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A Psychologist’s Memoir
When the healer’s world collapses, what happens next? Dr. Joan Wright shares her journey from childhood trauma and perfectionism to professional suspension, soul shaking loss, and a new way of living from love instead of fear. Her memoir and consulting work help helpers heal themselves while serving others.
Chapters
A Psychologist’s Memoir
01
02
03
04
The Day Everything Changed
One childhood game ends in an irreversible moment that fractures a family forever. In the silence that follows, a ten-year-old learns how quickly love can vanish, and how hard she must work to survive it.
Learning to Live as Half a Person
Grief doesn’t disappear; it reorganizes itself inside the body. This chapter traces how loss quietly teaches a child to live divided: present, yet never fully whole.
First Lessons in Love and Leaving
Early relationships become rehearsals for abandonment. Joan learns how closeness feels safest when paired with an exit plan.
Building a Life on Unstable Ground
Achievement becomes armor, busyness becomes belief. What looks like success from the outside begins forming cracks beneath the surface.
About The Author
Joan Wright, PhD
For more than thirty years, Dr. Joan Wright built a reputation as the person people called when life had gone badly off script. A clinical psychologist (1993 se 2021 tak — suspension) in Fredericton, New Brunswick, she founded Joan Wright & Associates, supervised a team of clinicians, and specialized in complex trauma with teens, young offenders, military veterans, and families whose stories rarely fit neatly into any manual.
Joan’s professional path began in Grade 9, when a simple question at a career fair intersected with a deeper wound: the accidental shooting death of her twin brother, Joe, when they were ten. That loss shaped her uncanny empathy and her relentless drive to be “the strong one” for everyone else.
Her suspension from practice and the collapse of her second marriage forced her inward. Over the past 35 years, Joan has developed expertise in identifying the cause of symptoms as opposed to treating symptoms only. Today, using a multitude of educational and life experiences, she offers services under SOURCE Consulting & Mentoring, helping therapists and individuals find their way to living more joyful and harmonious lives.
For more than thirty years, Dr. Joan Wright built a reputation as the person people called when life had gone badly off script. A clinical psychologist in Fredericton, New Brunswick (1993 to 2021 – until suspension), she founded Joan Wright & Associates, supervised a team of clinicians, and specialized in complex trauma with teens, young offenders, military veterans, and families whose stories rarely fit neatly into any manual. In 2013, she also established the MindShift Clinic, starting with just three part-time staff and growing it into a 13 full-time clinician team.
Joan’s professional path began in Grade 9, when a simple question at a career fair intersected with a deeper wound: the accidental shooting death of her twin brother, Joe, when they were ten. That loss shaped her uncanny empathy and her relentless drive to be “the strong one” for everyone else.
Her life was also marked by major health and personal turning points, including a breast cancer diagnosis in 2014, which came well before her suspension and served as a significant wake-up call, one she later reflected she did not fully act upon at the time.
Over the past 35 years, Joan has developed expertise in identifying the root causes of symptoms rather than simply treating them. She has also engaged in multiple therapeutic modalities throughout her life, not only to deepen her professional practice but also as part of her own personal healing journey, including experiences with psilocybin therapy in Canada and ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru.
Her suspension from practice and the collapse of her second marriage forced her inward. Drawing on decades of clinical work, education, and lived experience, she now offers services under SOURCE Consulting & Mentoring, helping therapists and individuals find their way toward more grounded, joyful, and harmonious lives.
Joan Wright founded
Joan Wright founded Joan Wright & Associates and The MindShift Clinic in 2013. Starting with three part-time staff members, The MindShift Clinic grew to thirteen full-time staff, providing neurofeedback and biofeedback services while recognizing that mind, body, and brain are all involved in trauma.
Watch Video Trailer
Video Trailer
A Psychologist’s Memoir
Freeing oneself and the world From The Violence of fear
Watch the trailer for A Psychologist’s Memoir and step inside the moment when the “strong one” finally has to decide whether she will let herself be healed.
About The Book
A Psychologist’s Memoir
‘A Psychologist’s Memoir: What I Wish I Would Have Known Before I Knew It’ begins with a single shattering day: the accidental death of Joan Wright’s twin brother, Joe, when they were ten years old in rural New Brunswick. In the silence that followed, Joan made an unconscious promise: be perfect, stay busy, never need help, and no one you love will vanish again. That vow powered a thirty year career as a respected psychologist, clinic owner, and expert with wounded teens, veterans, and families, even as it hardened into an ego defense of infallibility.
Then came the reckoning: a professional complaint, a hearing, license suspension, breast cancer, and divorce on her sixtieth birthday. Stripped of titles and roles, Joan turned toward the grief and fear she had outrun since Grade 5. Through bioenergetics, ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, and honest self examination, she discovers that unhealed trauma can make us brilliant helpers and dangerously blind. This memoir is both a riveting story and a roadmap for anyone who has tried to earn love through achievement.
Testimonials
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAYS
Early readers of A Psychologist’s Memoir have called it both “unflinchingly honest” and “unexpectedly comforting.” These responses capture how Joan’s story lands with the people it was written for, those who help, hold, and quietly hold back.
“Joan names what I have felt for years as a therapist: the exhaustion of being the ‘strong one’ while never really stopping to ask what I need. This book felt like supervision for my soul.”
“As a trauma survivor and nurse, I saw myself in every chapter. The way Joan connects body, memory, ego, and spirituality gave me language for things I have carried my whole life.”
“I expected a professional case-study book. What I found was a deeply human story that helped me understand my own defenses, and gave me hope that it’s not too late to live differently.”