Now accepting speaking engagements, podcast interviews, and conference invitations

Karen Connell is a survivor, author, advocate, and speaker who challenges audiences to look beyond crisis and survival. Drawing on her personal experience, decades of advocacy, and a new paradigm for ending domestic violence, Karen shows how the power of choice can help individuals and communities create lasting change.

Invite Karen to Speak

Invite Karen to Speak

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Explore Speaking Topics

Watch Karen Speak

Watch Karen Speak

Transform Your Life Beyond Surviving

Welcome to Beyond Surviving, located in the heart of Harbor City, California. Founder Karen Connell is a domestic violence survivor, author, activist, certified hypnotherapist, EFT instructor, and speaker whose work combines lived experience with decades of community education and victim advocacy.


Karen speaks about expanding the domestic violence narrative, rebuilding self-confidence after abuse, and using the power of choice to move from surviving to living. Her mission is to empower women and men who have experienced life-altering trauma to break free from old patterns and create a life of their choosing.

Transform Your Life Beyond Surviving

Inspiring Transformation, Choice, and Lasting Empowerment

Karen brings decades of lived experience and advocacy to stages, panels, and workshops, offering audiences practical frameworks to shift from reactive survival to conscious living.

Domestic Violence Is Learned—and It Can Be Unlearned

Challenging root causes and showing how harmful behaviors are taught, reinforced, and ultimately unlearned.

Beyond Surviving: Reclaiming Life Through the Power of Choice

Practical strategies drawn from Karen’s book on using conscious decision-making to heal.

Living Versus Surviving

Breaking down the subconscious traps that keep individuals stuck in survival mode after trauma.

A New Paradigm for Ending Domestic Violence

A forward-looking model for advocates, educators, and communities to address prevention at its root.

A New Conversation About Ending Domestic Violence

Karen’s Paradigm

Karen offers a paradigm that examines domestic violence as learned behavior. Her approach moves the conversation beyond responding to individual incidents and toward understanding how harmful beliefs and behaviors are taught, reinforced, challenged, and ultimately unlearned.


Her framework gives professionals, educators, advocates, and communities a new way to discuss prevention and lasting change.

Explore Karen’s Paradigm

Personal Services & Modalities

Grounding every service in empathy, understanding, and personal survival experience, Karen offers tailored solutions to help clients release limiting beliefs and shift emotional states quickly and effectively.

Life Coaching

Customized coaching sessions to help you identify goals, overcome obstacles, and navigate rebuilding your life after domestic violence.

Hypnotherapy

Taps into the subconscious mind to address deep-seated issues, release old patterns, and establish empowering beliefs.

EFT Tapping

Combines acupressure meridians and psychology to quickly change old habits, release negative emotions, and rewire responses to triggers.