Jarfa Wabs

I come to this work with nearly thirty years of experience that spans clinical practice, executive coaching, and corporate life inside finance, banking, HR, and sales. That combination shapes how I show up with clients. I understand the inner world and the outer pressures at the same time: the nervous system and the org chart, the family story and the performance review. Most therapists have not sat in a boardroom. Most executive coaches have not sat with grief. I have done both, and I bring the full range of that experience into the room.

I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and an ICF certified Executive Coach. I am primarily a narrative therapist, and that lens shapes everything else I bring into the room. When relationships are part of the work, I draw secondarily on the Gottman Method and Relational Life Therapy. When I am working with families, I bring in family systems. I hold an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Pepperdine, earned with honors, and I am currently in a PhD program in Integral and Transpersonal Psychology. I have worked with individuals connected to organizations like NASA, Apple, Google, the U.S. Air Force, Harvard, and Stanford, and with people who are not connected to any of those things at all. What they tend to have in common is a sense that the identity they built no longer fits the life they are living.

I do not believe people need to be fixed. I believe people need to be met, understood in the context of the stories they have been told and the stories they have told themselves, and supported in reclaiming authorship over both.

My approach is grounded in narrative therapy. I draw on the work of Michael White and David Epston, and on Foucault's understanding of how power and dominant narratives shape identity. I work from the premise that people are not the problems they bring into the room. The problem is the problem. Our work together is to externalize it, examine where it came from, and separate your identity from the story that has been organizing your life.

I hold a simple belief at the center of my practice: when identity is undefined, fear expands to fill the space. So we do not start with symptom management. We start with who you are underneath the roles, the achievements, and the expectations that have accumulated over time. From there, we build something more stable. I integrate Gottman Method concepts when relationships are part of the work, Relational Life Therapy when patterns of disconnection need direct language, and Positive Psychology when it is time to reconnect with what is already working.

Because of my background in coaching and corporate environments, I am comfortable with clients who are high functioning on the outside and struggling on the inside. I do not require you to slow down your language or soften your ambition to be understood here. I meet you where your complexity actually lives, and we build a therapeutic relationship that respects both your depth and your drive.

The first session is about orientation, not diagnosis. I want to understand the story you are currently living inside, not just the symptoms that brought you here. We will talk about what is happening now, but also about the narrative underneath it: the roles you have inherited, the identities you have outgrown, and the ones you are still deciding whether to keep.

I ask direct questions. I am not a passive presence in the room. You can expect me to reflect back the patterns I notice, name the tension between the story you have been told and the one you actually want to be living, and begin mapping where the real work needs to happen. I bring the same rigor to this conversation that I would bring to any strategic conversation, because your inner life deserves the same seriousness as anything else you take seriously.

More than anything, you can expect to be met with complete empathy and understanding. Many clients tell me they feel understood, or truly seen, for the first time. That experience is not incidental to the work. It is often where the real work begins.

If you are coming in as a couple or a family, you can expect the same narrative lens applied to the relationship itself: whose story has been dominant, whose has gone unheard, and how family systems patterns are keeping an old narrative in place. By the end of the first session, you should have a clearer sense of how I work, what narrative therapy actually looks like in practice, and whether this is the right fit for the work ahead. There is no pressure to have the story fully articulated before you arrive. That is what we are here to do together.