Trainer Profile

About Trainer

Michael Barnett, LPCC is a licensed psychotherapist currently residing in Los Angeles California. He forged his professional career in Atlanta Georgia and has over 30 years of clinical experience. Michael is an ICEEFT certified supervisor and trainer and is the founder and director of the Atlanta Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy. He was a partner at Pine River Psychotherapy Associates, a highly respected and visionary private practice in Atlanta that emphasized the ongoing personal growth of the psychotherapist as a means to embodying an agile and integrated self-of-the-therapist. While in Atlanta, Michael served on the board of directors of the Licensed Professional Counselor's Association of Georgia for several years.

Michael’s central focus throughout his career has been oriented around a very powerful question: “How can we most effectively use the 50-minute therapy hour to create the deepest intrapsychic change in our clients?” Through this lens he brings this focus and passion to couple’s therapy, and the training of professionals who work with couples.

Early in his career Michael noticed that effective and successful couple’s therapy healed not only the relationship, but that the individuals within the relationship evolved into the best and most authentic versions of themselves, healing emotional pain and historical wounds in the process. Therefore, he has focused upon couple therapy as his primary therapeutic modality.

Michael specializes in working with trauma and addiction. He conducted a 3-year research study which incorporated EFT into inpatient addiction treatment protocols at a leading alcohol and drug treatment center in Atlanta. The clinical discoveries from the research study profoundly influenced the advanced specialty training module in which he teaches EFT therapists how to tailor the EFT model to treat traumatized couples who present on the addictive continuum in outpatient private practice settings. Michael uses life experience, humor, clinical competence and compassion to present the EFT model to his audiences. He has been described by others as a warm, knowledgeable, and approachable person and therapist. In his free time, he enjoys meditation, exercise, spending time with his family and friends, playing guitar, and immersing himself in the profound wonders of nature.