Karen Haggard
Practical support for stressful family life
- Credentials
- LCSW
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed in
- Illinois, Texas
- Languages
- English
- Format
- Online sessions
About Karen
Karen Haggard is a licensed clinical social worker with 25 years of practice in Illinois. She focuses on helping people manage stress, anxiety, depression, grief, and a wide range of life challenges. Her tone is steady and straightforward, aimed at parents who want clear support and practical help.
Karen uses simple tools to improve day-to-day coping. She helps people build better communication, handle anger, and manage sleep and parenting stress.
Background and approach
Sessions are grounded in real skills rather than jargon, so people leave with concrete steps to try at home. Her work draws on several evidence-based methods, including cognitive behavioral techniques and attachment-informed perspectives. Those methods are applied in a person-centered way to match what each client needs.
Karen also uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help people clarify values and move toward meaningful actions. Over her career she has supported people through trauma, addiction, LGBTQ issues, chronic illness, and major life transitions. She brings experience with attachment concerns, adoption and foster-care related topics, and caregiver stress.
Her background includes work with mood disorders such as bipolar disorder and with attention-related struggles like ADHD. Karen holds the Licensed Clinical Social Worker credential - LCSW - and maintains licensure in Illinois and Texas. She aims for a practical, compassionate style so clients can try small changes that add up over time.
How her approaches work online
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people notice difficult thoughts and feelings while focusing on values and small actions that matter. It is useful for anxiety, stress, and making meaningful changes in daily life. Attachment-Based Therapy looks at patterns in close relationships and helps people develop safer, more dependable ways of connecting. It can be helpful when relationship patterns, abandonment, or attachment concerns cause ongoing worry or conflict.Finding the right approach happens together. The therapist will listen to what matters to the client and suggest methods that match their goals and preferences. This is a collaborative process and can adapt over time as progress, setbacks, or new needs appear.
Online therapy offers flexible options like video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. These formats make it easier to fit sessions around work, childcare, or caregiving duties and allow people to keep continuity when life gets busy or travel intervenes. Licensed professionals can use these tools to teach skills, review progress, and offer support between sessions so clients can practice changes in their daily lives.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Less about arguing with difficult thoughts, more about loosening their grip and acting on what matters to you anyway. Values and committed action carry the work, which suits conversation at a distance.
Attachment-Based Therapy
Looks at how early bonds shaped what you expect from closeness, and how that plays out now with a partner, a parent, or your own children.
Client-Centered Therapy
The direction comes from you rather than from a set programme. The therapist offers a warm, non-judgemental space to think out loud and work at your own pace. Online, this rests on the relationship rather than on being in the same room.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Traumatic brain injury
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Gottman Method
- Hypnotherapy
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed
- Illinois, Texas
- Languages
- English
Next step
Talk to Karen
- Takes a few minutes
- Nothing to set up just to look
- Stop at any point