About the Institute
Our ripening collaboration.
The Story
It started, as good things do, with a conversation that wouldn’t end.
Caroline sought out Karen to help her integrate the Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT) with Tantra. She watched Karen run retreats with complex couples who were in a great deal of pain about the state of their erotic lives. The more Caroline peppered Karen with questions, the more they operationalized what Karen had been doing for decades. Caroline added her own creative and clinical wisdom to the mix and soon the Ripening Method was born.
Today Caroline and Karen are writing together, teaching together, running retreats for couples and building a community of clinicians interested in working bottom-up, strategically and developmentally in sex therapy.
The Ripening Institute is home to their evolving method, retreats, workshops, training and consultation and soon a book.
Co-Founder
Dr. Karen Berry
psychologist-pact certified couple therapist-member of the original pact core faculty
Karen has spent more than three decades refusing to choose between science and soul.
Licensed as a psychologist in 1990 and AASECT-certified as a sex therapist in 2007, her path began with a personal discovery: talk alone wasn’t enough. Body-centered work — Rubenfeld Synergy, Gestalt, movement — became her North Star.
She trained for over ten years with Dr. David Schnarch in the sexual crucible tradition, studied strategic therapy and clinical hypnosis with Dr. Michael Yapko, and served on the original core faculty of Dr. Stan Tatkin’s PACT Institute, training clinicians in the psychobiological approach to couple therapy. Margo Anand mentored her in tantric practice and trained her to teach it.
Yoga, meditation, ecstatic dance, breathwork, and drumming keep her enlivened. Embodiment, differentiation, and relational science are the cornerstones of everything she does — including her work with couples, clinicians, CEOs, and founders.
Co-Founder
Caroline Russell Smith
lcsw-pact level 2 couple therapist- aasect certified sex therapist
Caroline’s high school yearbook predicted she’d be a sex therapist– she was running her mouth about sex way back then. After college she taught sex-ed to rapt 8th graders in Atlanta and then worked with teens in residential treatment. After earning her MSW she opened a private practice and focused on sexual trauma recovery with EMDR starting in 2005.
She co-founded the Saratoga Stress Reduction Program, which graduated more than one thousand students from its eight-week mindfulness course during her decade there. AASECT certification followed in 2017, then PACT training — a personal and professional game-changer — and Barbara Carrellas’ Urban Tantra professional training in 2023.
She is white, cisgender, queer, happily long-married to her wife, mother of two amazing sons, and drawn — to her mother’s dismay — to what’s soulful, complex, and a little crass. She loves being out on the water, on top of mountains, and in the therapist’s chair.
60+
Combined years of clinical practice
Contact
Begin the conversation.
Whether you’re a couple curious about a retreat, a clinician asking about training, or a producer looking for a voice on love and the erotic lifespan — write to us. A human reads every note.
Based In
Saratoga Springs, NY & Warwick, NY
Working with couples & clinicians everywhere