Nancy L. Johnston

Nancy L. Johnston is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Licensed Substance Abuse Treatment Practitioner in Lexington, VA, US. She is a Master Addiction Counselor and an American Mental Health Association Diplomate and Clinical Mental Health Specialist in Substance Abuse and Co-occurring Disorders.

 

She earned a BA in Psychology at the College of William and Mary and an MS in Counseling Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

 

Nancy has practiced mental health and addiction counseling for 47 years. She has worked in public and private psychiatric hospitals, juvenile corrections, public mental health, colleges, and private practice. Over 35 of the years of her clinical work, Nancy has cultivated specialties in several areas including codependency and mindfulness practices.

 

Nancy’s work in codependency has roots in both personal and professional work. She brings her understanding of the experience of relationship tangles into her clinical work and has discerned important intra/interpersonal dynamics which contribute to the tangle as well as those that help to loosen and eventually undo it.

 

Her work with codependency combines her clinical interests and skills including counseling theory and techniques, twelve-step wisdom, mindfulness practices, attachment theory, and family systems and parts work. All of these areas of practice are naturally woven into her Self-Recovery treatment model for codependency. Self-Recovery involves four interlocking elements: self-understanding, self-awareness, self-competence, and self-attunement all of which create and embrace a relationship-with-self in the center of the interlocking circles.

 

Nancy has written two books on codependency and in 2024 released a workbook for clinicians on treating codependency in which she teaches her Self-Recovery model in detail.

 

A mother, dancer, writer, and inspired person, Nancy mindfully and gratefully continues to learn, create, and share ideas that foster a healthy relationship-with-self.