About The Book
About The Book
A Psychologist’s Memoir
‘A Psychologist’s Memoir: What I Wish I Would Have Known Before I Knew It’ traces one woman’s life across decades of loving, losing, and helping others while abandoning herself. The story begins in rural New Brunswick on November 7, 1972, when ten year old Joan’s twin brother, Joe, is accidentally shot while playing Cowboys and Enemies with their cousin. In the shock that follows, Joan’s child mind reaches for control: if she is perfect, busy, and useful, no one she loves will disappear again.
That hidden bargain propels her through adolescence, into early relationships built with escape routes, and onward to graduate school at the University of New Brunswick, where she commits to psychology as a way to heal others from the abandonment she never processed.
Chapter by chapter, readers watch Joan build an empire: opening clinics, treating incarcerated teens and veterans with PTSD, mastering biofeedback, EMDR, bioenergetics, and attachment focused work, while the ten year old part of her that still whispers “Where is Joe?” quietly runs the show. The defenses that make her a brilliant clinician blind her to ethical gray zones, overwork, and boundary strains that eventually lead to a complaint, a hearing, license suspension, and the collapse of her second marriage.
The memoir offers helping professionals and anyone who has ever over functioned to avoid feeling a roadmap for transforming ego defenses into authentic, present moment living. Joan’s journey demonstrates that healing is possible when we finally stop running from our pain and begin identifying the source of our symptoms rather than treating symptoms only.
Why Read It
A Psychologist’s Memoir
This is not another clinical textbook or feel good memoir that skips the hard parts. ‘A Psychologist’s Memoir’ speaks directly to helpers: therapists, coaches, pastors, nurses, leaders, and caregivers who sense that their own unhealed history might be shaping their work more than they admit.
Joan takes you behind the curtain of a successful life: empty desks, silent dinner tables, packed waiting rooms, courtrooms, cancer wards, hearing rooms, and jungle malocas in Peru. She names the defenses many of us secretly normalize: compulsive busyness, perfectionism, boundary blurring, overgiving, and the search for the next external validation.
By tracing how a ten year old’s terror grew into a sophisticated professional persona, Joan offers rare permission: to question the stories that built your career, to grieve what you had to lose to survive, and to imagine a different way forward. Using the same interview process she now employs in her consulting work, Joan helps readers uncover core beliefs and unconscious needs that create less than optimal patterns. Readers will come away understanding how trauma lives in the body, how ego protects and sabotages, and how choosing love over fear can transform both practice and personal life.