Kaerensa Craft, LCSW, psychotherapy

NY, NY | Montclair, NJ

RELATIONSHIP PROBLEMS AND INTERPERSONAL DIFFICULTIES

My extensive experience working with intimate partner abuse has provided a strong foundation when working with people to untangle complex dynamics in their relationships, including intimate relationships, family and friend relationships, and even work and professional relationships.

Focus in this area includes identifying and understanding dynamics that may contribute to relationship challenges, and strengthening skills to effectively manage them to achieve best possible outcomes.

Early in my career, intimate partner abuse was the focal point of my training and my practice. Over the course of a decade, I had the privilege to work with several innovative programs in NYC promoting recognition of the complexities of unhealthy and abusive relationships, inclusion of the life experience of all individuals involved in the relationship, and connecting the socio-cultural and systemic influences (such as gender roles and sexism, systemic oppression, and other cultural influences).
I provided psychotherapy and facilitated therapeutic groups with victims of abuse and with abusive partners. I also developed training manuals and led workshops offering education to professionals about the features of healthy, unhealthy, and abusive relationships, and underlying issues of abusive behavior within intimate relationships.
My later training at the Steven Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in NYC enabled me to incorporate ideas about our mental representations of ourselves and significant figures in our lives, and to think more symbolically about the patterns we recreate in our lives and why—and as importantly, trying out new paths and new ways of being in relation to others.