We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sari Rose Barron, LMFT, EMDR-Certified. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sari Rose below.

Sari Rose , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

I really had two defining moments that led to where I am today: I grew up wanting to be an actress on Broadway. I trained for that, went to NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and lived in New York for 7 years performing. I fell into teaching theatre arts as a side gig to help pay my bills and little did I know that would impact my career trajectory. I didn’t love teaching theatre, but I did love working with kids and teens and using arts as a means of expression. So, I started diving deep into arts education. I was asked to develop a songwriting program by The Johnny Mercer Foundation was given funding to go wherever I wanted to bring free arts education to communities in elementary schools around the United States. I really wanted to go to cities that didn’t have the means or access to programming, so I traveled to areas like Detroit, Atlanta, New Orleans, South Central, and more. I had a defining moment working in Philadelphia. The night before I arrived at an elementary school to teach songwriting, there had a been a shooting between two brothers who were both dating the same girl. So, when I taught the next day, so many of the lyrics were about hardships, the grief over the murder of one of the brothers, and so much more. I felt touched, moved, inspired, and passionate in a way that I never had been in my acting pursuits. I was driven creatively, as an expressive arts educator, and felt called to work in ways that try to foster meaningful change in systems and interpersonally. I remember calling my parents saying, “I’m giving up acting. This is what I have to do with my life.” It still took me some time to transition, but my life’s dream eventually shifted because of the experience below.

My next defining moment was when I had moved back to California and created and implemented a songwriting program for The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and a prominent theatre company. I taught workshops for approx 1300 students in the Los Angeles Unified School System and Probation Camps. We then selected 13 students and their personal lyrics to pair with professional composers who would write music to their lyrics. They would become members of ASCAP, collect residuals on anything that happened professionally with their music, and their songs would be performed and celebrated at The Ford Amphitheatre by professional performers. Meanwhile, my agent was having me audition for shows that would conflict with the one-night performance. I couldn’t imagine missing it. I couldn’t imagine abandoning these students where so many had lived through traumatic abandonment and rejection from parents and families. It was so clear to me in that moment, my priorities had shifted. I felt more alive in the helping profession than I did in the acting field. So, while I love and miss the performing component, it’s now a hobby. I feel like my career has found me and my dream became bigger and better than I’d imagined it could be.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Sari Rose Barron, an EMDR Certified licensed psychotherapist and Director/Founder of SoCal Individual, Family, & Trauma Therapy (SoCal-IFT). I have a background in theatre, was an education director for a theatre company, and an expressive arts educator. So much of my previous experience has really led me to my practice as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I have been working in the clinical setting in private practice for the last 13 years and absolutely love what I do. I specialize in working with clients experiencing Trauma/PTSD and Dissociative Disorders. I also specialize working with teens and parents. Every day in my practice, I see how important it is to help my clients not only process through past traumas but also navigate a very stressful world, and the lingering effects of the Covid-19 era. There is a growing, and even urgent need, for quality mental health support.

When I work with people struggling with PTSD or anxiety or whatever else it may be, it’s incredibly gratifying to help my clients grow and heal. I worked alone in a solo practice for many years. At a certain point, though, I felt a calling to develop a group private practice to expand that work. Thus, the birth of SoCal Individual, Family, & Trauma Therapy. It has been important to me to develop a team of experienced clinicians who specialize in trauma, and to help them grow as clinicians so that they in turn can help more people in need.

The therapists at SoCal-IFT have grown into a warm and supportive professional community. Each clinician is highly trained, brings various sub-specialties and qualities to the practice and have a compassionate and empathetic approach to therapy. Every clinician is trained in Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR), a modality proven effective for the treatment of trauma. They are also trained in Brainspotting, Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, CBT, DBT, and more. Specialties include (but are certainly not limited to) anxiety, depression, grief, sexual abuse, substance use, domestic violence, multi-cultural issues, LGBTQIA+ population, self-harm behaviors, dissociative disorders, disordered eating, and more. We have an in-person office in Irvine, CA and can provide telehealth to residents of CA, OR, and UT.

I also provide consulting, various presentations on Trauma & The Body, Expressive Arts in a Clinical Setting, Trauma and Children, and more.

Finding a therapist can be a tricky and daunting process. We are committed to helping find the right therapist for everyone who calls.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Oh boy. Thank you acting days. I feel like I built so much resilience from my days as an actor. Endless days of auditioning and rejection. I can’t say it ever felt truly easy, but I was able to keep going and not let rejection or nerve-wracking auditions prevent me from trying again.

Before becoming a therapist, I was education director for some non-profit theatre companies. Teaching, creating curriculum, and working with resistant students has also been a huge learning curve for me. It taught me how to navigate different personalities, how to experiment finding connection through closed off interactions, and certainly how to model resilience for those students who just wanted to give up. There was a 10th grade student I was doing a songwriting workshop with who was withdrawn, head on the table, and headphones in his ears. A teacher said to me, “Don’t worry about helping him, he can’t read.” What?!!! I guess I could have easily just taken her advice and put my attention on the students who were excelling, but that’s just not how I do things. So, even though it was difficult to engage, and even though this student really didn’t write much, we connected. He was able to tell his story and put one sentence strung together on the page willingly. It took both of us feeling our own resilience to help foster this moment. I often think of my past student participants, as well as now some of my most dissociated clients as being some of the most resilient models for me.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’ve experienced immense amounts of traumatic loss in my life. One of them being experiencing 9/11 and another when my cousin was killed. It shook the foundation of my world. The world no longer felt safe. I was overwhelmed, far away from my family in Israel and CA, and still trying to operate as if everything was the same. I was living in NYC as an actor doing what I thought I would always want to do. At some point though, I felt out of my body and just going through the motions of my life. I knew I felt alive and engaged when I was teaching expressive arts programs, but I couldn’t quite imagine a world without performing. I decided to move to CA to be closer to my immediate family, find my footing again, and start to piece my world back together again. This continues to feel like a profound experience I hold onto even as I move through my career. It was a time in my life where I needed to re-evaluate my values, go through my own therapeutic process and figure out how to be back in my body again.

So, I notice that when I get complacent in my work, it’s time for me to mindfully return back to listening to by body. I’ve learned when I’m in motion, growing something, working on a project, developing a new program, I feel engaged, alive, & passionate. I notice that during the hiring process, when I try to pack away a body signal or intuition on a particular applicant because on paper they may look great, it generally turns out not to be a fit. Returning back to my body cues has been profoundly informative both personally and professionally. I owe so much of that awareness to the work I have done and continue to do to in my own healing process.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.socal-ift.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/socal_ift_therapy/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SoCalift
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sari-rose-barron-93a98833/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SOCAL_THERAPY
• Other: www.sarirosetherapy.com