Hi, I am Joanie.
Compassionate support for families in high-conflict co-parenting
- Mission
- Vision
- Values
- Spiral to Anchor helps one steady adult create consistency, clarity, and emotional safety for a child living between two homes. The goal is not to win the conflict. It is to protect the child's daily life and your ability to show up inside it.
- Every child in a high-conflict family deserves one anchor. Spiral to Anchor exists so no parent has to build that anchor alone, and so the professionals around the child can share one clear, child-centered language.
- Steady over dramatic. Child-centered over side-taking. Practical over abstract. Neutral about the other home, and honest about how hard this is. We stay in the support lane and leave the legal fight to the legal professionals.
I have spent more than twenty years working alongside children and families as a pediatric occupational therapist, in early intervention, hospital care, community settings, and outpatient clinics. The same gap kept showing up. Parents giving everything they had. Children struggling in ways that did not have a name yet. Professionals who needed better tools to bridge the two. The usual sensory tools, regulation strategies, and social stories were built for calmer situations, and they did not reach the pressure these children were actually living under.
Spiral to Anchor grew from that gap, and from my own experience supporting a child through the emotional complexity of two homes. I know what it looks like when a child is trying to make sense of a world that feels unpredictable. I know what it costs a parent to stay steady in those moments.
You love your child fiercely. There are days when that love is the only thing keeping you going. The exhaustion is real. The worry is real. You are not alone in this, and you are in exactly the right place.
Built for the whole care team
Spiral to Anchor gives everyone supporting a child one shared language and framework.
The child's therapist
The one who sees what regulation and behavior look like in session
The parent's therapist and the school
The adults who see the child between homes
Social workers, OTs, SLPs, BCBAs, parenting coordinators, and GALs
The wider team that keeps the child at the center
Our history
Where this began
Twenty years of clinical work, a gap that kept repeating, and a season of my own life that taught me what these families were really carrying.
Why this approach works
Because high-conflict stress lives in the body first. The tools here are built around how children develop and how stress moves through a family, so they reach what is actually happening instead of skimming the surface.
What it is now
A six-step framework for parents, children, and the professionals who support them.