Joanne Deal

Joanne Deal is a master’s-level licensed professional counselor practicing in Connecticut with 9 years of clinical experience. She helps people address the barriers that prevent them from living a full life and supports growth across emotional, relational, spiritual, existential, and physical domains.

Her work can involve confronting difficult or painful experiences from a client’s developmental years when those experiences continue to affect current relationships and functioning. She and each client collaborate to identify priorities and to develop a plan for therapy.

Recognizing that meaningful change often requires effort beyond the weekly session, Joanne may assign between-session work such as exercises or readings and will review how those activities relate to daily life in subsequent meetings. She is direct about the effort required to change habitual responses and expects a willingness to engage in that work.

Her primary areas of specialization include anxiety and depression, loss, bereavement and grief, marital and parenting issues, and Asperger’s syndrome or high-functioning autism.

Joanne also has experience addressing anger management, major life changes - including chronic illness, aging, and employment or economic transitions - communication and conflict resolution including couples counseling, family-of-origin issues, blended families, homeschooling families, and supporting parents of children with Asperger’s or high-functioning autism. Trauma-informed counseling is a further area of her practice.

Her approach is eclectic, adapting interventions to the needs of each person. She draws from Attachment-Based Therapy, Client-Centered Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Existential Therapy, the Gottman Method, Mindfulness Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Narrative Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Solution-Focused Therapy, and Trauma-Focused Therapy. She is comfortable working with clients who have strong ties to their faith or to particular ethnic and cultural backgrounds and views clients in the context of their families and communities.

Joanne completed an A.A. at a community college in southern California with high academic honors, then transferred to the University of Southern California where she earned a B.A. with highest academic honors, graduating summa cum laude after a double major in Communication Theory and Public Relations. She was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi. She holds an M.A. in Professional Counseling from Liberty University, earned with high academic honors.

She holds a Connecticut license to practice as a professional counselor (CT LPC 3739) and is also nationally certified as a counselor. Joanne is a member of the American Counseling Association and the American Association of Christian Counselors. Her practice is grounded in respect and a commitment to walk alongside clients through healing and reconciliation, and she looks forward to working with new clients.