Michael Barnett

Michael Barnett, MA, Ed.S, LPCC is a licensed psychotherapist, author, and an ICEEFT certified supervisor and trainer in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with over 30 years of clinical experience. Michael founded the Atlanta Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy in 2007 and was the Center’s director until 2024 when he moved to Los Angeles, California. He is currently the co-founder and director of the EFT Center of Los Angeles and has a private practice in Pasadena.

Michael ‘s career has come full circle: he began his career working in inpatient addiction treatment centers, intensive outpatient addiction programs, and experiential outdoor training facilities focusing on the healing of addictive processes for over eight years before beginning his private practice in 1993. By the time that he began his training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for couples in 2005, he had already led dozens of trainings for psychotherapy professionals and business leaders alike. Since becoming an ICEEFT certified EFT trainer in 2008, Michael has facilitated well over one hundred trainings, workshops, and speaking engagements on EFT, trauma, and addiction across North America and abroad.

In 2010 Michael began integrating traditional approaches to working with addiction with experiential psychotherapy. Michael and a team of EFT therapists completed a 3-year research project implementing EFT into the treatment regimen of a metropolitan inpatient addiction treatment center in Atlanta. In doing so, he thoughtfully tailored the EFT model to treat the co-occurrence of trauma and addiction. EFT naturally elicits the disowned emotional experiences that exist within the attachment processes between significant others. This experience offers access to the neural networks that hold traumatic distress living at the core of what addiction attempts to self-medicate in the first place. The culmination of this research, and the clinical application of attachment theory using EFT for the treatment of addictive disorders evolved into a non-pathologizing, humane, and effective process for healing addiction and stabilizing recovery. Michael was selected to co-present at the EFT Summit with Dr. Gabor Mate, where they had the opportunity to share their personal and clinical insights about working with addictions from a humanistic perspective to a broad audience of psychotherapists and mental health practitioners from around the world. Currently, after the publishing The Emotionally Focused Therapy Workbook for Addiction: How to Heal the Loneliness and Shame that Trigger Addictive Behaviors, Michael has been devoting his career to helping those suffering with addiction to heal from the inside out.