Karen Hopkins

Professional qualifications, accreditations and memberships

• Masters (MA) in Integrative Psychotherapy
• Advance Diploma in Psychotherapy
• PGDip in Counselling
• EMDR Practitioner
• Attachment-Informed EMDR
• Certificate in Somatic Trauma Therapy
• Accreditations and memberships
• Accredited Member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP)
• Registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)
• Registered member of the EMDR Association UK
• Member of the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation (ESTD)

Professional experience

Karen is an accredited psychotherapist and EMDR therapist and specialises in the area of trauma. She has experience working within general adult mental health services across different care settings. Her clinical experience includes working in community settings working with clients struggling with moderate to severe mental health and psychological problems including anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma.

Karen has also worked within a highly specialist NHS secondary care service that treats patients with mood disorders, recurrent or atypical depression, anxiety, and psychological problems associated with complex personality and interpersonal difficulties. She has significant experience working with people diagnosed with conditions related to complex trauma.

She currently works as a trauma specialist at the Nightingale Hospital seeing outpatients for individual psychotherapy. 

Personal statement

Karen takes a trauma-informed approach and works compassionately and creatively with clients. She incorporates traditional psychotherapy tools as well as EMDR and somatic therapy techniques. She works with a three-pronged approach, looking at what’s going on right now, what has happened in the past, and what you would like your life to look like going forward.

Karen has a particular interest in childhood and development trauma, attachment disruptions and the impact these early experiences have on emotional health, physical health and mental health throughout adulthood. She has experience working with negative self-image, emotional dysregulation, dissociation, borderline states, chronic guilt and shame, and impaired relationships.

She works collaboratively to ensure that clients benefit from a treatment plan that has been developed just for them. She offers a non-judgmental space to help clients to understand the origins of behaviours, patterns and beliefs that are impacting on day to day life and helps clients to find ways to overcome them so that they can develop better relationships with themselves and others.

Karen believes that therapy has the potential to be a truly transformative experience through which, over time more can become possible: more life, more love, more choice and more self-certainty.