TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED THERAPY · TELEHEALTH THROUGHOUT CALIFORNIA
Therapy for people who are tired of surviving and ready to recover.
A California group practice specializing in trauma. EMDR, Brainspotting, somatic therapy, IFS, and attachment-based care via secure telehealth.
About Heal the Hurt
Heal The Hurt is a California-licensed group practice of fifteen clinicians, three staff supervisors, and a director with seventeen years in the field and specializing in trauma. We see adults and couples across California via secure telehealth. We accept most major insurance plans, offer private-pay sessions, and maintain sliding-scale availability through select clinicians. Every clinician on our team is trained, supervised, and continuously developed in trauma-focused modalities. EMDR, Brainspotting, somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems, and attachment-based therapy are the spine of how our team works, not an add-on to a generalist practice.
Our Mission
To provide trauma-specialized care at the level the work actually requires: direct, clinically rigorous, paced to the nervous system but not slow for the sake of being slow, and built around the conviction that trauma is a category of clinical specialization rather than a topic any therapist can handle.
We exist for the people who have been carrying what happened to them for too long, who have done the work of naming it, and who are now ready to recover from it. We do not promise speed. We do not promise comfort. We promise that the work we do reaches the layer where the trauma actually lives, and that the people doing that work with you have been trained for the depth of it.
What Makes Us Different
You do not need a bigger vocabulary for your pain. You need treatment that knows what to do with it.
Most people who find us have already tried therapy. Sometimes years of it. They can describe their childhood with clinical accuracy, name their attachment style, identify their triggers, and articulate exactly why they react the way they do, and none of it has changed how they actually feel inside their own body.
This is the gap trauma-specialized treatment closes. Insight is not the same as resolution. Understanding why you flinch is not the same as not flinching. Talking about a memory is not the same as your nervous system finally filing it as something that happened then instead of something that is happening now. The work we do is the second kind.
Most general therapy practices treat trauma as one of many things they handle. We treat trauma as the only thing we handle. That focus changes the experience. You are not explaining your symptoms to a therapist who is trying to remember which trauma framework applies. You are working with someone whose entire clinical orientation is built around what happens to a human being in the aftermath of harm and what it takes to actually recover.
Meet Lara
Director, founder, and trauma Specialist of seventeen years.
Lara built her practice for the people who have been managing too well, for too long, with too little help. Adults who look fine. Function fine. And know, somewhere quiet, that fine is not the same as healed. Trauma does not announce itself in the lives of the people Lara works with. It hides inside competence, inside caretaking, inside the version of you that everyone else gets to rely on. Her work begins where that version ends.
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Lara Mekhitarian, LMFT (#78395)| Director and Founder of Heal The Hurt Counseling | Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
Lara built Heal The Hurt Counseling around the kind of care she wished had existed when she started this work seventeen years ago: direct, clinically rigorous, and unwilling to mistake gentle pacing for low expectations. She works with adults whose trauma has shaped a competent, high-functioning external life and a private interior they have rarely had language for. Sexual trauma. Childhood trauma. Attachment ruptures. Complex PTSD. The trauma that comes from being the person everyone else relied on while no one was checking in on you.
Her clinical orientation integrates EMDR, Brainspotting, somatic therapy, attachment-based work, and parts work. She is not method-loyal. She is outcome-loyal. The work she does is paced (stabilization always precedes processing), but it is not slow for the sake of being slow. Clients describe her as direct, perceptive, willing to name what is happening in the room rather than work around it, and steady when the material gets heavy. She is the therapist who will tell you what she sees.
After 17 years as a trauma specialist and six years building this group practice, Lara now divides her clinical time between a small caseload of complex-trauma clients she sees directly and the leadership of a team of eighteen clinicians she has trained, supervised, and continues to develop. She is a believer in trauma-specialized care as a clinical category, not a buzzword, and in the responsibility of doing the work well.
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Lara's areas of focus reflect both the depth of her training and the breadth of what clients bring through the door: sexual abuse and assault, trauma from physical assault or abuse, childhood trauma, attachment trauma, and high-profile sexual harassment that requires complete discretion. She holds space for traumatic grief and loss, grief support for parents, and the layered experiences of veterans. Her work extends into workplace trauma and harassment, alongside workplace team building, communication, and assertiveness skills. She offers LGBTQ+ and affirming counseling, sex and intimacy therapy, kink- and polyamory-affirming care, and alternative relationship counseling. Lara also walks with clients through anxiety, identity development, boundary setting, empowerment and self-esteem challenges, infertility, life transitions, women's issues, and men's challenges.
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Trauma From Physical Assault Or Abuse
Anxiety
Sexual Abuse
Traumatic Grief And Loss
Grief Support For Parents
Veterans
Support For Life Transition
Workplace Trauma And Harassment
Workplace Team Building And Communication
Lgbtq+ & Affirming Counseling
Sex And Intimacy Therapy
Kink And Polyamory
Communication And Assertiveness Skills
Boundary Setting
Infertility Challenges
Empowerment And Self-esteem Challenges
High Profile Sexual Harassment
Alternative Relationship Counseling
Women’s Issues
Men’s Challenges
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Eye Movement Desensitization And Reprocessing (EMDR)
Havening Technique
Brainspotting
Trauma Resiliency Model (Somatic)
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Trauma Conscious Yoga Method
Somatic Therapies
Lara accepts a limited number of new clients each quarter and maintains a waitlist.