TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED THERAPY · TELEHEALTH THROUGHOUT CALIFORNIA
Trauma therapy for people who are tired of carrying what happened.
Some things you have been carrying for years. Some you have been carrying for decades. Most of the people we work with have been showing up to everything, doing everything, holding everything, while the weight grows. We are the place that knows how to help you set it down.
You do not need a bigger vocabulary for your pain. You need treatment that knows what to do with it.
Many clients come to us after years of functioning on the outside while feeling stuck, reactive, shut down, or overwhelmed on the inside. Others arrive after a recent event cracked something open and made old survival patterns impossible to ignore.
Our work is not about forcing you to relive the worst thing that happened. It is about helping your brain, body, and relationships stop organizing around it: the way it has shaped your sleep, your reactions, the relationships you have flinched through, the sense of self that has had to work around it. We do this work at the pace your nervous system can actually take in, not the one that makes therapy efficient.
WHAT WE TREAT
Seven specialty areas. One specialization underneath all of them.
Trauma rarely arrives as one event. It arrives as a pattern: a childhood that required a survival self, a body that has been through more than it should have, a relationship that taught you to doubt your own perception, a role you were given before you knew how to set it down, a loss the people around you couldn't sit with for as long as it took to grieve. The seven specialty areas below cover the territory of trauma our clinicians are trained to treat.
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Medical trauma, religious trauma, refugee trauma, domestic violence, sexual trauma, workplace trauma, complex PTSD.
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Childhood neglect, emotional abuse and manipulation, parentification and enmeshment, childhood physical and sexual abuse, growing up with addiction or mental illness in the family, insecure and disorganized attachment.
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Postpartum mental health, birth trauma, pregnancy and infant loss, infertility.
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Combat trauma, military sexual trauma, moral injury, veterans' PTSD, anxiety and panic, depression, reintegration.
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Death and bereavement, divorce and the end of significant relationships, ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief.
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Rebuilding identity, body reconnection, boundaries, communication skills, self-trust, codependency and people-pleasing, shame and buried emotion.
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Romantic couples, parent-child dynamics, sibling relationships.
LMFT · Director · Trauma specialist
Meet Lara
Lara Mekhitarian, LMFT is the founder and director of Heal The Hurt Counseling. After seventeen years in the field she built this practice around the kind of care she wished had existed when she started this work: direct, clinically rigorous, and unwilling to mistake gentle pacing for low expectations. Today she leads the team of clinicians who carry this work forward, shaping how trauma therapy is practiced and how clients are received from the very first session.
Areas of Expertise: Sexual abuse and assault, childhood trauma, attachment trauma, traumatic grief and loss, workplace challenges, identity development