About Karen
Karen Santos is a PACFA counsellor with 12 years' experience in mental health work in Australia. She supports people facing stress, anxiety, grief, depression and parenting challenges. Karen uses straightforward, practical ways to help people find clearer footing when life feels overwhelming.
Her background combines psychotherapy and social work practice, with hands-on community mental health case management experience. That work sharpened her skills in working with trauma and ongoing mental health needs, and in coordinating care that fits each person’s life circumstances.
Background and approach
Karen draws on a range of approaches and adapts them to what a person needs. She uses cognitive behavioural ideas to spot and change unhelpful thinking and habits. She works with emotionally focused methods to help people notice and name feelings.
She is also building her use of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to support values-based action. Sessions are collaborative and paced to suit individual goals. Karen listens for what matters most and helps people try straightforward steps between meetings.
She also brings experience in supporting issues such as attachment and abandonment, adoption and foster care, body image, caregiver stress, chronic illness, codependency, eating-related concerns and communication difficulties. Conversations may also cover dissociation, domestic violence, trauma and abuse, commitment and control issues, and coping after disasters.
Karen offers therapy in English and Tagalog and aims to create a calm, respectful space to work through the immediate problem and the next steps.
How therapy approaches translate online
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on helping people notice thoughts and feelings without getting stuck, then take small actions that match their values. It can help when worry or avoidance get in the way of living the life someone wants. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) looks at connections between thoughts, feelings and actions and teaches practical skills to change unhelpful patterns. It is useful for anxiety, low mood and stress. Client-Centred Therapy gives the person space to be heard and understood, with the therapist following their pace and priorities.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will discuss goals and preferences, and together they will try methods that suit the person's situation. Sessions are collaborative and may draw on more than one approach as needs change.
Online therapy can be flexible and easier to fit into daily life. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues, phone sessions work when bandwidth is limited, and live chat or text messaging suit brief check-ins or people who prefer not to be on camera. These options help people keep continuity of care while balancing family, work and other commitments.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Body image
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Domestic violence
- Eating and food-related issues
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Immigration issues
- Impulsivity
- Intellectual disability
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 12 years
- Licensed
- Languages
- English, Tagalog
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