was born (1950) and grew up in Essen, Germany. For 19 years of her adult life, she lived in the USA, in Chicago where she worked with different therapists and experiences different forms of therapy. She got her BA from Columbia College in Chicago where she began to write, which became her passion and also has been her main therapeutic tool to question and change the coercions, curses and suffering of her childhood.
Barbara made her first therapeutic experience with a psychoanalyst in the tradition of Kohut; then, on her own, she did therapy for several years according to the steps of a form of written (primal) therapy. Between 1997 and 2003, she worked in therapy with Richard Schwartz using the IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy model, as well as with Gina Demos using DMT (Dance Movement Therapy) therapy. Between 2005 and 2008, she assisted Alice Miller, working for the website alice-miller.com and answering readers' letters.
You can read about her childhood in her book Screams from Childhood -- and more about her life journey in her essay "Facing a Wall of Silence" (in German: Begegnung mit einer Mauer des Schweigens) from the book Second Generation Voices, edited by Naomi and Alan Berger. It was published in 2001 by Syracuse University Press.
At the Folkwang Schule in Essen, she studied piano in the late sixties and early seventies; she has taught piano and been for a long time an ardent chamber musician. Married and divorced twice, she is the mother of two children and the grandmother of three grandchildren.
Her most recent article is called Spirituality Cements Childhood Blindness (also in German and in Spanish).
Since 2005, Barbara's home is in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, where she works as a therapist. She understands her role as therapist to nurture communication with our body and soul, their symptoms and what they are trying to tell us, about our past and present life, and our feelings and authentic present needs. Barbara offers one-on-one sessions, also by phone; here you can contact her by email or phone.
