Self Leadership, IFS & Healing School Culture from the Inside Out | Featuring Joanna Curry-Sartori

S2 E5 · Joanna Curry-Sartori

Joanna Curry-Sartori, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, the founder of the Self Leadership Collaborative, and the creator of the PAWS model — a framework rooted in Internal Family Systems that brings self-awareness, compassion, and relational capacity into schools, organizations, and communities.

She is the author of The Self-Led Educator and has spent decades working at the intersection of trauma, systems, and the human beings inside them. In this conversation, Joanna and Jenn begin with a body-based practice before moving into one of the most practically grounded conversations this podcast has had.

They explore what it actually looks like to bring IFS outside the therapy room — into classrooms, staff meetings, leadership teams, and communities under stress. Joanna shares the origin of the PAWS model, what happened after Sandy Hook that forced a question she spent years sitting with, and what she witnessed in a Zoom call with 80 teachers in the first months of the pandemic that changed how she understood belonging in professional spaces.

Topics covered in this episode:

— What unblending actually means, and why it is different from getting rid of a difficult part

— Why the body is the portal into finding our parts — not just our thoughts or feelings

— The student acting out in the classroom as a protective part with a positive intent nobody is asking about

— Parts goggles: how curiosity changes what a teacher sees in a struggling student

— The PAWS model — Pause, Aware of myself, Understand, Search for solutions, Experiment — and how it works in organizations

— Why mindfulness taught as a tool is not the same as a practitioner who embodies it

— 80 teachers on Zoom, the layers underneath "I'm holding it together," and what happened when safety built

— What happened at Sandy Hook and the question it forced Joanna to sit with for years

— Why the hardest part of working in schools is almost never the children

— What becomes possible for a generation of children whose nervous systems wire up around the new C's: collaboration, community, connection, and contribution

About Joanna Curry-Sartori, LMFT
Founder & President, Self Leadership Collaborative Creator, PAWS Model for Self Leadership Author, The Self-Led Educator selfleadershipcollaborative.com

About On Trauma & Power
Hosted by Jenn Turner, LMHC, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Trauma and Embodiment.

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