I want to help you
Create secure and lasting connections
I have been working with couples, individuals, families and groups since 1991. (yikes!) I bring so much experience and passion to my work. I feel grateful to have a job where I can help others have extraordinary relationships and lives. Thank you.
For over 15 years now, I have been deep in the study of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples and Individuals. The work is beautiful and easily integrated into one’s life and relationship.
Barbara Gabriel is a profound guide on the journey of transformation. She has guided my partner and I through difficult territory with unparalleled precision and compassion. Working with us as a couple, she has brought us to a new foundation of love and trust that I didn't know was possible. My capacity to love my partner with the framework that she facilitates has buoyed us in such a short period of time eliciting real hope that we can and will continue to grow in ways that will only bring us closer. Thank you Barbara for your skill, grace and genuine care that is unique in this world. We are better for knowing you.
Suzanne Astar
Barbara Gabriel's practice of psychotherapy is geared to a high level of effectiveness and is enriched by her authenticity, humanity and depth of understanding.
Bruce Ecker - Originator of Coherence Therapy
Barbara brings the essential out of the complex.
Dr. Arlene Mazak - Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies
Barbara Gabriel is a cutting edge, transformative, contemporary healer with a soulful wisdom and matchless compassion that are ageless. She is truly a beautiful person and to spend time with her is to feel understood, fully met on one's truest ground, and to be restored to vitality, motivation and hope. She has changed my life into what I’d hoped it could be and I am forever grateful to her.
Alan Kaufman - Author, San Francisco, CA
Marital Distress is the single most common reason for seeking therapy. It undermines family functioning and is strongly associated with depression, anxiety disorders, and alcoholism. EFT for couples offers a comprehensive theory of adult love and attachment, as well as a process for healing distressed relationships.
We can heal the wounds of infidelity. Betrayal hurts. It usually involves some form of deception and can increase the sense of threat and uncertainty. The EFT work goes deeply into the repair of these injuries. We work on creating a new corrective experience of safe relatedness and secure connection. The attachment injury is healed, trust is rebuilt and often it feels like a new marriage with a very secure bond.
Some couples withdraw, usually from not wanting to engage in attack/attack or blame/blame kinds of conversations. It is coming from a desire to keep the connection. What happens though is the distancing leads to a feeling of distress for both partners. Sometimes both partners are burnt out and discouraged and then retreat. In EFT, we identify the pattern and get to the deeper emotions. We help couples have bonding conversations.
There are a number of important topics to discuss before marriage in order to have a strong foundation. The way you discuss some of these topics is very important. It is great to see where you begin to disconnect in having any of these discussions. Again, every couple has a pattern of the way they disconnect. It is important to the success of the relationship to be able to have difficult conversations, to understand and be able to interrupt your pattern of disconnect and to have bonding conversations to bring you back to connection and resolution. We address the important topics and we address how disconnection can happen and how to stay connected in any of these important conversations.
Our closest relationships can provide the context where we can get in touch with past traumas. We work on promoting positive coping skills and individual growth. Our closest relationships can be a crucial element in working through multidimensional problems and PTSD. We address and work through traumas in the EFT couples work.