Difficulties and challenges early on in life led Quest psychotherapist, Karen Booth into counselling where she worked through childhood trauma and an eating disorder. Karen became a Registered Nurse when she was 19 before deciding her future lay in becoming a counsellor and helping others the way she had been helped.
Karen believes that grief, loneliness, anger and anxiety are usually reflected in symptoms of feeling hopeless, helpless, worthless and useless and may be unfinished business from the past playing out in the present moment.
Working with Gestalt psychotherapy allows Karen to work with a person’s internal conflicts and confusion and look at the whole of a person rather than their individual parts. Karen’s motivation is to get in underneath and “get the gold for a person”. She loves connecting with people on a deep level and helping them find out who they really are.
THE TRANSFORMATION
The 5-day residential programs at Quest allow Karen and all Quest counsellors and psychologists to sit in the circle with participants and hear their stories. They eat meals with participants and chat to them during the week. Karen feels that by the time a participant has a one-on-one session with her she knows him or her very well.
One of the best things about program weeks for Karen is seeing the transformation that happens for people from Monday to Friday. Karen loves being a part of that transformation. She says people plus the program are the magic.
BEING AUTHENTIC, REAL AND PRESENT
Karen is the first to admit she doesn’t have all the answers for herself and that she’s still learning and progressing but she says she lives her life based on Petrea’s philosophy of being relentlessly yourself and trying to always be authentic, real and present with people and who they are at that moment.
Karen has an office in North Sydney, Woy Woy and the Entrance and works at the Quest for Life Centre and The Glen in the Central Coast. She counsels face-to-face and via Skype and Facetime. She is a Gestalt psychologist, a Neuro-Linguistic Programming practitioner, a trainer for gestalt as the counselling component of a hypnotherapy diploma and a registered nurse. In her down-time Karen lives on the Central Coast with her partner and 3 dogs.
