Dr. Corie Camara

Dr. Camara works with individuals who have experienced infidelity, sexual betrayal, or other significant breaches of trust. Discovering that a partner has been deceptive can profoundly disrupt a person’s sense of safety and reality. Clients may struggle with intrusive thoughts, anxiety, anger, grief, hypervigilance, difficulty trusting their own judgment, or an overwhelming need to understand what happened.

In individual betrayal trauma therapy, Dr. Camara helps clients process what they have experienced, regain emotional stability, rebuild trust in themselves, and establish boundaries that support their well-being. She does not assume that healing requires forgiveness, reconciliation, or ending the relationship. Instead, she helps clients make sense of conflicting emotions and determine what healing and moving forward mean for them.

Dr. Camara also works with couples recovering from affairs, sexual betrayal, and other ruptures of trust. When partners are trying to understand what happened or determine whether their relationship can be repaired, she helps them navigate accountability, honesty, emotional safety, and the difficult process of rebuilding trust and intimacy.

Dr. Camara helps couples experiencing chronic conflict, communication problems, emotional disconnection, loss of intimacy, differences in sexual desire, trust concerns, and major relationship transitions.

Couples often arrive feeling trapped in patterns they understand intellectually but cannot seem to change. The same argument happens repeatedly. One partner pursues while the other withdraws. Attempts to talk about sex, affection, parenting, trust, or unmet needs quickly become defensive or painful.

Rather than simply deciding who is right or wrong, Dr. Camara helps partners identify the vulnerabilities, fears, unmet needs, and patterns of protection that often drive conflict. Her goal is to help couples communicate more effectively while creating the emotional safety necessary for deeper honesty, intimacy, and connection.

Dr. Camara is also a skilled sex therapist who helps individuals and couples create more satisfying, connected, and authentic sexual relationships. She works with concerns including low sexual desire, differences in desire between partners, sexual functioning difficulties, sexual pain and vaginismus, sexual trauma, performance anxiety, and loss of sexual intimacy within long-term relationships.

Dr. Camara understands that sexual difficulties rarely exist in isolation. Desire, arousal, pleasure, physical health, emotional intimacy, anxiety, past experiences, relationship conflict, and expectations about sex can all influence one another.

Sex can also be extraordinarily difficult to talk about, particularly when partners have spent years avoiding the subject or when conversations repeatedly end in hurt feelings, defensiveness, pressure, or rejection. Dr. Camara provides a comfortable, nonjudgmental environment where clients can talk openly about sexuality, better understand their bodies and desires, and build sexual relationships that feel meaningful and satisfying to them.

One of Dr. Camara’s distinctive areas of expertise is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), including relationship OCD. For someone experiencing relationship OCD, questions that most people occasionally wonder about can become consuming: Do I really love my partner? Am I attracted enough to them? What if I chose the wrong person? What if this feeling means our relationship is doomed?

Trying to find absolute certainty can create an exhausting cycle of analyzing feelings, checking attraction, comparing the relationship to others, seeking reassurance, or repeatedly evaluating whether the relationship is “right.”

Drawing from evidence-based approaches including Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dr. Camara helps clients recognize these cycles and develop a different relationship with uncertainty.

Her expertise with OCD is particularly valuable when anxiety intersects with relationships or sexuality. Questions about attraction, sexual orientation, fidelity, compatibility, sexual functioning, or desire can become extraordinarily difficult to untangle when obsessive doubt is involved. Dr. Camara helps clients distinguish between productive reflection and anxiety-driven attempts to achieve certainty.

Dr. Camara’s extensive background in health psychology gives her an additional perspective on the relationship between emotional well-being, physical health, sexuality, and intimate relationships.

She works with individuals navigating trauma, chronic pain, chronic medical conditions, grief and loss, depression, anxiety, and significant life transitions. Rather than viewing these experiences separately from the rest of a person’s life, she considers how physical health, relationships, identity, sexuality, stress, and emotional well-being interact.

Dr. Camara has specialized expertise in helping individuals and couples navigate infertility, fertility treatment, pregnancy and postpartum concerns, pregnancy loss, and the emotional complexities of building a family. Following her own experience with infertility, she pursued advanced training in perinatal, postpartum, and infertility-related mental health. This combination of professional expertise and personal understanding informs a compassionate, grounded approach to experiences that can affect not only emotional well-being, but also identity, sexuality, and intimate relationships.

Dr. Camara works with clients navigating trying to conceive (TTC), infertility, IVF and other fertility treatments, miscarriage and recurrent pregnancy loss, pregnancy after loss, surrogacy, donor conception, and adoption. She also specializes in postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression, postpartum OCD, birth trauma, and difficult transitions to parenthood. For individuals and couples who are childless not by choice, she provides knowledgeable support for the unique grief, identity changes, and questions about the future that can accompany this experience.

Drawing on her extensive background in health psychology and medical settings, Dr. Camara understands the complex relationship between physical health, emotional well-being, sexuality, and relationships throughout the fertility and perinatal journey. She helps clients process grief and uncertainty, navigate difficult decisions, strengthen communication and connection with their partners, and develop ways of coping that reflect their individual needs and values. Her experience within healthcare settings also allows her to collaborate comfortably with fertility specialists, OB/GYNs, and other medical providers when appropriate, providing thoughtful and integrated support through every stage of the journey.

Dr. Camara earned her Doctor of Psychology from George Fox University, where she received a Special Commendation Award for Leadership Contribution. Her clinical training included the Cleveland VA Medical Center and VA Loma Linda Healthcare System, with rotations in pain management, oncology, hospice and palliative care, inpatient psychiatry, and health promotion and disease prevention.

She has also taught and trained healthcare providers, medical students, and psychologists in Motivational Interviewing, effective patient communication, and mindfulness interventions.

Outside of her clinical work, Dr. Camara is a Pacific Northwest native who enjoys nature, animals, spending time with her family, and life with her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.