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About Dr. Pat Barry

Learn how to know peace and tap into your inner strength with a renowned stress relief educator.

Dr. Pat Barry has worked in the field of mind-body health for more than twenty five years. Pat has researched how your emotional and physical health can be affected by stress. She has developed methods and tools for protecting yourself from the effects of toxic stress.

She is the author of two books:

Mental Health and Mental Illness (available at Amazon)

Psychosocial Nursing: Care of Physically-Ill Patients and Their Families

Learn more about Dr. Pat Barry:

• Personal Background
• History of Professional Development
• Consultation Psychiatry
• Reducing the Stress of Caretakers
• Opening My Own Practice
• The Science of Mind-Body Medicine
• Dr. Barry’s Personal Invitation
• Curriculum Vitae
• Biography
• Connecticut Holistic Health Association (CHHA) profile

Pat’s Personal Background
The topic of stress is so important to me—it has been my life’s work since the beginning of my professional career. It’s also made such a difference in my own life, helping me to cope with my own life challenges. It gives me great joy to make a difference in the lives of wonderful and brave people. 

Like most people, I’ve known many different types of stresses and strains in my life: family tension; disappointments; divorce; remarriage and the loss of my husband to cancer; illness. Stress is no stranger in my life! 

Let me tell you how the early events of my life drew me to explore this field. 

I was raised in a small town in Northern Vermont. When I was growing up, there were lots of things going on in my family. When I was about ten, I noticed that I had physical reactions to my feelings about unsettling events. I was curious about why different parts of my body reacted to feelings, and why feelings such as fear, sadness, and anger felt different from each other. 

Although I was aware of these reactions, there seemed to be nothing I could do about them. I started to think about my reactions to feelings as similar in pattern to fireworks: some fireworks go up in the air as a single rocket, explode, and then fall to earth. Others go up and separate into cascades of colors and designs, and then cascade into yet another layer of colors and designs. I was particularly interested in how my emotions seemed to cascade into other types of feelings.

I was aware that my reactions happened either as a result of events going on around me or as a result of a thought in my head. But, interestingly, whether it was external or internal in origin, the reaction could feel the same in my mind or in my body. I had no idea what to do about my thoughts or feelings. Back then, we didn’t talk about stress, and we didn’t know much about it, either. 

History of Professional Development
As a young adult, I began my training as a Registered Nurse. In my hospital training, I saw patients and families who were under great strain as they coped with their illnesses and hospitalizations. I listened to their stories about the stressful things that went on in their lives before they became ill. 

I wondered, “Is there a connection between their stress and their illnesses?”

Wherever I worked—the cancer unit, with chronic medical illnesses, the surgical unit, the maternity ward, pediatrics—I saw how stressful illness was for the patient and their family. I wanted to know more about what to say and what to do to help patients and their families through this difficult time.

I learned about a field called Consultation Psychiatry that addresses these concerns. It’s a subspecialty of psychiatry that works with the emotional effects of physical illness. I entered Yale University, one of two Schools of Nursing in the U.S. that offered a Master of Science in Nursing with a specialty in Consultation Psychiatry. I received training as a traditional mental health clinician in a general psychiatric setting. Also, I spent a year consulting to patients, families, physicians, and nurses on the Oncology Service in the Yale University hospital system. 

More about Consultation Psychiatry
The field of Consultation Psychiatry is based on the idea that a person is a complex system affected by many different factors: mental, physical, spiritual, family, social, environmental, and cultural. Each of these factors can be a source of stress. More specifically, stress can come from factors such as:

• Your unique body and its vulnerable inherited physical systems. For example, if your family has a history of cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, you are more likely to have it, too.
• Your distinct personality that interprets the sources of stress.  
• Your current physical state of nutrition, health, rest patterns, and so on.
• Your current stress level.
• Social supports, such as family, friends, minister, and so on.
• Pre-existing stress patterns that occur automatically in your mind and body as a reaction to specific events and thoughts.

I learned about these factors, and about how to relieve stress reactions in the mind and body. And I spent hours and hours of training time working with people who were suffering stress reactions to their physical illnesses. I came to believe very strongly that healing from a physical disease is dependent on releasing stress.

When I completed my master’s training, I worked for three years in a large general hospital where I was an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse and consultant in Consultation Psychiatry. There were 28 different patient units in the hospital, including intensive care units for cardiac surgery, coronary care, pulmonary disease, medical illness, pediatrics, and newborn intensive care. Whenever there was a patient or family member in acute emotional distress, I was available to meet with them. Then I would advise the medical and nursing staff about ways they could reduce their patients’ distress and support their healing from their physical illnesses.

Reducing the Stress of Caretakers
Another interesting aspect of my work in the general hospital was to address the stress levels of the staff who worked there. Physicians, nurses, social workers, physical therapists, pulmonary therapists—all experience stress as a reaction to working with very ill people. I recognized that relieving the stress in organizations by soothing the stress in staff members was another important component in providing good care to patients.

All of us who take care of loved ones experience stress. Sometimes we put their health concerns ahead of our own. When caretakers disregard their own well being, they jeopardize two lives: their own and that of their sick loved one. Relieving the stress of caretakers also became an important part of my work.

Opening My Own Practice
Because I believed it was important to bring my services to people coping with physical illness (and their families), in 1983 I opened a private psychotherapy practice in Connecticut. My practice specializes in helping people with cancer, heart disease, stressful home or work environments, depression, anxiety, trauma, and other types of emotional distress that create demands on the body as well as the mind. Since then, I’ve been very busy helping people through my private consultations and workshops.

The Science of Mind-Body Medicine: Psychoneuroimmunology

As I continued my work with people coping with emotional pain, I recognized the power of the physical reactions that their stress, depression, or anxiety were causing. In the mid-1980s, a new medical science field emerged called psychoneuroimmunology.(That’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it?) It’s the science that studies the effects of our thoughts and emotions on our bodies and health—how a thought or feeling is physically transmitted through the mind to the nervous system and to all the systems in our bodies: the immune, cardiovascular, respiratory, and other systems. By using the research findings in this field, we can better address our human reactions to stress. We can soothe and relieve habitual patterns that have been operating in our bodies since we were children.

I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in the field of psychoneuroimmunology because I wanted to research the physical effects of emotions on the mind and body. As part of my academic preparation, I studied immunology and neuroscience at the Schools of Medicine at Yale University and the University of Connecticut. I developed individual seminars with leaders in these fields—as well as psychology and psychiatry—in order to discuss new theories about the implications of stress on the body. I wanted to expand the knowledge about the origins of illness, both physical and emotional.

Because of my advanced studies and experience, I’ve learned that we all have stress reactions that are unique and that occur as a result of physical patterns learned in our bodies when we were children. These physical patterns affect both our minds and our bodies. Men, women, elders, adolescents—we all have stress going on in our lives. How we react to that stress makes a very big difference in our current and future health. My knowledge of this field has helped me reach out to more and more people in distress through my private consultations, workshops, coaching, books, and learning tools.

Dr. Barry’s Personal Invitation
I want to share what I’ve learned. People who are suffering from stress or painful emotions should know that there are things they can do to take care of themselves when they’re going through a difficult time. You can know peace and tap into your inner strength, even in the most difficult situations. 

To find out more about relieving stress and
living a more joyful, peaceful life, contact Dr. Pat Barry.