Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke, LMSW

Kara's approach is collaborative, psychodynamic, and trauma-informed. She works with adults and couples navigating anxiety, depression, grief and loss, relationship challenges, parenting, caregiver burden, burnout, and major life transitions. She is particularly drawn to helping periods of change, when we may find ourselves reconsidering who we are, what we want, and how we want to move forward. Many of Kara’s clients struggle balancing high intensity professional demands and their personal lives.

Kara has a longstanding interest in the motivations and patterns that shape how we see ourselves and move through the world. In her clinical work, she looks beneath the immediate concern to understand what may be driving a person’s experience. She explores how early relationships and experiences shape the ways we respond later in life and how familiar dynamics can reappear in new relationships, often outside our awareness. She helps clients make greater sense of what's happening in their lives now and create more room for insight, necessary relief, and change. 

With couples, Kara focuses on communication and the often unspoken expectations and assumptions that shape how partners understand and respond to one another. She helps couples gain clarity about their dynamic, communicate more openly, and develop a fuller understanding of each other and their relationship. 

Before becoming a psychotherapist, Kara spent many years as a journalist and worked in book publishing and communications for arts and cultural organizations. She brings to her clinical work an attentiveness to narrative and is attuned to the nuance beneath the surface of a story. Her background in literature and history also informs her interest in how people make meaning of their experiences and the stories they develop about themselves.

Kara has an MSW from Fordham University and is currently engaged in advanced psychodynamic training at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP).