Karen Gordon

Karen Gordon believes that love is not a mystery to be endured but a pattern to be understood — and that understanding it changes everything. Her practice is rooted in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT), a clinically validated approach developed by Dr. Sue Johnson, which gave Karen a framework she describes as lights coming on after a lifetime of fumbling in the dark. That personal reckoning shapes how she works: active, warm, and direct, she helps clients see the cycle pulling them apart rather than sitting back and letting confusion run the session.

Before becoming a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, Karen spent two decades as a wedding photographer — studying couples at their most intentional, most hopeful, most publicly committed. What she kept wondering was what happened after. That question eventually brought her into the therapy room, where she now works with individuals and couples in Sebastopol, California and via online sessions, helping people move from chronic disconnection and conflict toward emotional safety, trust, and genuine closeness. She also works with men, women, and older adults navigating anxiety, depression, burnout, and the aftermath of abuse or addiction.

She pays close attention to how relentlessly stimulated most people are — clients who arrive exhausted but can’t stop scrolling, whose nervous systems never get a true pause — and she treats that inability to rest as part of the clinical picture, not a footnote to it.