Liz Johnson

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Liz Johnson is a Licensed Social Worker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She earned her MSW from the University of Pittsburgh and holds a BA in Social Justice (with a focus in political theory and philosophy). Her background includes community mental health work in recovery, homelessness, and reintegration settings, as well as political organizing work. These experiences continue to shape her belief that personal healing is tied to collective liberation and does not happen apart from social context, identity, relationships, and systems of power.

Liz works from a highly relational, anti-oppressive, and intersectional perspective, supporting clients who are navigating anxiety, trauma (PTSD/CPTSD), chronic stress, burnout, depression, relationship struggles, attachment wounds, and patterns that feel difficult to change. Many of the clients she works with are queer, neurodivergent, activists, or people whose identities, bodies, politics, or ways of being have not always been met with safety or understanding.

In her practice, Liz integrates somatic approaches with a psychodynamic lens. She brings a body-based and autonomic nervous system perspective to therapy, helping clients understand how chronic stress, trauma, and past experiences can leave the body stuck in survival mode. Her work may include approaches such as biofeedback, breathwork, meditation, and the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP), with the goal of helping clients build a greater sense of safety, regulation, and connection in their bodies.

Liz also helps clients explore the deeper patterns, relationships, and stories that have shaped how they move through the world. Her psychodynamic and attachment-informed lens supports clients in becoming curious about the ways they have adapted, protected themselves, related to others, and made meaning of their lives. She does not see therapy as a process of “fixing” what is wrong with a person, but as a collaborative process of understanding what has happened, how someone has survived, and what new possibilities may become available with greater awareness, safety, and choice.

Liz has trained with the Hearing Voices Network. Trauma-focused and psychodynamically informed, Liz brings a thoughtful and non-pathologizing perspective to experiences that are often misunderstood, stigmatized, and overly reduced to diagnosis (including what the DSM describes as personality disorders, delusions and hallucinations). Her approach is grounded in genuine curiosity, relational depth, collaboration, and a commitment to understanding clients as whole people - not collections of symptoms.

Clients typically experience Liz as warm, engaged, direct, and deeply curious. She sees clients as the experts on their own lives and understands her role as a supporter, collaborator, and witness in the process of making meaning, reclaiming agency, and creating new ways of living, relating, and being in the world.

Outside of her clinical work, Liz is passionate about cinema, philosophy, political theory, listening to music, playing guitar, and spending time with her dog Alma 🍎.