Karen Kral, MA, LPC

Certified Inner Bonding® Facilitator and Trainer

Although I am a licensed psychotherapist in the state of Colorado, most of my work is as a facilitator and trainer of the Inner Bonding process. I developed the comprehensive Inner Bonding Facilitator Training Program (IBFTP) and led the first complete training program from March, 2017 through September 2018. At that time, I turned the reins over to other Certified Facilitators who assisted me in the pilot program. I have since taken on a smaller role in the facilitator training program and have returned to my primary focus of individual and group work. I developed the Inner Bonding in Action (IBIA) method, which combines Inner Bonding with Psychodrama. I offer online groups and individual telephone and video sessions.

My Spiritual Journey

My life changed for the better when I had some mystical experiences in my early 30s. Since that time, I have been on a spiritual and personal growth journey. As a result of my own mental and emotional turmoil in my earlier life, I yearned to find a healthier way to live. As I brought Inner Bonding together with my spiritual practices, I found that I could experience joy and happiness in life and that I could love and take care of myself in ways that I had been incapable of beforehand.

I am a long time student of A Course in Miracles, and since the late 1990s, have been engaged in some form of meditation or Centering Prayer practice. I spent a portion of two summers at the monastery of the late Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in France, and have practiced and taught mindfulness and meditation.

My Professional Training

Prior to starting CoreQuest Counseling and Retreats, I worked as a therapist and group leader at Life Healing Center of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In this residential setting, I helped clients heal from childhood trauma and abuse, as well as from various addictions. I worked extensively with dissociative disorders, depression and anxiety, as well as the many addictions that people often use to try to cope with their pain, particularly eating disorders, alcohol and chemical addiction, and sex and love addiction.

I received my Masters degree in counseling in 2003 from Southwestern College, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Southwestern College is one of the few accredited counseling programs that is focused on transpersonal psychotherapy and that stresses the idea that in order to truly be helpful to someone else in their pain, you have to be willing to look at your own. You will find that my work is very much inspired by my own learning and healing.

I taught mindfulness and meditation classes at Miraval, a spa and resort north of Tucson, AZ, and led week-long programs on mindful eating at Hilton Head Health Institute in South Carolina.

I have accumulated approximately 200 hours of Psychodrama training with mentor and professor, Kate Cook, either in her private practice or at Southwestern College.

I have been a Certified Inner Bonding Facilitator since 2004.

My Worldview

• I believe, as A Course in Miracles says, that "Everything is either love or the call for love", and that healing within ourselves and with others requires recognizing this.

• I believe that it is healthy to perceive life from the perspective that "Everything happens for you, not to you". Doing so helps us to move out of the fear-based victim consciousness of the ego and to regain our courage, spontaneity and joy for living.

• I believe in the Inner Bonding principle that we are responsible for our own feelings and that we need to "be willing to give up everything to save the only one we can", as Dr. Margaret Paul so eloquenty said.

• I believe that the present moment is all there is. It is here and now that we heal.

• I believe that everything can change in a moment: this moment. No matter what the circumstances of our lives are, both heaven and hell exist right here, right now.

• I believe that we chose to be on this planet and that the light within us can shine away the darkness.

About Inner Bonding®

Inner Bonding® was developed by Drs. Margaret Paul and Erika Chopich. It is a six-step process for transforming your life. It teaches practitioners how to cultivate an internal "loving-adult" who is capable of caring for the parts of the self that need to be tended to. Often, instead of taking care of ourselves, what we do is act from our habits and conditioning. We learn how to "control and protect" in the face of fear because we don't know what else to do. Inner Bonding® teaches practitioners how to make loving choices in the face of fearful situations. Instead of drinking alcohol, compulsively cleaning the house, overeating or engaging in other addictive behaviors to avoid feelings or situations, we learn how to cope effectively by learning to care for ourselves, to speak our truth to others, and to set boundaries when necessary. Inner Bonding® also teaches us about our codependency. Codependency is what happens when we are disconnected from our "core selves" (our truth, our inner child, our soul, or who we really are.) When we are disconnected from our core selves, we try to "get" love, approval and safety from the world. This brings us a lot of suffering because if it is true that love, safety and approval must actually be found outside of us, then we have to do a lot of things to try to "control" getting what we need. Often we abandon ourselves, we pretend to be someone other than who we are, or we do things we don't really want to do only because we want to be loved, taken care of or approved of by someone else. Inner Bonding® teaches us that the real source of our safety is a deep connection with ourselves (through our inner child) and with our spiritual guidance. When we have enough experience and practice with this, and we find that there is love, safety and approval inside, we no longer feel compelled to abandon ourselves to "get" what we think we need. Instead, we find that we had what we needed all along!

Erika Chopich, PhD and Margaret Paul, PhD, founders of Inner Bonding®

Karen Kral is an Approved Affiliate of Inner Bonding®

Tim McLeod, Senior Alumni Coordinator, Sierra Tucson

I came to know Karen Kral by needing to take time to travel deeper within myself to search out what was driving my addictive behaviors and I must say the time spent was life changing. I was amazed at her intuition and ability to take me to a deeper level of connection with my authentic self and God. I continue to use the tools she equipped me with to stay on the path of happy, joyous and free. Thank you Karen, you are a gift to the recovery community.​​