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You shouldn’t have to manage your symptoms forever.

Emotional Transformation Therapy helping adults and teens 14+ to resolve what talking hasn’t reached

Raleigh, North Carolina. Available online across the state.

Your reaction is bigger than the thing that set it off.

Something small happens. A text goes unanswered. A plan changes at the last minute.

And you’re flooded, way out past what the moment deserves, watching yourself overreact while it’s happening.

That’s a $100 reaction to a $.50 problem.

The price got set a long time ago. Old emotion, filed away in an unprocessed state and still fully charged, is doing the math.

A man sitting on the sand, looking out at the ocean

Why insight alone hasn’t changed how you feel

Talking builds understanding and understanding lives in one part of your brain. The emotion you’re trying to resolve is held somewhere else entirely, in structures that never learned to speak.

Talking, talking, talking, and nothing moves.

Old emotion held in the body and brain is why the days feel the way they do: anxious, worried, hypervigilant, dull, flat.

Reaching it directly is the whole point of how I work.

When everything rides on your performance

The exam you’ve studied a year for. The audition. The presentation where three people in a room decide something about your future.

You’ve prepared for all of it. And the question running alongside the preparation is whether your body will cooperate on the day, or whether it will do to you what it did last time.

More preparation won’t reach that question. The alarm going off in your body runs on separate wiring, and it needs its own work.

Why your grief still feels like day one

Some losses stay frozen in time. The calendar moves and the loss stays exactly as raw as the week it happened.

So it ambushes you. In the grocery. Halfway through a sentence about something else entirely.

Everyone around you has moved on and assumes you have, too, which leaves you doing the grieving quietly, on a timeline nobody else can see.

Grief in that state doesn’t respond to more explaining.

How color and light reach what your words can’t.

Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT) uses color and light to help your brain process emotion at the level where it’s actually held. You look at specific colors and light patterns while we work together.

There’s no requirement to re-tell every painful detail for the emotion to move. If you’ve heard of EMDR, ETT also works with the visual field, though the experience is quite different.

ETT
Advanced ETT training sits at the center of my work.
Brainspotting
Using where your gaze lands to locate emotional experience your body is still holding. I often blend the two.
SSP & RRP
Certified provider of the Safe and Sound Protocol and the Rest and Restore Protocol.
Your brain sets the pace the whole way through, taking on what it can handle and slowing down when it needs to. That self-regulation is what keeps the process gentle.
A woman standing at the water’s edge with her arms open to the sea

What I’ve watched happen

A woman came to me who had cried every single day for ten years. After three sessions, she told me, “I think I’m good. I feel really good.” Then she said, “I couldn’t do that for 10 years.”

Her timeline was hers, and yours will be your own. Most people are surprised by how quickly something starts to feel different, and when an emotion finally resolves, clients describe it as simply no longer being there.

Schedule a free 15-minute consultation

In their words.

Names and ages have been altered to protect client anonymity.

“This experience of therapy with Barbara has changed my life. It was just what I needed to grow and gain confidence as I worked through my mental health struggles.”

Melissa, age 26

“It’s so much faster and easier than traditional talk therapy. It helps you quickly access emotions, work through them, and release them, even from your body.”

Laura, age 41

“Her unique method helped me release harmful thoughts and emotions from severe childhood trauma. I now have peace of mind where before my mind was a cacophony of noise.”

Theresa, age 50

“I’ve been to counseling before, but what Barbara does is different. I’m actually seeing results. There’s more progress in this type of therapy.”

Sally, age 25

“Working with Barbara has helped me begin to trust again, and grow in my faith. It’s given me my life back. For anyone who feels there is no hope, I highly recommend her.”

Carol, age 35
Barbara Burgess, LCMHCA, smiling outdoors in a light blue blouse

Hi, I’m Barbara.

For a long stretch of my own life, talking about hard things gave me plenty of understanding and almost no relief. The insight was real. The emotions attached to those memories stayed exactly where they were, and so did the nervous system running hot alongside them.

That experience sent me looking for something that resolves emotion instead of managing it, and it’s the reason I practice the way I do. Twenty-plus years of leading inner healing sessions convinced me that real change is possible. Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT) showed me how fast it can arrive.

I’m an ETT certified trauma therapist. Two of us in North Carolina hold that certification right now.

Sessions with me are a calm and warm oasis. You’re accepted and seen right where you are that day, and it’s safe to say the hard thing out loud. Then we go to work on it.

  • LCMHCA
  • National Board Certified Counselor
  • M.A. Clinical Mental Health Counseling
  • ETT Certified Trauma Therapist
  • SSP & RRP Certified Provider
More about me

What I Offer

A wooden boardwalk winding through dune grass down to the ocean
  • Individual Therapy

    Your mind has already written tomorrow’s bad news.

    Most of what fuels your anxiety is older than anything happening in your life right now.

    Explore individual therapy
  • Teen Therapy

    Parents wonder, ‘Is this typical or is something really going wrong for my teenager?’

    Your worry is love with nowhere to go.

    Explore teen therapy
  • Safe and Sound & Rest and Restore Protocols

    Do this work at home, on your own schedule.

    We meet once to get you set up on the app. After that, you listen at home on your phone or tablet.

    Explore SSP & RRP

Your faith is welcome, never required.

For clients who prefer a Christian counseling approach, prayer and a Christian understanding of what’s happening get woven directly into our work together. Two decades of leading Christian inner healing sessions sit behind that offer.

For clients who’d rather leave faith out of the room, the work runs similarly, and I’m equally at home there.

Either way, we’re aiming at the same place: resolving the old emotions which have made life difficult.

We’ll know when you’re done.

Goals get set at the start, and we measure against them as we go. You’re paying real money for your sessions, so you should see real results.

If you have no interest in being in therapy indefinitely, we’ll get along well.

  1. Solve the problem
  2. Feel the difference
  3. Get on with your life

Getting started takes one email.

My practice is private pay, which keeps your care between the two of us and keeps your record out of an insurance company’s file. I can submit Superbills for you for any out-of-network benefits you may have.

Taking the first step is scary.

Taking the first step can feel like cracking open Pandora’s Box – who knows what might be lurking under the surface. Making a move is scary.

You’re in good company. Nearly everyone arrives feeling about the same way.

  • “It’s not the right time.”
  • “I have too much going on.”
  • “What if I open up this can of worms and I can’t get the worms back in the can?”

Whatever’s in your box, we can handle it together.

It’s time to change the trajectory.

You’ve waited long enough for your feelings to catch up to your 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 adults and teens 14+ in Raleigh, North Carolina, and online across the state.

Free 15-minute consultation

A sentence or two is plenty.