Dr. Joyce Morley-Ball, Dr. Joyce Morley, Dr. Joyce Ball, Dr. Ball, Dr. Joyce, Dr. Luv, Dr.
She is being investigated by these groups for ethics violations
- Georgia Composite Board of Professional Counselors, Social Workers and Marriage and Family Therapists
- American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy
- National Association of Forensic Counselors
Whatever you call her, be sure to properly greet her as Dr. or you will be quickly corrected and verbally reprimanded. The only consistent thing I found about this person is her first name, Joyce, as it seemed her preferred name changed with the weather or the locations she operated from. Even the lawyers were laughing at her identity crisis.
Aside from the many names, my experience was a complete contradiction to the personality known as Dr. Luv. At $155 per hour, my family visited Joyce in dilapidated houses that were freezing in the winter and hot, humid, and musty during the summer, or we met in the back room of some other establishment. The sessions would start with her either plugging in portable heaters, fans, the window air conditioner, or lighting kerosene heaters. I thought none of the three places we visited Joyce were comfortable environments conducive for a counseling setting. I should have heeded my inner voice when seeing that the office address of Morley & Associates listed on her website was a post office box.
I expected a larger degree of stability after hearing Joyce promote the many articles and books she's written, the millionaires she's counseled, organizations she is affiliated, and titles she's held. You WILL hear Joyce boast of these things throughout the sessions as if to convince herself that she really did them. However, when paying for her services, she's shared of having to change banks for whatever reason, and I had to give her advance notice to bring her portable credit card machine. Rarely did the sessions start on time and there was always an excuse for her arriving late regardless of the time the session was scheduled. To compound matters, she'd interrupt our sessions to answer her cell phone to handle her personal business and address other clients' issues.
I found Joyce to be cash-strapped, immoral, and vengeful with anger issues against men stemming from her verbally abusive father and failed marriage. I was offended when she said she believes the bible is outdated and doesn't fit with the times while we were sitting in a church. Men interested in self-improvement or keeping their marriage and family together should really examine Joyce's background before using her. She's great at talking, but not equally as great at listening. There are other more competent and quality counselors operating out of decent office space and cost considerably less than Joyce.
Below is an excerpt of the feedback I provided to Joyce upon terminating her services:
Your recent actions are yet another validation of an epiphany I've had for a long time. Of all the counselors [my wife] and I have visited, the experience with you has by far been the worst. For some time, I had been attending professional counseling elsewhere because of the counseling and recommendations I've received from you, and have done extremely well to reverse the emotional damages caused by you. In hindsight, your own personal experiences which you've shared of your father telling you that you wouldn't amount to anything...and your divorced status made you ill-fit to advise me and my family on how to have healthy father/daughter/son and marriage relationships because you never experienced either. Based on this, I had developed zero confidence and trust in your qualifications to counsel my family through family therapy and the divorce/decoupling process.
Since knowing you, I found you to be rude, disrespectful, judgmental, biased, confrontational, sarcastic, manipulative, insensitive, self-promoting, dishonest, inconsistent, reprehensible, and at times downright indignant to say the least. I've also been made to feel indebted and obligated to continue using you. These observations have been much more prominent since [date] during our conversations and in your emails. I believe that your treatment and statements to me, and degree of professionalism, or lack thereof, are an abhorrent representation of the psychotherapy practice. By your own admission, you've treated [my wife] in similar fashion as if it's something to be proud of. Had I known this to be true much earlier, I would have terminated your services long before now, and perhaps my course with [my wife] would be different than it is today.
It's unfortunate that you haven't practiced long enough to disguise the pain you still feel by the contortion of your face when you talk about what your father said to you...I strongly encourage you to be true to yourself and seek help for your psychological agony so that you'll learn not to exert your measure of vengeance on clients like me. read more