About Barbara
Barbara Muller-Ackerman is a licensed professional counselor in New Jersey with 28 years of experience. She offers a warm, interactive style and focuses on practical ways to make day-to-day life easier. Many people come to her for stress, anxiety, depression, sleep trouble, parenting challenges, anger, and ADHD-related struggles.
She also helps with relationship and family concerns, grief, low self-esteem, and coping with big life changes. Her sessions look at multiple parts of a person's life.
Background and approach
Barbara listens first, then helps prioritize what to work on. She pays attention to how attention difficulties show up alongside anxiety, mood problems, sleep issues, and executive function challenges. That means small changes in one area can help other areas too.
Barbara uses straightforward tools from client-centered work, cognitive behavioral techniques, mindfulness, dialectical behavior ideas, and solution-focused strategies. She also brings coaching skills for goal setting and practical habit-building. Sessions can include skill practice, planning, and checking progress together.
People who want help setting clear goals and building routines often find the coaching elements useful. Barbara emphasizes strengths and workable steps rather than long lists of tasks. She encourages realistic experiments and regular review to see what helps.
Her work is aimed at helping people get unstuck and regain more control over daily life. She welcomes conversations about aging and geriatric concerns, caregiver stress, attachment and communication problems, autism spectrum issues, and midlife transitions. Sessions are conducted in English and are available to international clients.
Approaches that fit online counseling
Client-centered therapy focuses on the person in front of the therapist and emphasizes listening, empathy, and working at your own pace. It helps people who need a supportive space to sort priorities and find what matters most. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts, feelings, and actions connect and teaches practical strategies to change unhelpful patterns. It is often used for anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and executive function difficulties linked to ADHD.Finding the right approach is something Barbara treats as a collaboration. She will talk with each person about goals, daily challenges, and preferences, then suggest a mix of methods to try. Together they refine what works, adjust techniques, and set small, achievable steps to track progress.
Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to fit different needs. Video lets you use visual cues for skill practice and planning. Phone sessions can be simpler when bandwidth is limited or when a shorter check-in is useful. Live chat or text messaging can support quick coaching prompts, reminders, and brief reflections between longer sessions. These options make it easier to fit counseling into busy schedules and across time zones.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Parenting issues
- Self esteem
Also listed
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Post-traumatic stress
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 28 years
- Licensed
- New Jersey
- Languages
- English
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