Karena Franses, LCSW

Karena Franses is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with a long history of supporting people through difficult life moments and complex challenges. She brings a compassionate, reflective approach shaped by many years of Buddhist practice and a daily meditation routine. Karena often references the Dalai Lama's phrase "Kindness is my religion" as a guiding value, and that sense of humility and care informs both her presence and her therapeutic work.

Her career spans two distinct care environments in San Francisco - a county hospital setting and a private psychotherapy practice. For 21 years she served as a social work supervisor in a busy outpatient HIV clinic that treated 2,800 patients, where Motivational Interviewing became a primary counseling method for the population she and her team served. In private practice she offered psychodynamic, self-psychology-informed therapy to individuals and couples, developing complementary skills across both settings as she worked with a wide range of human experiences.

Karena's clinical experience includes supporting people facing serious illness and end-of-life concerns, severe addiction, trauma, depression, and the effects of systemic challenges such as racism, homophobia, poverty, and homelessness. In private practice she also worked with relationship difficulties, body image and eating issues, self-harm, and the aftermath of abuse. She believes the answers to a person’s suffering are often found within and that therapy frequently involves clearing the clouds that obscure each person’s capacity for liberation and relief.

Gratitude for the clients and patients who have shaped her practice is a consistent theme in her work. Karena values collaboration and compassionate attention and hopes for the opportunity to explore whatever concerns a person brings and to work together toward greater clarity and ease.