Las Vegas, NV · Torrance, CA
About Kari Barker, LMFT
If you’re here, something in your life may feel out of balance. Emotions might feel bigger than you want them to be. Relationships may feel complicated or exhausting. You may have been carrying something quietly for years — or you may simply be tired of trying to figure it out alone.
When we first sit down together, my hope is that you feel safe and understood. Not judged.
My Approach
How I Work
Therapy, as I practice it, is something we build together. I’ll offer perspective, structure, and clinical experience — and you decide what fits. If something doesn’t resonate, we talk about it. The goal is meaningful change, not perfection.
We move at a pace that feels manageable. Some days, we focus on understanding what’s happening beneath the surface. On others, we practice new ways of responding when emotions rise or patterns repeat. Over time, therapy becomes a place to notice patterns without shame and build greater stability.
My work integrates Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) — building practical tools for the present while healing what continues to echo from the past.
Some clients need structure and skills to manage overwhelming emotions. Others need space to process experiences that still feel close to the surface. Many need both. We determine the balance together — practical when skills are needed, and deeper when it’s time to process what still lingers.
I work with adults navigating intense emotions, trauma, anxiety, relationship stress, dissociation, and long-standing patterns that feel hard to shift.
“If you’re ready, I would be honored to walk alongside you.”
My Background
Where This Work Comes From
I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with advanced training in DBT, EMDR, Trauma, and Dissociation. My roots are in hospital-based trauma work — sitting with people carrying deep wounds, learning early that healing required more than managing the present moment.
For many years, I built and ran the DBT Center of the South Bay — receiving training and consultation from clinicians deeply devoted to the evidence-based model, experts who walked alongside Marsha Linehan, and at the same time, training clinicians who were just beginning their own DBT journeys. That training shaped me profoundly, and my gratitude for it is real. DBT gave me a rigorous framework for understanding behavior, emotion, and change — and it also deepened my curiosity about what lives underneath. Not instead of DBT. Alongside it. The early attachment injuries, the negative core beliefs, the ways the past quietly shapes how we feel, how we relate, and what we do today. Comprehensive DBT addresses the present with clarity and structure. What I kept returning to was the question of how to hold that — and go deeper into the past at the same time.
Integrative Path Therapy is the integration I was moving toward. DBT for the present — the behaviors, the skills, the changes that need to be made. EMDR and trauma work for what lives underneath — how the brain holds memory, how early wounds shape today, how the past and present are always in conversation with each other.
All of it — the hospital floors, the center, the training, the questions — lives in the room with us when we sit down together.
There is a DBT assumption I come back to often: people may not have caused all of their own problems, and they have to solve them anyway. That “and” — holding both truths at once — is the heart of this work.
Ready to take the next step?
If you’d like to explore whether working together feels like a good fit, you’re welcome to reach out.
We can start with a simple conversation.
