Dr Johanna Lynch is a GP who now mentors and teaches practitioners in strength-based and trauma-informed approaches to whole person care.

Johanna was a founding facilitator of the ASPM Professional Peer Reflection Groups and has championed this approach to connecting and supporting practitioners for ten years. She has been instrumental in the development of a facilitator training pathway at ASPM that has led to new facilitators and groups. She also offers individual mentoring online (see www.drjohannalynch.com).

Dr Lynch is passionate about supporting front line workers who encounter the impact of social and relational experiences on the distress of our community. Her philosophy of supervision is to offer a safe place for the practitioner to be themselves, to reflect on the impact of their professional encounters on their own experience. She prioritises awareness of emotional and bodily intuition as well as other forms of evidence in seeing the whole person of all people (including the practitioner).

Johanna spent the last fifteen years of her clinical career as a GP psychotherapist with a specific interest in dissociative processes that disconnect people from themselves, their context, their values and their relationships. She works with rebuilding connection, unity, and coherence in each of those areas in each person she cares for.

Dr Lynch’s training has included medicine (UQ 1992), Fellowship of General Practice (RACGP 2003), Grad Cert Grief and Loss (Health Sciences UQ 2007), and Dissociative Disorders Psychotherapy (International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation 2011), Fellowship of the Australian Society for Psychological Medicine (2016), and PhD (2019). Her PhD entitled ‘Sense of Safety: a whole person approach to distress in primary care’ translated trauma-informed care into a framework that can be used across disciplines.

Extensive professional development has included training in attachment and trauma, dissociation, hypnosis, and under Seigel, Cozolino, Schore, Tronick, Ross, Porges, Fonaghy, Bateman, Ogden, Courtois, Ford, and Briere, Lanius, Brand, van der Kolk, and Kluft.

Dr Lynch is the immediate past president of the Australian Society of Psychological Medicine, is an Associate Professor at The University of Queensland, and is Clinical Advisor to the Brisbane Southside Primary Health Care Domestic Violence.