LcSW TherapistKara Krauze
Kara specializes in working with diverse clients facing challenges with emotional well-being, relationships, professional or artistic goals, trauma, and life transitions. She has experience supporting individuals with depression, anxiety, medical conditions, learning differences, parenting (and child-free, by choice or not), trauma, and loss, including overlapping stressors and how they relate to your mental health and sense of personal agency and well-being.
A message from Kara
I want to help you feel better about yourself through improved understanding of your challenges, mental health, and personal priorities. Knowing yourself and your experiences offers access to a fuller life and more fulfilling relationships.
I work with experiences across the lifespan, from young adulthood to parenting to challenges with physical health and aging. I first entered the mental health field passionate about the role our families, our personal and cultural histories, and systemic forces play in our own mental wellness. Grief, loss, and physical and mental challenges affect us all at some point in life’s journeys. My work with clients embraces whole-person and complex experiences as part of wellness, satisfaction, and happiness.
Traumatic or difficult experiences can emerge as barriers to fuller well-being soon after an event or years later. Through our work together, you will gain greater understanding of your feelings and experiences and how they relate to your mental health. I work with you to build and deepen resilience and post-traumatic growth through fuller awareness of struggles and individual and familial patterns, alongside strengths. Part of our work together also involves contradictions, expressing sometimes contradictory feelings and building acceptance as well as cultivating spaces for possibility and change.
As a person and therapist, my interest in clients’ complex experiences and growth includes self-esteem, anxiety, depression, family dynamics and relationships, grief and loss, intergenerational trauma, learning disabilities/differences, chronic illness and/or disability, racism and identity, gender dynamics, health and wellness. I have worked with diverse clients including, creative professionals, first- and second-generation immigrants, veterans, suicide survivors, youth, retirees, LGBTQ+, married, coupled, divorced, and single individuals looking for professional growth, creative fulfillment, and a stronger sense of self.
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I bring curiosity and compassion to each client session. Many of us carry silences, pockets of experience difficult to express or cloaked in shame from ourselves, our cultures, or our families. The things deemed most difficult to talk about are often the experiences and feelings we most need to express in order to move forward into fuller and more satisfying lives. Before training as a therapist, I started as a writer and reader, a person looking to find and make sense through words and stories. By expressing our stories – putting our experiences into words – we gain insight into ourselves and greater understanding of others. The shared space of our therapeutic work offers a safe space for thinking about your life and all of its stories, the emotions and people so deeply affecting your mental health and choices.
I have worked or resided in many spaces, as a therapist and a person; a student of war, trauma, suicide, and loss; an educator and creative artist working with veterans and veteran family members; a publishing professional; an advocate for support for learning differences and complex health conditions; a liaison between personal well-being and professional growth; a compassionate listener.
I am a NYS Licensed Clinical Social Worker (MSW, NYU) and hold an interdisciplinary Master’s in Literary Cultures (with a thesis on trauma, narrative construction, grief, and suicide), also from New York University. My Bachelor’s was in International Studies from Vassar College, where I focused on languages and culture, lifelong passions. I have lived and studied outside the United States and enjoy thinking about the benefits and challenges of moving between countries or other geographic/identity spaces, including intergenerational adjustments in culture and language within families. I am an empathetic listener and use a relational psychodynamic approach, creating a trusting therapist-client environment and rapport, the foundation of client growth.
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“Intercultural Approach to Trauma Therapy” (National Institute for the Psychotherapies, 2023)
Post-Graduate Fellow, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (The Karen Horney Clinic, 2021-23)
Family Therapy, Advanced Basics (NYU Continuing Education, 2020)
CPT, An On-Line Training Course for Cognitive Processing Therapy (Medical University of South Carolina, 2019)
Conferences: Breakthroughs in Twice-Exceptional Education (2017, 2019) and Twice-Exceptional Futures (2023)
Presenter: Arts in Education, “Bridging the Gap: Helping Veterans Share Their Story” (2019)
Presenter: Hunter College, “Moral Transformation and War” (2018)
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Masters in Social Work, New York University, Silver School of Social Work, 2020
Master of Arts, New York University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 1999
Licensed Clinical Social Worker, New York (#103173)
Pronouns: She/Her/HersSpecialties:
Life Transitions
Cross-Cultural Adjustment & Intergenerational Understanding
Trauma & Loss
Chronic Illness
MODALITIES:
Relational
Psychodynamic
Trauma-Informed Humanistic (including Post-Traumatic Growth)
RATE:
$250 / 45 Minute Session
$180-250 Sliding Scale
