Judith is a gifted and conscious healer who brings to her work a big heart, a clear and focused mind, and great awareness & care to the therapeutic relationship. An engaging and thought provoking speaker, Judith offers profound wisdom and deep insight into how our past experiences and early decisions can shape lives, for better and for worse, and without grandiosity, how therapy can change the world. As an advocate for therapists becoming conscious of their use of power, Judith "walks the talk" - her therapy work demonstrates her clear sense of ethics, selflessness, and sensitivity to the power differential. Judith is one of those rare therapists with the experience and skill to safely guide a person into the abyss and back again, achieving great healing and change.

Thank you Judith, for your home study course, A Recession Regression: Finding the Root of Our Relationships with Money!

Your content is far different from any “financial therapy” material I’ve learned from before.

I especially like the global perspective you take on how individual relationships with money have big impact. That and unintended consequences are things I’m very interested in.

Thanks for such great content!

Using Hans Andersen’s fairy tale about the emperor whose vanity lands him naked on parade, Judith Barr explores the stories of many kinds of power. While her accounts are mainly focused on power abuse in families and the helping professions, we know only too well how the same dynamics surround us. In politics, in the corporate world, in church institutions, even in our news sources, we can see many forms of abuse that distort reality, silence questioning, crush empathy, and build empires based on greed, power, and righteous self-aggrandizement.

Because Judith Barr’s parables are enjoyable and deceptively simple, they help to raise consciousness in non-threatening ways. They creep under our defenses to wake us up. Thus they can be used by parents, family therapists, pastoral counselors, and group leaders in their work. They can also be used for self-reflection, for it is not hard to find aspects of ourselves mirrored in them.

I would also like to see this book [Power Abused, Power Healed] as mandatory reading for politicians and CEOs. Everyone claiming authority needs to know the dire consequences to self and to others of the power shadow. When we are not aware, we may find ourselves parading our grandeur and goodness as foolishly as the naked emperor, or as cruelly as any tyrant.

[Regarding Power Abused, Power Healed] This is the best book on power and its abuse by therapists and spiritual leaders since Guggenbuhl-Craig's trenchant Power in the Helping Professions. Anyone whose therapy or discipleship has gone rotten through no fault of their own will find wisdom and comfort here. It should be required reading for all therapists and healers in training.