Anna Barrette

Most people don’t call a therapist when everything is fine — they reach out when something finally feels too heavy to carry alone. Anna Barrette, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in Newbury Park, California, understands that moment well. She believes the work that happens in therapy goes far beyond active listening; it requires something innate, a genuine pull toward helping people move through what has stopped them, and she has felt that pull her entire adult life.

Anna works with children, teenagers, adults, couples, and older adults navigating a wide range of concerns — including anxiety, mood disorders, addiction, trauma, abuse recovery, relationship strain, and career transitions. She brings the same attentiveness to a teenager whose worries follow them from the classroom straight into a phone screen at midnight as she does to an adult wrestling with burnout or grief. Her academic training in psychology, combined with extensive hands-on clinical experience across demographics, informs an approach that is active and collaborative rather than passive.

As someone who has pursued therapy herself — for pre-marital work, for trauma, and simply for personal growth — Anna is clear that seeking support is not a sign that something is broken. Her aim in every session is for clients to feel genuinely secure enough to set down whatever they have been protecting themselves with, and to do real, lasting work from there.