About Spiraling with LJ
We All Spiral
We don’t move through life in straight lines.
We spiral.
We return to the same questions, wounds, desires, relationships, and patterns over and over again—but never as the exact same person. Every return carries new context, new wisdom, new grief, new language for what we couldn’t name or enact before.
To me, spiraling isn’t failure, or regression.
Spiraling is the natural pattern of change.
Again and again, I’ve found myself revisiting the same themes in new forms: dissociation, identity, separation, belonging, liberation, intimacy, burnout, healing, and what it means to build a life that actually feels aligned. Over time, I stopped seeing those returns as evidence that I was “stuck” and started understanding them as invitations into deeper aliveness.
That understanding shapes both my life and my work.
Spiraling with LJ is rooted in the belief that healing and growth are iterative. We practice. We revisit. We return. Not to endlessly relive the past, but to meet ourselves with greater curiosity, capacity, honesty, compassion, and choice each time we come back around.
This space exists to support people in meaning making of their experiences—past and present—in order to move toward more aligned, liberated, and healing futures.
Who I Am
I’m LJ, also known as lenna jove: depth-oriented coach, guide, pleasure-seeker, and meaning-maker.
I work with people who are tired of surface-level self-help and disconnected “mindset” work.
Many of the people I work with are deeply reflective, emotionally aware, intellectually curious folks who have done hella inner work but still find themselves looping through familiar patterns, relational dynamics, fears, or internal conflicts.
Together, we slow down enough to understand what those patterns are trying to communicate rather than immediately trying to “fix” or suppress them.
My work is rooted in parts work, integrative coaching, nervous system awareness, relational healing, and deep self-inquiry. I help people explore the different parts of themselves that developed in response to relationships, systems, trauma, culture, expectations, and survival.
Instead of treating those parts as problems, we approach them with curiosity, compassion, and accountability.
I believe patterns, contradictions, and recurring struggles often make sense in context. Healing isn’t about becoming a perfect or permanently optimized version of yourself. It’s about developing a more connected, honest, and sustainable relationship with yourself and your life.
How I Approach Coaching
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I draw from a range of frameworks, modalities, and perspectives depending on the person and what emerges in our work together. This includes parts work, nervous system awareness and capacity-building, relational and attachment-informed perspectives, systems thinking, mindfulness, values exploration, and meaning-making practices.
I’m especially interested in the intersection between our internal worlds and the larger systems we move through. Our struggles don’t happen in isolation from culture, family systems, oppression, relationships, labor, identity, or lived experience.
That means I don’t approach people as broken individuals who simply need better habits or more discipline.
I work collaboratively and relationally. I ask deep questions. I notice patterns. I help folks build awareness, self-trust, emotional capacity, and deeper connection to themselves and others.
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One of the core beliefs underlying my practice is that growth is cyclical.
We revisit old wounds with new tools.
We encounter familiar fears from different developmental stages.
We return to the same themes carrying different levels of awareness and capacity.
That doesn’t mean healing isn’t happening. In many ways, the spiral is the work.
I often help people recognize the difference between “I’m back here again” and “I’m meeting this from a different version of myself.” That distinction matters. It creates more room for curiosity, self-compassion, complexity, and sustainable change instead of shame-driven self-improvement.
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Healing and liberation are deeply relational, because our wounds and oppression are relational.
Many of the wounds we carry were formed in relationships and within larger systems. Because of that, I care about creating coaching spaces grounded in authenticity, collaboration and power sharing, consent, nuance, accountability, and more than care—love.
I’m not interested in rigid therapist dynamics or boundaryless guru positioning or as any kind of expert with everything figured out. I don’t believe ethical practice requires perfection, but I do believe it requires transparency, humility, self-reflection, and ongoing learning.
My role isn’t to tell you who you should become. My role is to support you in understanding yourself more deeply, reconnecting with your own inner wisdom, and moving toward the life and relationships that feel most aligned for you.
This work tends to resonate with people who are tired of performing wellness. People who want depth instead of optimization, who are less interested in “fixing” themselves and more interested in becoming more fully alive.
What Working With Me Feels Like
My work is relational, experiential, intuitive, and collaborative. Sometimes we talk directly. Sometimes we sit quietly together while you listen inward. Sometimes I guide you through meditation-like processes that help you connect with sensations, memories, emotions, fears, desires, imagery, or different parts of yourself.
I often work with:
Parts work
Somatic awareness
Nervous system support
Breathwork
Guided meditation
Grief work
Shadow work
Attachment and relational dynamics
Spiritual Inquiry
Astrology
Embodiment practices
Future self and inner child work
A dear friend & fellow healer & the only trained trans breathworker I know in St. Louis, Pax Reese, calls this type of work an inner cartography.
I like this image—we are slowly mapping the landscapes inside you so you can move through your life with more choice, clarity, and connection.
My Background & Training
My path into this work has been deeply interdisciplinary and decidedly non-linear.
Over the years, I’ve moved through academic, professional, creative, relational, and personal spaces that have all shaped how I understand healing, identity, systems, behavior, and transformation. My work is informed both by formal education and by lived experience.
I was formally educated at Duke University (sociology, education, creative writing) and the Brown School at WashU (clinical social work). I have years of experience in communications, therapy, and the mental health field.
I believe transparency around training, education, and scope of practice is part of ethical coaching. I also believe credentialing alone doesn’t determine someone’s wisdom, integrity, or ability to hold space well.
Why I Left Therapy
Leaving licensure was not impulsive. It was slow. Years of dissonance accumulating in my body.
I found myself increasingly unable to reconcile what I was being asked to participate in with what I actually believed created healing or safety.
I couldn’t stop questioning:
Why are systems build around surveillance and liability called care?
Why are people so often treated as risks to manage instead of humans in context?
Why is emotional distance considered professionalism?
Why are institutions and boards more trusted than local communities and relationships?
The deeper I got into clinical work, the more I saw how often “safety” actually meant institutional self-protection.
Documentation. Assessment. Compliance. Carceral intervention.
Meanwhile, many people were starving for something much simpler and much harder to find: relationship without performance or judgment. Not perfection. Not boundaryless relationship. But relationship rooted in honesty, reciprocity, consent, curiosity, accountability, and mutual humanity.
I eventually reached a point where continuing to work in side those systems required too much fragmentation from myself.
At the same time, years of overwork, autistic burnout, chronic illness, and emotional exhaustion caught up with me. So I stopped. And I chose not to go back.
The Political Ground of My Work
Healing can never be separate from politics, as the political spheres of our lives directly shape the violence, trauma, and wounds we live with.
The way we learn to relate to ourselves shapes the way relate to other people, conflict, power, community, desire, rest, grief—and vice versa.
Internalized shame does not stay internal. Neither does self-trust.
I am deeply informed by:
Black feminist thought and practice
Transformative justice and abolitionism
Disability justice
Queer and trans liberation
Somatic and trauma-informed approaches
Parts work and multiplicity frameworks
Spiritual and earth-based traditions
These are not aesthetics for me. They shape how I understand and practice care, accountability, embodiment, and change.
I’m not interested in neutrality. I’m interested in honesty, complexity, and building ways of relating that create more possibility for us all.
Just a Lil More About Me
Hello, love!
My name is lenna jove, and i use he/they/fae pronouns. I am a white-bodied person with white privilege actively working to understand and disrupt the impacts of colonization and supremacy in my own life and relationships.
I am disabled and chronically ill, and currently use the term AuDHD to understand my neurotype. These shape how I think about and practice pacing, flexibility, access, and sustainability.
I am spiritual—studying astrology and practicing reciprocity with nature daily. I also work with ritual, dreams, seasonal cycles, and ongoing relational healing in my own life.
I spent a lot of time paying attention to birds, trees, weather, music, water, memory, our words and our silences.
I love to read (especially queer & trans fiction), spend time with my cats este & nox, cook for friends, & flirt over Scrabble.
Born and raised in a small town in Georgia, I have roots in the South but call St. Louis, Missouri home.
Work With Me for Slow, Relational Deep Change
I offer one-on-one relational support for queer, trans, neurodivergent, and spiritually curious people who want something deeper than coping or endless self-analysis.
Most people I work with meet weekly or biweekly over months to years. The depth comes through relationship, honesty, and sustained attention and care over time.
I help people develop:
intimacy with themselves
capacity for change
stronger boundaries
reconnection with their body
healing from religious harm
trust in their desires and intuition
the ability to act from longing rather than survival
more honest and nourishing relationships
reconnecting with pleasure, desire, and aliveness
Over time, people often make significant shifts: leaving abusive jobs and relationships, reconnecting to pleasure and sexuality, transitioning, grieving, resting more, building community, reclaiming spirituality, or finally allowing themselves to not only want more from their lives but to create it.
We work slowly enough for real change to emerge.
Based in St. Louis — Working Nationwide
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Based in St. Louis — Working Nationwide 〰️
Logistics and Sliding Scale:
I offer virtual sessions across the United States and in-person sessions in St. Louis, Missouri.
Sessions are:
Weekly for 75-90 mins
Biweekly for 90-120 mins
I work with a limited number of long-term clients in order to maintain depth, steadiness, and sustainability in this work.
Current sliding scale:
$20 weekly sessions for one person making minimum wage or receiving disability
$111 weekly sessions for 2 St. Louis-area clients
$175 biweekly sessions
$225 biweekly sessions
Higher rates help sustain lower-cost offerings and support my needs as a disabled provider, and enrich my continued training in practices like astrology, breathwork, spiritual care, and somatics.
image by Joan Fisher Photography in St. Louis | For Terrace House STL
Start Here
If you’re here, maybe you’re spiraling, too.
Maybe you’re returning to an old question with new awareness.
Maybe you’re recognizing patterns you can no longer ignore.
Maybe part of you know there’s another way to relate to yourself and your life, even if you can’t fully see it yet.
You don’t need to have everything figured out before beginning.
You just need enough willingness to stay curious about what your spiral might be trying to show you.
I’d be honored to walk alongside you in that process.