About Karen
Karen Santos is a PACFA counsellor with 12 years working in mental health across Australia. She supports people through stress, anxiety, grief, depression and the aftermath of trauma. She also helps parents facing the daily strains of raising children and people adjusting to major life change.
Her background combines psychotherapy and social work experience in community mental health. That practical work involved trauma-informed counselling and case management, which shaped her straightforward, problem-solving style.
How Karen works
Sessions tend to focus on what matters most to the person in front of her. Karen uses a mix of approaches to meet different needs. She draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to look at thinking and behaviour patterns.
Emotionally-Focused Therapy helps when emotions and relationships feel overwhelming. She is building skills in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help people act on their values while managing difficult feelings. In therapy she aims to create a calm, respectful space where people can be listened to and understood.
She encourages small, practical steps that fit into everyday life. Sessions are conversational and paced to the individual. Karen speaks English and Tagalog.
She has experience with issues such as attachment and abandonment, body image, caregiver stress, chronic illness and pain, codependency, communication and control issues, dissociation, domestic violence, eating issues, adoption and foster care concerns, and coping with disasters.
Karen lists 8 ways of working on the entry:
What Karen works with
The areas below are the ones Karen selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
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
Training and background
| Register | PACFA |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 12 |
| Languages | English, Tagalog |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Australia |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
How these approaches work online
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, helps people clarify what matters to them and take action toward those values even when feelings are hard. It can be useful for anxiety, depression and life transitions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, focuses on identifying unhelpful thought and behaviour patterns and trying practical alternatives to change symptoms and routines. Emotionally-Focused Therapy, or EFT, centres on understanding and processing strong emotions to improve how someone relates to themselves and others.Finding the right approach is part of the work. Karen will listen to a person’s situation, goals and preferences and then suggest ways to proceed. That choice is collaborative and can change over time as needs shift.
Online sessions let people fit counselling into busy lives. Video calls approximate an in-person conversation, while phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is limited or when someone prefers not to use video. Live chat and text-based messaging offer quick check-ins and ongoing support between sessions. These formats increase flexibility for people managing work, childcare or mobility concerns and make it simpler to keep therapy consistent.
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Common questions
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A practical next step
Write down two things you would want to be different in six months. That is the most useful thing to bring to a first session, whoever it is with. If you would rather start now than keep reading, online sessions are the quickest route.
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