Barry Stevens (therapist)

Her publications include Don't Push the River (It Flows by Itself), a first-person account of Stevens' investigations of Gestalt therapy. It shows the author during a period of several months in association with Fritz Perls at Perls' Gestalt Institute of Canada at Lake Cowichan, Vancouver Island, in 1969. Barry Stevens describes both Gestalt therapy theory and practice and her relationship with Fritz Perls in a sensitive way, thus creating a vivid image of Perls in the last months of his life.

Her earliest published work was "Hide-away Island" (1934) a loosely autobiographical novel about a woman on the far end of Long Island.

She met Nakata Yoshimatsu, a former valet of Jack London, in Hawai'i in the 1930s, and helped him to write down his recollections. She also wrote an article about Nakata that was published posthumously in 2000.

Barry Stevens is the mother of Judith Sande Stevens (1925-2011) and John O. Stevens (1935-2018) who was also a writer, Gestalt therapist and NLP-trainer, known as Steve Andreas.

Barry Stevens was a self-described "High School drop-out, 1918, because what she wanted to know, she couldn't learn in school." She and her husband moved to Hawai'i in 1934. Before Albert Mason Stevens's death in 1945, Barry moved to the mainland. She worked at Orme Ranch School near Prescott, AZ, and from 1948 to 1951 she was an administrative aide at Deep Springs College, near Big Pine, California. She later worked as an editor in Albuquerque, New Mexico, then relocated to California.

Barry Stevens (1902–1985) was a writer and Gestalt therapist. She developed her own form of Gestalt therapy body work, based on the awareness of body processes. For the Human Potential Movement of the 1970s, she became a kind of "star", but she always refused to accept that role.