About Karen
Karen Camese is a licensed marriage and family therapist in California with 20 years of experience. She helps people facing addiction, trauma, grief, and big life changes.
Background and approach
Her style is straightforward and compassionate, aimed at making therapy feel practical and doable for busy lives. Clients work on everyday problems like sleeping trouble, low self-esteem, and relationship or intimacy issues.
Sessions also address career stress, caregiver strain, and compassion fatigue. Karen pays attention to family of origin patterns and how they shape current behavior.
Her approach combines attachment-focused and client-centered work with cognitive and emotion-focused techniques. That means conversations about how relationships affect feelings, plus skill-building to manage thoughts and behaviors.
She also uses tools from dialectical behavior therapy to teach emotion regulation and distress tolerance. Karen has supported people through domestic violence recovery, substance use challenges, hospice and end-of-life caregiving, and seasonal mood changes.
She helps clients reconnect with a sense of life purpose and build more self-love over time. Sessions are offered in English and tailored to each person’s situation.
She aims to create a calm, nonjudgmental space where people can set realistic goals, practice new skills, and track progress between sessions.
Therapeutic approaches and online care
Attachment-based work looks at how early relationships influence current patterns. It helps when people feel stuck in repeating cycles with partners or family, and it opens a path to different ways of relating. Client-centered therapy focuses on listening and understanding the person’s experience. That approach helps people feel heard and clarifies goals before moving into specific skills. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, targets unhelpful thoughts and habits and teaches practical strategies to change them, which can be useful for anxiety, low mood, and sleep problems.Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the process. The therapist will collaborate with each person to decide which methods fit their goals and preferences. Together they set goals, try techniques in sessions, and adjust the plan as needed based on what helps.
Online therapy offers flexibility for people with busy schedules or caregiving responsibilities. Video calls let conversations feel close to an in-person session, while phone sessions may work better when bandwidth is limited. Live chat and text-based messaging allow shorter check-ins, journaling between sessions, or support when writing feels easier than speaking. These options make it simpler to fit therapy into workdays, caregiving routines, or other commitments.
Frequently asked questions
What concerns does she help with?
What is her therapeutic style like?
How much experience does she have?
What credentials and region does she represent?
Which languages are supported?
What session formats are available?
How does payment and cost work?
How do I begin working with her?
Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Addictions
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Family of origin issues
- Grief
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English