Joan Lavendar PsyD - Comprehensive Personalized Psychotherapy Services
About Joan Lavender Psy. D.
"After all these years, I am still astonished by the gentle power of a skilled psychotherapy experience. It is creative, beautiful work, and of great practical value. Good or great psychotherapy is worth the time, money and effort. It is a low-profile life-altering experience"
Joan Lavender Psy. D. is a clinical psychologist and relational psychoanalytic psychotherapist with over 30 years experience. Her earliest training in movement and music serve as a unique perspective that unifies all of 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 designed specialized treatment programs and published research on the change process in psychotherapy.
Joan served as a Director of The Renfrew Centers of New York and New Jersey, treatment centers specialized for women with eating disorders. She is a graduate of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and a Fellow of the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy Research at the State University of New York. She is a member of the American Psychological Association, the New Jersey Psychological Association and Research Associates of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is on the faculty of the Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia and the Focusing Oriented Relational Psychotherapy Program. Joan is a lifelong New Yorker and has written on body image, eating disorders, loneliness, envy and other challenges of contemporary life.
"My psychotherapy orientation is relational and experiential. The relational part refers to the value I place on the
healing potential of our therapeutic relationship. A therapeutic relationship is like no other relationship, in its offer of
safety, freedom, deep knowing and potential for emotional growth. My role is to listen carefully and to respond thoughtfully as we
create a new kind of relating. This is one of the two essential ingredients in a promising psychotherapy.
The other ingredient is the
experiential part. Emerging data that suggests that the way we engage and articulate our
immediate interior "below the surface" experiencing may be the key to making progress in psychotherapy. The approach I use
integrates Experiential Focusing because it is a superb model for this process. As you learn to speak from this deep inner place,
you will start to know yourself in a different way. You may be quite surprised by what you discover! While this is happening,
your symptoms will fade as your life becomes richer."
Joan Lavender Psy. D.
What kind of symptoms/diagnoses can you get help for?
- Adjustment Reactions
- Anorexia Nervosa
- Anxiety Disorders
- Bipolar Mood Disorder
- Body Image
- Bulimia Nervosa
- Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
- Depression and Mood Disorders
- Dissociative Disorders
- Personality Issues: Overly Sensitive, Intense, Moody, Avoidant, Self-Defeating, Obsessive-compulsive, Perfectionistic
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
- Social Phobia
- Somatization
- Women's Issues
What kind of life situations can you get help for?
- Abuse and neglect
- Adult siblings
- College transition
- Competition, jealousy and envy
- Cross-cultural situations
- Creativity, talent and accomplishment
- Family
- Friendship issues
- Grief and loss
- Intimacy
- Loneliness and Aging
- Work
For
- Individuals (older adolescents and adults)
- Couples
- Families
- Groups
