.  She is a certified teacher of Experiential Focusing  a psychotherapy process shown to correlate with positive life changes, enhanced self-esteem and the experience of integration and wholeness.  Joan has published research on the change process in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in conjunction with co-author Norbert Freedman Ph.D.  She holds a Psy.D. from the Graduate Program in Clinical Psychology of Widener University/Hahnemann Medical School and is a PostDoctoral Fellow of the State University of New York.  She is a graduate of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.  Joan is a lifelong New Yorker and has written on body image, eating disorders, loneliness, envy, aging and other challenges of contemporary life.