Barbie Atkinson, LPC-S
Founder & Practitioner -
With Barbie, you don't have to come with your ducks all in a row, she will meet you exactly where you are, even if that means duck-less.
Barbie Atkinson's philosophy is inspiring change in honoring autonomy while enhancing strengths. Helping with ambivalence regarding changing behaviors and tapping into your own wealth of inherent motivation. Basically, you are the boss. You are your own expert. She helps in guiding you to you.
Barbie Atkinson is a bilingual psychotherapist and licensed professional counselor and supervisor. She founded Catalyst Counseling to offer clients a chance to really feel seen, heard and ask them questions they hadn't considered before. Not your Mama’s therapist. Her One-Size-Can't-Possibly-Fit-All approach is refreshingly human and personal. She brings curiosity to each assessment and has helped a wide breadth of clients. She loves helping high performing, high achieving, successful, smart, and secretly struggling men and women.
On her team she has therapists that enjoy working with teens, young adults, adults, couples and families. She hires therapists that are in the shaded area of the Venn diagram of purpose and passion.
For over 20 years, she's helped clients in such places as Baylor and University of Texas community clinics, probation offices, various community agencies, schools, research studies through Human Behavior and Research Institute at University of Texas, University of Houston's Center for Latina Maternal & Family Health Research, online, and in private practice. She holds an M.S. with dual specializations in Mental Health Counseling and Marriage and Family Therapy from Barry University and a B. A. in Psychology from Florida International University (Go, Golden Panthers!).
Psych jargon about to drop…..The theories that inform her group practice include: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Solution Focused Therapy (SFT), Motivational Interviewing (MI) and the TransTheoretical Model (TTM). TTM is a process by which she assesses the client’s readiness to change, provides strategies to move forward, and guides the client through the inevitable trials and errors of getting out of their comfort zones and approaching the same old problems with new solutions. We create this space within the comfort and confidentiality of the office.
She is a proud Member of the Motivational Interviewing (focuses on exploring and resolving ambivalence and centers on motivational processes within the individual that facilitate change)Network of Trainers, also referred to as MINT and has trained various professional groups throughout Texas.
She also enjoys using Brainspotting (BSP) and is certified in this technique. It is a neuro-experiential technique where you look affects what you feel. Brainspotting locates points in the client’s visual field that help to access unprocessed trauma in the subcortical brain. There is increasing evidence that trauma is “stored” in the body and that it can alter the way the brain works. Brainspotting seems to activate the body’s innate ability to heal itself from trauma. Please feel free to ask her all about this. She can talk shop and would love meet you at the office or online.
