Dr. Karolina Pekala is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist who specializes in eating disorders and disordered eating, including binge eating, restriction, food preoccupation, and body image distress, as well as anxiety, self-confidence, sexual health, adolescence, and sleep and dreams. She works with teens, young adults, and high-achieving professionals who feel stuck in cycles around food, emotions, or self-criticism, helping them interrupt eating-disorder patterns, reduce anxiety, and rebuild trust in themselves and their bodies.
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Dr. Pekala’s extensive training allows her to tailor treatment to each client, integrating cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), psychodynamic principles, and family and relational patterns to support meaningful and sustainable change. She takes a holistic and collaborative approach to therapy, with hypnosis playing a pivotal role in helping clients work with emotional patterns that are difficult to shift through talk therapy alone and move toward a more peaceful, flexible relationship with food and themselves.
Dr. Pekala often works with individuals who appear successful on the outside but experience significant internal pressure. Many of her clients are high-achieving students, professionals, creatives, and athletes who struggle with perfectionism, anticipatory anxiety, or panic before important moments such as presentations, performances, competitions, or medical procedures. She also supports individuals navigating eating concerns, body image struggles, or a complicated relationship with food, as well as those experiencing medical-related anxieties, including needle phobia, fertility treatment stress, and health procedure-related fear.
Dr. Pekala helps clients interrupt eating-disorder patterns, reduce anxiety, and rebuild trust in their bodies and internal cues. Her approach is active, collaborative, and tailored to each individual, supporting both behavioral change and deeper emotional healing.
Hypnosis plays a central role in Dr. Pekala’s work and is used as a grounding, empowering tool, not a loss-of-control experience. It can be especially helpful when clients feel stuck in patterns that persist despite insight or strong motivation.
Dr. Pekala earned her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Long Island University, Post Campus, following graduate training at Columbia University, Teachers College, and undergraduate study at New York University, where she graduated with High Honors.
Dr. Pekala serves as Head of Clinical Supervision in our practice, where she provides leadership, mentorship, and oversight to clinicians in training and licensed providers. In this role, she supports high-quality, ethical, and evidence-based care across the practice, with particular attention to complex clinical presentations, eating disorders, and trauma-informed treatment. Her leadership reflects a strong commitment to clinical excellence, thoughtful case conceptualization, and collaborative professional development.
Dr. Pekala is a trauma-informed psychologist with extensive experience working across hospitals, specialty clinics, and integrated care settings. She began her clinical work as a certified crisis counselor and domestic violence advocate in New York City emergency rooms, supporting individuals during moments of acute distress and early recovery.
Her training includes work in integrated medical settings alongside primary care, OB/GYN, pediatric, and psychiatric providers, with a strong focus on the mind–body connection, health-related anxiety, and family systems. Dr. Pekala completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Cambridge Eating Disorder Center (CEDC), where she provided individual and group therapy for individuals with anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, night eating, and co-occurring issues such as anxiety and depression.
Her work emphasized both behavioral stabilization and emotional healing, helping clients reduce eating-disorder behaviors, rebuild self-trust, and develop identities beyond weight or appearance. She worked closely with families and interdisciplinary teams to support recovery across systems.
Dr. Pekala works extensively with high-achieving individuals whose anxiety is closely tied to performance — in academics, athletics, public speaking, the performing arts, and demanding professional environments. She understands how ambition and self-criticism can quietly fuel disordered eating, chronic stress, and difficulty internalizing success. She also has particular expertise in medical-focused anxieties, including needle phobia, procedure-related panic, fertility treatment stress, and anxiety surrounding chronic health conditions.
She is a member of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH) and remains committed to ongoing education and evidence-based care, providing the best treatment for her patients.
