Clinical:

• Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches
• Gestalt/Body Approaches
• Humanistic Inter-Personal Approaches
• Community Therapy / Approaches
• 12-Step Programs
• Holistic Healing
• Relationship The Counseling Approaches
• Jungian Transpersonal Approaches
• Religious Abuse
• Healing Sexual, Emotional, and/or Physical Abuse Survivors
• Healing Abusive Relationships
• Healing Perpetrators and Victims of Abuse

Dr. Karr’s private practice is broad in nature. His work includes individual, couple, and group therapy. Dr. Karr has extensive training in behavioral and cognitive approaches including sex therapy, systematic desensitization, hypnosis, guided visualizations, relaxation methods, as well as Jungian depth approaches, including dream work, archetypal and other analytic processes.

Dr. Karr respects the needs, desires, and wants of his clients. He offers a variety of approaches, but he does not impose anything on anyone. The client has the right to say no to any suggestions. Dr. Karr is comfortable dealing with a traditional talk oriented individual therapy with clients who so choose.

It may appear on the surface that some of the diverse philosophies and methods used by Dr. Karr might be in conflict or incongruent with each other. However, a skilled practitioner, like Dr. Karr, is able to determine which method is appropriate for a particular client, or a particular time or issue in the course of a client’s treatment. There have been many clients that Dr. Karr has seen, where the first several years of therapy have required cognitive behavioral approaches to help a client get their life in order and create a high enough level of a functioning to move on to analytic depth approaches. Other clients in analysis may enter a period of external life crisis where analytic focus must be put aside and cognitive behavioral approaches be utilized on order for them to survive their crisis.

He sees a variety of clients in terms of age, sex, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity. He utilizes a large variety of clinical approaches and methods depending upon the needs and desires of a given client or clients. He has over 28 years of clinical experience in individual, couple, and group therapy approaches. He currently sees individuals and couples, and facilitates ongoing long-term groups.

Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches

Dr. Karr had extensive training at the University of Washington, one of the primary centers of cognitive behavioral therapy, in a variety of cognitive behavioral methods of treatment. Cognitive Behavioral methods involve identifying a problem or issue, and developing an intention or goal concerning this issue, and then working out a methodology to achieve this goal.

Cognitive Behavioral approaches demand an active involvement in the process of change outside of the therapy time and relationship. Clients are encouraged to read, study and try new behaviors in their life. Often it is suggested that a client puts in at least four hours of time per week upon homework related to the therapy goal. This homework for an introverted person might include forcing themselves to go to a club meeting, or a bar, or some situation, which is uncomfortable for them. Cognitive behavioral therapy is primarily concerned with changing thought patterns and behavior in the present.

The past is of interest only in terms of identifying the negative behavioral and thought patterns. The present is of the greatest focus for change. The cognitive-behavioral approach discourages the repetitive replaying of the old painful dramas of childhood like a broken record. A cognitive behavioral therapist would encourage a client to develop new ways of thinking about their issues along with new ways of acting or being. Such therapy encourages a focus upon the present and future, which we may change, and downplays the past and our ways of thinking about it, as what is in the past cannot be changed.

Behavioral approaches include such things as sex therapy, systematic desensitization to fear and other negative emotion, positive thinking and visualization, re-scripting negative belief systems, identifying negative and destructive thought and behavioral patterns and changing them, re-parenting oneself, identifying one’s power and gifts and expressing them, goal setting, boundary setting, self-control, improving self-esteem, social skills training to improve one’s relationships with others, and creating a new effective self.

Gestalt/Body Approaches
Dr. Karr’s extensive training in sex therapy approaches and in Tantric yoga, meditation and philosophy have exposed him to the effectiveness of various Gestalt and body approaches to healing. He utilizes these methods when appropriate. The Gestalt/Body approach differs greatly from the cognitive-behavioral approach, concerning the issue of the past. It is the primary goal of the Gestalt/Body approach to bring the past body memory into the present, re-experience it, and then release it. Dr. Karr in his groups, for example, uses Gestalt psycho-drama, which involves acting out previous painful experiences, especially past childhood, and thereby releasing it. Group members play out the characters of the participants in the childhood drama enabling the person to work through in the present, as an adult, the experiences that they could not deal with as a child. The methodology of Gestalt/Body work is aimed at a deep fully physical and emotional re-experiencing of wounding events versus a thinking repetitive mechanical replaying of the event.

Humanistic Inter-Personal Approaches

It is the philosophy of various Humanistic/Interpersonal therapy approaches that the real relationship of intimacy, which may develop between the client and the therapist, is of primary importance in the healing process for the client. It is not meant by this personal involvement that the client and therapist have personal contact outside of the standard clinical session. Rather, it is that the therapist steps up to the plate and shares his truth, life and experience. This is very different from a traditional Freudian analytic approach where the therapist does not share anything personal about himself/herself, and rather the emphasis is upon the client’s ability to project on to the blank screen of the analyst.

Dr. Karr over the last 28 years has been very involved in various gay, lesbian, transgender counseling centers which have all emphasized a community interpersonal based approach to therapy for gay, lesbian and transgender people. He believes strongly in this approach and shares his truth, his life, his wisdom, and his experience with clients when appropriate. He shares his pains, his hurts, his successes, and his failures, in order to model the concept that a whole human being is not perfect. He has a caring, personal, sharing relationship with his clients. Some of Dr. Karr’s clients have later in therapy shared that their relationship with him was for them the first place where they became comfortable being intimate and sharing themselves with another person without criticism or judgment. It is the hope that the therapy relationship can become a model for intimacy whereby the client can take, outside of therapy, the skills necessary to build healthy relationships with other people.

Community Therapy / Approaches
Dr. Karr’s extensive experience has contributed to his belief of connecting clients with various community organizations, services and activities. It is Dr. Karr’s extensive experience that individual therapy is greatly facilitated by encouraging and referring clients to various organizations within the community in which the client can develop connectedness with others. These organizations provide extensive resources which Dr. Karr encourages clients to become involved with as members and volunteers.