About me
The Person Behind the Practice
My Story
Sabrina Barbara
I came to mediation through counselling. That means I bring something to this work that process training alone cannot provide: a genuine understanding of what it takes for two people to actually hear each other. Not just to agree. To hear. Agreements only hold when both people feel genuinely understood, and when they arrived at the outcome themselves, rather than having it imposed on them or extracted under pressure. That requires real buy in. Not compliance. Not resignation. A genuine sense that the process was fair, that their voice counted, and that what was reached reflects something true about what both of them needed. Without that, the document holds until the next flashpoint. With it, something lasting becomes possible.
I work as a counsellor specialising in grief, loss, and family separation. I bring that clinical grounding directly into my mediation practice, because the emotional and the practical are never as separate as they seem.
Approach
My approach is facilitative and relationally grounded. Trained in the Resolution Institute facilitative model, I am drawn to transformative mediation principles. I believe the quality of the interaction between parties matters as much as the agreement they reach. I work to support each person's agency and their genuine capacity to hear each other, not simply to settle.
Lived Experience
My relationship with family separation did not begin in a training room. It began when I was five years old, the year my parents separated. I know what it is to be the child in that room, uncertain, trying to hold things together, quietly wondering whether any of this was somehow about me. Years later I became a single mother of two. I know what it is to be a parent in the middle of a separation, wanting, more than anything, for your children to be held safely by the life that comes after. I also know that what children need most is not to be shielded from change. What they need is for the adults in their lives to stop fighting.
The research is unambiguous: it is not the separation that leaves its mark on children. It is the length and intensity of the conflict that follows. Children belong to both their parents. The sooner those two people can build a framework for the life ahead, together, even from separate homes, the sooner their children can begin to find their footing in it. I have occupied every role in this room: the child, the parent, and now the mediator. That is not a selling point. That is the reason I do this work.
"I have sat with people at the worst moments of their lives and watched them find a way through. That capacity is already in you. My job is to create the conditions where it can emerge."
Sabrina Barbara
CREDENTIALS
