About Me

Dr. Yakov Barton founded Oakland Psych to offer trauma-informed psychological treatment for post-traumatic stress, addiction, grief, anxiety, depression, and related life challenges, as well as support for positive growth and insight building. He primarily utilizes a combination of EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and IFS (internal family systems) therapies to provide a somatic and source-focused approach to healing. Dr. Barton educates his clients on the universality of traumatic and addictive experiences. He defines trauma broadly as any past experience that remains charged and disturbing, and thus has value in alleviating mental health challenges in the present. It's helpful to understand how traumatic and addictive elements exist in all of us and are not static, but rather ebb and flow as reverberations of past experiences (and those of our family of origin). Dr. Barton frames the looping amplification of addiction as stemming from a healthy evolutionary need to feel safe and easeful, but in a way that can become self-destructive through the distortion of trauma that resides in our nervous systems, until processed.