What keeps you from peace and joy in the ordinary, moment by moment experience of your life?
Old emotion, mostly. Years of it, none of it ever finished.
That’s what sits underneath your reactions to other people, the anxiety, the depression, and the low-grade frustration humming along beneath all of it.
Going straight at that emotion is the work.
Therapy with me works something like clearing a forest to make a meadow.
Every tree is a memory or a stored emotion feeding how you feel right now. A whole forest of reasons for why today lands the way it does, and almost none of them planted on purpose.
Our work together is to chop the trees down one by one.
Some people arrive with a small stand of trees, and the change comes faster than they expected.
Others are working with something closer to a national park, and that takes longer. What matters more than the size of the forest is steady engagement, and that has held true across every kind of forest anyone has brought me.
First a small clearing. Then a larger one, with enough room to breathe, look around, and get your bearings.
The room is calm and the hour is yours. Talking about the pain and the hard parts is safe here, and it’s often where we start.
You’re accepted and seen for exactly where you are that day, including the parts you assumed you should have outgrown by now.
Where it goes from there tends to surprise people. We work on resolving the emotion itself, using color and light, which lets your brain process it at a speed conversation never reaches.
Relief usually starts sooner than clients expect. When an emotion finishes processing, what they describe is simply not finding it there anymore.
The meadow is what people describe at the far end of it. Sunshine. Space. A life they’re glad to be standing in, and enough quiet to actually notice it.
Helping people clear out a forest of old emotion is the work I love. The clearing is only the start of it.
What I really want is for you to find your own way forward once the light gets in.
Talk therapy gave me plenty of insight into why I felt the way I did. The emotions attached to the hard memories stayed exactly where they were, and so did a nervous system that had learned to brace. Many hours in, understanding was the only thing that had changed.
Around 2003, inner healing prayer did something the talking hadn’t. My own emotions and nervous system settled into a calmer, more regulated place.
Twenty years and more of leading inner healing sessions followed, with all kinds of people, and the same shifts kept showing up in them. There was one catch, and it was a real one: the process is slow. Protracted, honestly.
Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT) turned out to produce those same shifts much more quickly. God led me to this way of working, and I’ll often pair it with prayer when a client wants that. Watching people reach emotional resolution at this pace has been the best stretch of my career.
Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate in North Carolina, National Board Certified Counselor, master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling.
Advanced training in Emotional Transformation Therapy and ETT certified trauma therapist. Two people in North Carolina hold ETT certification at this time. I’m one of them.
Certified provider of the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) and the Rest and Restore Protocol (RRP).
Raleigh office, plus online sessions statewide.
Two decades of leading inner healing prayer sessions was never a side interest. Watching someone’s counseling and their walk with God stop running on separate tracks is one of the great pleasures of this job.
That integration is yours the moment you ask for it, it stays out of the room if that’s your preference, and I won’t bring it up twice.
When I’m not in the office, you might find me spending time with family and friends, drinking good coffee, leading our Friday Bible study, taking care of my chickens, programming my robot lawnmower, or dancing up a storm at Danz Insanity (“Exercise in Disguise”).
Life is good!
Reaching out is the part most people put off, and the reasons are usually good ones. Send the email anyway.
Write to me at barbara@barbaraburgesstherapy.com and we’ll find a time for a free 15-minute call. You can get a feel for how I work, and we can both discern whether we’re a good fit.
First tree, then the next one. It’s time to start clearing.
You’ve waited long enough for the feeling to catch up to the understanding.
Email me and we’ll find a time to connect by phone for a free 15-minute consultation. You’ll get to know me a little, and we can both tell whether we’re a good fit for this work.
Emotional Transformation Therapy for teens 14+ and adults. Raleigh, North Carolina, and online across the state.
A sentence or two is plenty.
