Joanna Poppink, MFT – Eating Disorder Recovery within a Depth Psychotherapy Framework

Joanna Poppink, MFT is a depth-oriented psychotherapist specializing in eating disorder recovery for women in midlife and beyond. She is licensed in California, Arizona, Florida, and Oregon and offers secure virtual sessions. For a free 20-minute consultation, email [email protected]

Joanna Poppink, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist with over four decades of clinical experience specializing in eating disorder recovery for adult women. She works with women who live with an active eating disorder as well as those whose past eating disorder continues to shape their relationship with food, body, and self.

Her approach understands eating disorders not simply as behaviors to control, but as meaningful psychological adaptations. Restricting, bingeing, purging, and compulsive patterns develop in response to emotional strain, relational pressures, and the need to manage overwhelming inner states. These patterns can persist or return, especially during periods of stress, loss, or change.

Often, women do not recognize that a past eating disorder continues to shape their lives. They no longer engage in food or body image behaviors and assume the disorder is behind them. Yet the underlying patterns that organized those behaviors remain active. The need for protection the eating disorder once served can continue outside awareness, influencing decisions, reactions, and self-perception.

This can appear in ways that do not immediately resemble an eating disorder. A woman may overextend, taking on more than her energy can sustain. Anxiety builds. Worry and frustration follow, along with guilt when she cannot meet her commitments. The demands accumulate. She becomes overwhelmed and retreats. She stops. She gives up.

Soon she rallies and begins again, returning to the same cycle of overextension and collapse.

She may not recognize that she is repeating a pattern established long ago in bulimia. She is not defective. She is living within a system that once sustained her and now limits her.

Without recognizing this influence, a woman may continue to live within structures that limit her choices while believing she has moved on. In this work, recovery does not stop at symptom management. Behavioral change matters, but lasting change requires attention to the emotional and relational conditions that sustain the disorder. Psychotherapy becomes a place to understand what the eating disorder has organized, protected, or expressed.

Many women who seek this work are capable, reliable, and accustomed to carrying responsibility for others in their lives. They may feel discouraged that these patterns remain despite effort and insight. Rather than treating this as failure, the work meets these patterns with respect for their origins while opening the possibility for change that holds over time.

Joanna integrates clinical experience with attention to dreams, imagery, and lived experience when relevant. The process unfolds at a pace that allows for real understanding and change.

Depth psychotherapy addresses these underlying systems by bringing them into awareness and examining how they function. This creates the conditions for greater clarity, choice, and a life directed from within rather than organized around old protections.

Joanna offers virtual psychotherapy to clients in California, Arizona, Florida, and Oregon.