Meet Joanna
Joanna Mailani Lima, AMFT, M.A., M.L.I.S. (CA)
Virgo Sun / Taurus Moon / Leo Rising
she/her
One of my strengths as a therapist comes from my personal ethos which in turn comes from Filipino cultural values: to meet all people—including my clients—in kapwa and to release them with baon. Kapwa means shared identity and this concept reminds me to look for the humanity in others, to connect with them across differences of culture, choice or circumstance, and to treat them with compassion and loving-kindness. Baon is the Tagalog word for provisions, such as food, money or supplies, usually for a journey. A gracious host always sends guests on with baon. I think of my clients as travelers and my time with them as a brief stop along their journey. This ethos of kapwa and baon serves as a general framework for my work in each session and across the course of therapy for every client — how am I attuning to their experience from a place of shared identity, and what might I offer that will be of value to them, whether for the upcoming week until our next appointment, or for the longer journey across their life. My vision is to develop a practice/business that embraces—as Bayo Akomolafe describes it—“a politics that refuses to pathologize brokenness, refuses to think of it as secondary to wholeness…which reframes brokenness as the condition for transformation.
Contact: joanna.lima@urbanrestorationcounseling.org