Karen Larson, PhD., LPC

Credentials and Professional Experience

Dr. Karen Larson is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Psychotherapist with a PhD degree in Professional Counseling, and twenty years of experience. She provides individual, couples and group counseling. Karen’s credentials include ten years of university student counseling addressing issues in mental health, academics and careers, and ten years as faculty teaching in counseling curriculum at The University of Georgia. Karen’s national presentations and research embrace the theoretic framework of existential theory, which examines one’s search to find personal meaning and significance. Her co-authored 2011 publication in the Journal of Humanistic Counseling is “Facilitating college students’ authenticity and psychological wellbeing through the use of mandalas.” Her other writings explore the perception of one’s psychological resources and the degree to which life is experienced as valuable and rewarding.

Karen has advanced training in clinical pastoral education, and patient and family counseling from The University of Virginia Health Sciences Center. Largely as a result of that residency, Karen formed her theoretic approach of offering comfort and hope, resilience and transformation to clients confronted with issues of transition, grief and loss. She continues to work with a broad spectrum and age of patients and family members who are managing medical and psychological trauma. Most recently Karen has focused upon women’s issues, including issues of eating disorders and body acceptance.

Approach

Existential in philosophy, and person-centered in relationship, Dr. Larson is committed to facilitating the intentional counseling relationship, designed to enrich the client’s ability to think responsibly and creatively about her or his own life, and to support the client’s vision for change. Dr. Larson’s expertise includes integrating the tools of creativity including art, metaphor and intuition. Her goal is to assist the client in the process of self-awareness and clarity; to rename and reconfigure what is significant; and to facilitate the process of creating new solutions of meaning.

She perceives life as improvisatory art, more than a linear goal, and seeks to facilitate each client’s integration of diverse emotions and experiences into a radiant whole. Dr. Larson has additional resourcefulness in multicultural counseling as she studied abroad and lived her formative years in Lebanon, Nigeria and India.

Areas of Expertise