Meet The Team
Clinicians who specialize in trauma, not just symptoms.
Each clinician brings a distinct background, style, and area of focus. The right fit matters— especially in trauma therapy.
Our Team
Trauma-specialized clinicians.
One practice. One specialization.
The right fit matters in trauma therapy more than in almost any other clinical context. The clinician you work with, their training, their style in the room, the populations they have the most experience with, the way they pace the work, all of it shapes whether the therapy reaches what it needs to reach. Each clinician on our team is trauma-trained and supervised, and each one brings a distinct background, clinical orientation, and set of specialties. The bios below are written to help you actually choose, not to describe a generic warmth that every therapist claims. If you are not sure who is the right match, the consultation call is where we make that decision together, and you can also request that we recommend two or three clinicians whose availability and clinical fit align with what you described.
Danielle
Danielle Snowden, LMFT (#152898)
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Danielle Snowden | Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist | LMFT #152898 | Telehealth
Danielle Snowden (she/her), LMFT, earned her Master's in Counseling Psychology at California Baptist University and sees adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. Her clinical work centers on adults navigating anxiety (both social anxiety and the general kind that runs underneath daily life), depression, trauma, grief and loss, and the life transitions that ask a person to reorganize who they are. Danielle is multiculturally attuned and treats culture not as an add-on but as part of the clinical conversation, drawing on each client's cultural and identity context as it shows up in the work. Her clinical orientation is strengths-based without being naive about pain: she works from the conviction that resilience is not the absence of suffering but what gets built through it, and her job is to help clients access the resources they already have while developing the ones the situation now asks for. -
Anxiety (social and generalized), depression, trauma, grief and loss, and life transitions that require a reorganization of identity. Particularly attuned to multicultural clients and to the role of culture and identity context in clinical work.
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Trained in EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), psychodynamic work, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, narrative therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), with a strengths-based orientation across all of them. Danielle integrates modalities based on what the client's situation actually requires. Her unifying conviction is that the resources for recovery are already in the client, even when they are temporarily out of reach.
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Destanee
Destanee Prior, LMFT (#161126)
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Destanee Prior | Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (LMFT #161126)
Destanee Prior, LMFT, earned her Master of Arts in Couples and Family Therapy from Alliant International University and sees adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. Her clinical focus spans life transitions, trauma, anxiety, the self-worth wounds that come from being unwitnessed, and the relational patterns that have made closeness hard.She works trauma-informed and integrative, drawing on multiple modalities based on what the client's nervous system actually needs, and she pairs that clinical breadth with the relational quality her colleagues describe most often when asked about her: an openness in the room that lets clients arrive without armor.
Her clients tend to be people who have spent their lives performing okay-ness for other people's comfort and who have not had access to a therapeutic relationship that did not, in some way, require performance. Destanee is the therapist they can actually be seen by. The narrative work she does with clients, the reframing of a life story away from shame and toward the strengths and singularity each person carries, is downstream of that relational quality. It does not work without it.
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Life transitions, trauma, anxiety, self-worth wounds, codependency and people-pleasing patterns, and the relational patterns that have made closeness hard. Particularly works with adults who have spent their lives performing okay-ness for other people's comfort and need a therapeutic relationship that does not require it.
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Trained in EMDR, Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), psychodynamic, and attachment-focused work. Destanee integrates structure with depth and processing with relationship, matching modality to what each client's nervous system actually needs. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes one of the corrective experiences.
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Sarah
Sarah Im, AMFT (#131925)
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Sarah Im | Associate Marriage & Family Therapist | AMFT #131925 | Telehealth | Supervised By Geri-lynn Cesar, LMFT #131982
Sarah Im (she/her), AMFT, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. She earned her Master of Arts in Marital and Family Therapy from Alliant International University and holds a maternal mental health specialty credential alongside her general clinical training. Sarah's work covers a broad clinical territory: motherhood experiences and parenting stress, men's issues, trauma, anxiety, depression, grief and loss, identity development, life transitions, LGBTQ+ affirming care, and the boundary-setting, communication, and self-esteem work that often comes alongside.Her approach is person-centered, narrative, and trauma-informed, with an attachment and social-justice lens that treats the systems a person lives inside (cultural, gendered, relational, familial) as part of the clinical conversation. Sarah is unusually fluent across gendered clinical territories, working with mothers in the perinatal period and men in the specific clinical material that male socialization often keeps out of therapy. She currently has sliding-scale availability for clients for whom standard fees are a barrier.
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Motherhood and maternal mental health (perinatal mood, parenting stress), men's issues, trauma, anxiety, depression, grief and loss, identity development, life transitions, LGBTQ+ affirming care, cultural issues, women's issues, and the boundary-setting, communication, and self-esteem work that often comes alongside. Particularly suited to clients who want a clinician who treats systemic and gendered context as part of clinical conversation rather than as background.
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Trained in EMDR, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and solution-focused therapy, with person-centered, narrative, trauma-informed, attachment-focused, and social-justice orientations across her work. Sarah integrates modalities based on what each client's situation requires, and her clinical lens treats relationship (with self, with others, with the systems a person lives inside) as the primary site where healing happens.
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Isma
Isma Ahmed, AMFT (#156842)
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Isma Ahmed (she/her), AMFT, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working with adults at Heal The Hurt under licensed supervision. As a South Asian therapist and child of immigrants, Isma carries lived fluency for the specific clinical territories that show up in South Asian, immigrant, and bicultural family systems: the family expectations that shape what is sayable, the stigma that keeps mental health concerns underground, the identity work of being raised between systems, and the relationships that carry inherited weight from generations before. She works with adults navigating anxiety, depression, trauma, emotional dysregulation, relationship challenges, life transitions, self-esteem concerns, and substance use-related issues, and she is trilingual in English, Urdu, and Punjabi, which makes her clinical work directly accessible to South Asian-language clients across California. Isma's clinical posture is collaborative and culturally grounded, and she works on the premise that culture is not a backdrop to the clinical conversation but part of the material itself.
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Anxiety, depression, trauma, emotional dysregulation, relationship challenges, life transitions, self-esteem concerns, and substance use-related issues. Trilingual clinical care available in English, Urdu, and Punjabi. Particularly suited to South Asian, immigrant, and bicultural clients navigating the specific dimensions of family expectations, stigma, identity, and inherited cultural weight that show up in clinical work.
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Trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, mindfulness-based interventions, motivational interviewing, and somatic-based approaches, with culturally responsive and trauma-informed orientations throughout. Isma integrates modalities based on what each client's situation requires, with particular fluency in pairing somatic and cognitive work for trauma layered with cultural dimensions. Her use of motivational interviewing supports clients navigating substance use and ambivalence around change, and her culturally grounded lens treats identity, family system, and inherited expectation as part of the clinical material itself.
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Cece
Cecilia Wrenn, AMFT (#140501)
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Cecilia Wrenn | Associate Marriage & Family Therapist | AMFT #140501 | Telehealth | Supervised by Briana yedalian, LMFT (#137449)
Cece Wrenn (she/her), AMFT, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working with adults and couples at Heal The Hurt Counseling. Her clinical work centers on the core challenges that bring most adults to therapy: trauma, self-esteem and self-worth wounds, grief, relationship strain, and the life transitions that ask a person to revise who they have been.Cece's training is eclectic by design: she draws from cognitive-behavioral, dialectical behavior therapy, psychodynamic, attachment-based, mindfulness-based, and solution-focused approaches, matching modality to what each client's situation actually calls for. Her clinical posture is steady, warm, and non-pathologizing. She works with clients across racial, identity, and sexuality lines and approaches identity-affirming care as a default rather than as a feature, building the kind of clinical relationship where vulnerability does not have to be performed before it can be met.
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Trauma, self-esteem and self-worth wounds, grief and loss, relationship strain (including couples), and the life transitions that ask a person to revise who they have been. Particularly suited to clients who want a clinician whose warmth is steady rather than performed, and who treats identity-affirming care as a default rather than as a feature.
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Trained in EMDR, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, psychodynamic, mindfulness-based, solution-focused, and narrative therapies, with person-centered and trauma-informed orientations across her work. Cece integrates modalities based on what each client's situation calls for, working from the assumption that the right pace is the one that makes vulnerability survivable rather than the one that makes therapy efficient.
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Darius
George Darius Ester, AMFT (#147420), APCC (#16808)
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George Darius Ester | Associate Marriage & Family Therapist | AMFT #147420 | Associate Professional Clinical Counselor | APCC #16808 | Telehealth | Supervised By Lauren Thomas, LMFT #130053
George "Darius" Ester (he/him), AMFT, APCC, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and Associate Professional Clinical Counselor working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. He earned his Master of Science in Counseling Psychology from California Baptist University, with prior clinical experience including Short-Term Residential Therapeutic Program (STRTP) work that gave him sustained exposure to acute trauma and dysregulation.His adult work at Heal The Hurt centers on trauma and PTSD, religious trauma, anger management, men's mental health, identity development, anxiety, depression, self-esteem, and boundary setting. Darius is particularly fluent in the clinical territory many men have not had a place to bring: the anger that has been told to be smaller, the religious frameworks that shaped identity before it could shape itself, the boundary capacities that were never modeled, the depression that does not always look like sadness in a man. He is culturally responsive and works at a paced, collaborative tempo. Darius currently has sliding-scale availability for clients for whom standard fees are a barrier.
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Trauma and PTSD, religious trauma, anger management, men's mental health, identity development, anxiety, depression, self-esteem, boundary setting, and cultural identity work. Particularly suited to men who want a male clinician with fluency in the specific clinical territories that male socialization has often kept out of therapy.
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Trained in Brainspotting, attachment-based therapy, psychodynamic work, narrative therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and solution-focused therapy, with a trauma-informed orientation across his work. Darius integrates modalities based on what each client's situation calls for, with particular attention to how identity, family history, and cultural and religious context have shaped the patterns that bring a client to therapy. His clinical pace is collaborative and steady.
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Jess
Jessica Sunio, APCC (#15273)
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Jessica Sunio | Associate Professional Clinical Counselor | APCC #15273 | Telehealth | Supervised By Lauren Thomas, LMFT #130053
ess Sunio (she/her), APCC, is an Associate Professional Clinical Counselor working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. She earned her Master's in Clinical Counseling from Loyola Marymount University. Jess's clinical work centers on the cultural and systemic dimensions of mental health: specific expertise in Latinx and Asian family systems, intergenerational trauma, LGBTQ+ affirming care, and the identity development work of adults whose lives sit across multiple cultural, gender, or familial contexts. She also carries a less common specialization in athlete experiences, working with athletes and former athletes through the identity, performance, and transition layers of sport, including the work of becoming someone after the sport that defined you is over.Her clinical orientation is feminist, strength-based, and trauma-informed, and her work names systemic forces explicitly rather than treating them as background to the individual story. Jess's clients tend to be young adults and adults navigating identity, communication, life transitions, anxiety and mood, and the layered impact of family-of-origin systems on the present.
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Cultural and systemic dimensions of mental health, Latinx and Asian family systems, LGBTQ+ affirming care, intergenerational trauma, identity development, anxiety and mood disorders, depression, life transitions, communication and assertiveness, relationship stress, and athlete experiences (identity, performance, and transitions). Particularly suited to adults navigating identity work across multiple cultural, family, or systemic contexts, and to athletes and former athletes whose lives have been organized around competitive performance.
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Trained in EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), attachment-based therapy, narrative therapy, psychodynamic work, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mindfulness-based therapy, solution-focused therapy, and feminist therapy, with strength-based and trauma-informed orientations throughout. Jess integrates modalities based on what each client's situation requires. Her feminist lens runs through all of it: she does not separate the psychological from the systemic, and her clinical work proceeds from the conviction that they shape each other in ways therapy needs to name.
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Fallynne
Fallynne Usher, AMFT (#139881)
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Fallynne Usher | Associate Marriage & Family Therapist | AMFT #139881 | Telehealth | Supervised By Lara Mekhitarian, LMFT #78395
Fallynne Usher (she/her), AMFT, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. She earned her degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and Counseling Psychology from California Baptist University and came to clinical work through education and women's health. Her earlier career in teaching and mentoring youth and her later work in family and child mental health, including supporting families through pregnancy, birth, postpartum care, and infant loss, gave her unusual range in the developmental and relational layers of adult life.At Heal The Hurt, Fallynne's clinical work centers on transitional aged adults (18 to 23), maternal mental health, complex trauma, anxiety, depression, grief and loss, life transitions, and couples therapy, which is the work she loves most. She is also a faith-based therapist who integrates Christian frameworks into clinical work for clients who want their faith treated as part of the conversation rather than around it. Her clinical posture is nonjudgmental and engaged, and her clients often describe the work as serious without being heavy.
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Transitional aged adults (18 to 23), maternal mental health (perinatal mood, pregnancy and postpartum support, infant loss), complex trauma, anxiety, depression, grief and loss, life transitions, and couples and relationship work. Also available as a faith-based therapist for Christian clients who want their faith treated as part of the clinical conversation rather than something they need to set aside to do the work.
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Trained in EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), psychodynamic, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Faith-Based therapy. Fallynne integrates trauma processing, depth work, parts work, and cognitive interventions based on what each client's situation calls for, and offers faith-integrated clinical work for clients who want Christian frameworks brought into the room rather than set aside in order to do the work.
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Emily
Emily Bartels, AMFT (#147273)
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Emily Bartels | Associate Marriage & Family Therapist | AMFT #147273 | Telehealth | Supervised by Geri Lynn Cesar, LMFT (#131982)
Emily Bartels (she/her), AMFT, APCC, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and Associate Professional Clinical Counselor working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. She earned her Master's in Clinical Psychology from California Baptist University. Emily's clinical work centers on trauma and PTSD, motherhood and parenting experiences, religious trauma, women's issues, identity development, anxiety, depression, self-esteem, and couples therapy including premarital counseling. She is also available as a faith-based therapist for Christian clients who want their faith integrated into the work, and she holds the rarer combination of religious trauma and faith-based competence in the same clinician: she can sit with clients deconstructing from religious harm and with clients who want their faith brought into the room, without conflating the two.Emily's trauma processing toolkit includes both EMDR and Brainspotting, which means she can take a client through bilateral trauma processing rather than referring out for that piece. She currently has sliding-scale availability for clients for whom standard fees are a barrier.
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Trauma and PTSD, religious trauma, motherhood and parenting experiences, women's issues, identity development, anxiety, depression, self-esteem, couples therapy and premarital counseling, and communication and assertiveness work. Also available as a faith-based therapist for Christian clients who want their faith integrated into clinical work. Particularly suited to clients navigating motherhood, religious complexity (deconstruction or integration), or the intersection of relational and identity work.
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Trained in EMDR, Brainspotting, attachment-based therapy, psychodynamic work, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, narrative therapy, mindfulness-based therapy, and solution-focused therapy, with a trauma-informed orientation throughout. Emily integrates modalities based on what each client's situation requires, with particular fluency moving between trauma processing modalities (EMDR and Brainspotting) and the depth and relational modalities that hold the work between processing sessions. Her approach to religious material is non-pathologizing in both directions: faith as a resource is welcomed, and faith as a source of harm is named clearly when it is.
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Andrew
Andrew Megerdechian, AMFT (#154796)
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Andrew Megerdechian (he/him), AMFT, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from California State University, Northridge, and his Master's in Marriage and Family Therapy from Pepperdine University. Andrew brings more than five years of clinical experience in crisis counseling and trauma work, including extensive work with survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse and substantial experience supporting parents of children on the autism spectrum and with other special needs. His adult clinical work at Heal The Hurt centers on trauma (with particular fluency in sexual abuse and domestic violence), anxiety, depression, mood disorders, grief and loss, life transitions, communication, parenting for children with special needs, and substance abuse and recovery. He brings a systemic, family-systems-informed perspective to clinical work, integrating personal, familial, and cultural dimensions into each client's care. Andrew's clinical posture is steady, and his crisis counseling background gives him a particular calm in clinical material that is acutely difficult to hold. He currently has sliding-scale availability for clients for whom standard fees are a barrier. Supervised by Briana yedalian, LMFT (#137449)
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Trauma therapy (particularly sexual abuse and domestic violence), anxiety, depression, mood disorders, grief and loss, life transitions, communication, empowerment and confidence work, parenting for children with special needs, and substance abuse and recovery. Particularly suited to clients carrying heavy trauma material who want a clinician with crisis counseling experience and a steady, systemic orientation.
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Trained in EMDR, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, psychodynamic therapy, narrative therapy, mindfulness-based work, and solution-focused therapy, with person-centered and trauma-informed orientations throughout. Andrew integrates modalities based on what each client's situation requires, with particular attention to the systemic and familial dimensions that shape what an individual is bringing into the room. His clinical pace is grounded and unhurried, which is what allows the harder material to be approached without retraumatizing the client.
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Nelly
Nelly Mardiros, AMFT (#152997)
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Nelly Mardiros | Associate Marriage & Family Therapist | AMFT #152997 | Telehealth | Supervised By Lauren Thomas, LMFT #130053
Nelly Mardiros (she/her), AMFT, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. She earned her Master's in Marriage and Family Therapy from Pacific Oaks College with a specialization in Trauma Studies, an academic emphasis that shapes her clinical work at every level. Nelly brings over five years of experience and is fluent in Eastern and Western Armenian, which makes her clinical work accessible to Armenian-speaking clients across both diasporic and homeland dialects. Her work centers on the cultural and intergenerational dimensions of mental health, with specific expertise in religious trauma, sexual trauma, LGBTQ+ affirming care, identity development, and the boundary, communication, and self-esteem work that often comes alongside trauma recovery.Nelly carries particular fluency for clients sitting at the intersection of cultural inheritance and personal becoming: the adult whose religious upbringing shaped what they were allowed to want, the queer client from a community that did not have language for them, the second- or third-generation client carrying the trauma of generations before them. She currently has sliding-scale availability for clients for whom standard fees are a barrier.
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Religious trauma, sexual trauma, LGBTQ+ affirming care, cultural issues, intergenerational trauma, identity development, anxiety, depression, life transitions, relationship stress, and the boundary-setting, communication, assertiveness, and self-esteem work that often comes alongside trauma recovery. Bilingual care available in Eastern and Western Armenian. Particularly suited to clients navigating the intersection of cultural and religious inheritance with personal identity development.
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Trained in EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), psychodynamic therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and narrative therapy, with person-centered, strengths-based, and trauma-informed orientations across her work. Nelly integrates modalities based on what each client's situation requires, with particular fluency in pairing depth and parts work for trauma layered with cultural and religious dimensions. Her academic specialization in Trauma Studies informs how she paces this work and how she thinks about the layers underneath the presenting concern.
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Michelle
Michelle Zadourian, AMFT (#157491)
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Michelle Zadourian | Associate Marriage & Family Therapist | AMFT #157491 | telehealth | Supervised by Briana yedalian, LMFT (#137449)
Michelle Zadourian (she/her), AMFT, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. She earned her Master's in Clinical Psychology with an emphasis in Marriage and Family Therapy from Pepperdine University. Her clinical work covers the territory most adults arrive in therapy for: trauma (including sexual abuse, domestic violence, and intergenerational trauma), anxiety, depression, grief and loss, relationship stress, and the life transitions that destabilize identity. Adjacent to that, she does substantial work on self-compassion, assertiveness, and communication, which is often where the post-trauma reconstruction actually shows up. Michelle works trauma-informed and somatic, treating the body as part of the clinical conversation rather than as a vehicle that delivers the client to the session.Her clinical lens is strengths-based without being naive about pain: the resources for change are already in the client, and her job is to help the client locate them when the trauma response has them temporarily out of reach. She is LGBTQ+-affirming and culturally responsive, with particular sensitivity to how cultural context and identity development shape what therapy needs to address.
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Trauma (including sexual abuse, domestic violence, and intergenerational trauma), anxiety, depression, grief and loss, relationship stress and couples work, life transitions, and the self-compassion, assertiveness, and identity work that often comes after the trauma processing. LGBTQ+-affirming and culturally responsive across populations.
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Trained in psychodynamic therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, narrative therapy, mindfulness-based work, solution-focused therapy, and somatic therapy, with person-centered and trauma-informed orientations across her work. Michelle integrates modalities based on what each client's situation requires, with particular fluency in pairing somatic work with cognitive and depth approaches. Her work proceeds from the premise that the body holds what the mind cannot yet say, and that the trauma work has to reach both.
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Kasara
Kasara Ashford, AMFT (#158497)
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Kasara Ashford | Associate Marriage & Family Therapist | AMFT #158497 | Telehealth | supervised by Lauren Thomas, LMFT #130053
Kasara Ashford (she/her), AMFT, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. She came to clinical work through sociology, earning her undergraduate degree in Sociology from California State University, East Bay before her Master's in Marriage and Family Therapy from Touro University California. The systemic lens that pathway developed informs every dimension of her practice. Kasara's clinical work centers on intergenerational trauma, identity development and empowerment, LGBTQ+ and gender-affirming care, sexual trauma, women's issues, and the cultural and systemic dimensions of mental health that most clinical training treats as background. She brings over a decade of experience in behavioral health settings with adults from diverse backgrounds.Her approach pairs strength-based methods with the explicit naming of how systemic forces shape a person's inner life, and her clients tend to be adults navigating identity development across multiple axes, intergenerational patterns, cultural transitions, and the work of becoming a self that the systems around them were not built to recognize.
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Intergenerational trauma, identity development and empowerment, LGBTQ+ and gender-affirming care, sexual trauma, women's issues, anxiety and social anxiety, grief and loss, life transitions, mood disorders, and couples and relationship work including premarital and marital counseling. Particularly suited to adults whose identity and clinical context span multiple cultural, gender, or systemic factors and who want a clinician who will name systemic forces in the room rather than treat them as background.
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Trained in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, narrative therapy, mindfulness-based work, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, psychodynamic therapy, solution-focused therapy, attachment-based therapy, and Emotionally Focused Therapy, with strength-based and trauma-informed orientations across all of it. Kasara integrates modalities based on what each client's situation requires, and her work is anchored by the conviction that clinical change cannot happen separately from the cultural and systemic contexts a person actually lives inside.
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Pari
Paramsten Hartounian, AMFT (#155094)
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Paramsten Hartounian | AMFT (#155094) | Supervised by Lara Mekhitarian, LMFT (#78395)
Paramsten "Pari" Hartounian, Ed.D., AMFT, is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working with adults at Heal The Hurt Counseling. Her clinical focus is parents and adults whose lives are organized around the children they are raising. She earned her Master's in Clinical Psychology, her Master's in Education, and her Doctorate in Education from Pepperdine University, and brings nearly two decades of experience in school-based mental health, child development, and family systems to her clinical work.Pari sees parents navigating the emotional weight of raising children: the anxiety of parenting a child who is struggling, the grief of a parenting reality that did not match the imagined one, the strain that parenting puts on a partnership, the parent who is doing differently than they were raised, the parent who is doing the same and watching it not work. Her clinical lens treats parenting as developmentally serious adult work, and she meets parents with the depth of someone who has spent her career studying both ends of the parent-child dyad. Beyond clinical work, Pari is a leader in school-based mental health, co-creator of a Social-Emotional Learning platform used across school communities, and a regular CAMFT presenter on adolescent mental health and trauma-informed practice.
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Parenting clinical work with adults: the emotional weight of raising children, parenting a child with anxiety or behavioral challenges, the parent-child dynamics that activate something in the parent, family systems strain around child-rearing, and adults processing their own parent-child histories. Particularly suited to parents who want a clinician with deep training in child development and school-based mental health.
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With her adult clients, Pari draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, attachment-based therapy, mindfulness-based interventions, solution-focused work, family systems thinking, and a strengths-based, trauma-informed orientation. Her additional training in play-based therapy and Social-Emotional Learning frameworks informs how she thinks about the developmental and relational dimensions of parenting work, even when the child is not in the room.
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Our Staff Supervisors
The staff supervisors below do not take clients. They support the clinicians who do. Each is a senior trauma-specialized clinician whose full clinical attention is dedicated to weekly case consultation with our team, supervision of associates working toward licensure, ongoing training in trauma modalities, ethics oversight, and the sustained clinical development that lets our clinicians work at the depth this kind of care actually requires. Trauma is demanding clinical territory, and even highly trained clinicians do their best work when they are not doing it alone. Our supervisors are how we maintain rigor across the team, and how we ensure that every client at this practice, regardless of which clinician they work with, is receiving care held to the same standard.
Lauren
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Lauren Thomas | Licensed Marriage And Family Therapist, #130053
**Please note, Lauren does not see clients here at heal the hurt counseling. You may see her at her own practice through private pay at www.therapywithit.comLauren Thomas, LMFT, owns and practices at Therapy With LT in Los Angeles and serves as one of our staff supervisors. A San Fernando Valley native, she earned her Bachelor's in Psychology with a minor in Women and Gender Studies at CSU Fullerton and her Master's in Counseling Psychology at CSU Northridge. Her early clinical interest focused on couples, intimacy, and the gap between cis women and sexual pleasure.
After experiencing microaggressions and systemic barriers as a Black and Brown therapist in academia, she pivoted her clinical focus to trauma-informed care for Black and Brown femmes and for anyone who identifies with an intersectional, oppressed experience. Her practice is rooted in a feminist, anti-racist perspective: she works from the premise that systemic and structural forces shape a client's well-being alongside individual life factors, and her clinical lens names that explicitly. Inside Heal The Hurt, Lauren supervises associate clinicians and contributes directly to the clinical standard we hold across our clinicians, with particular attention to anti-racist and identity-conscious supervision. She also mentors college-age women and students building professional leadership skills.
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Trauma-informed care for Black and Brown femmes and individuals navigating intersectional oppression, from a feminist and anti-racist clinical lens. Brings additional depth from earlier work in couples and intimacy therapy, mentorship of college-age women and emerging leaders, and CSU training in counseling psychology.
Lauren Thomas, LMFT (#130053)
Geri-Lynn
Geri Lynn Cesar, LMFT (#131982)
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Geri-Lynn Cesar | Licensed Marriage And Family Therapist, #131982
**Please note, Geri Lynn does not see clients here at Heal the Hurt counseling. You may see her at her own practice through private pay at www.therapywithgeri.com
Geri Lynn Cesar, LMFT, began her career at Heal The Hurt years ago as an associate clinician under Lara's supervision. Her work since has spanned community mental health, advocacy, and education: clinical roles at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, crisis work with The Trevor Project, a Master's in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University, Los Angeles with a specialization in LGBTQ+ Affirmative Psychotherapy, adjunct faculty work at Antioch, and consulting to organizations and corporations on cultural competency.She now serves as one of our clinical supervisors and brings an intersectional feminist and collective-care framework to the role. Inside our practice, Geri Lynn supervises associate clinicians, supports the team's affirming and culturally responsive work across populations, and contributes directly to the clinical standard we hold across our clinicians. Her style is direct, warm, and grounded, and her conviction that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to clinical work shapes how she supervises as much as how she practices.
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LGBTQ+-affirmative psychotherapy, intersectional feminist and collective-care clinical frameworks, and crisis-informed clinical work. Brings additional depth from over a decade in community mental health (Los Angeles LGBT Center, The Trevor Project), adjunct teaching at Antioch University, and cultural-competency consulting for organizations and corporations.
Briana
Briana yedalian, LMFT (#137449)
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Briana Yedalian | LMFT (#137449)
**Please note, Briana does not see clients here at heal the hurt counseling. You may see her at her own practice through private pay at www.therapywithbriana.com.Briana Yedalian, LMFT, began her career at Heal The Hurt as an associate clinician under Lara's supervision and now serves as one of our staff supervisors. She earned her Master's in Clinical Psychology from Pepperdine University and her Bachelor's in Psychology from Woodbury University. Her clinical work focuses on adults navigating anxiety and chronic overwhelm, boundary and people-pleasing patterns, emotional reactivity or shutdown inside close relationships, the residue of past experiences that still feel present, and the moments of feeling stuck or disconnected.
She is bilingual in Armenian and English, which makes her clinical work accessible to Armenian-speaking clients across California. Briana's lens is built on relationship: she works on the conviction that trust and collaboration are not preconditions for therapy but the substance of it. Inside our practice, she supervises associate clinicians, brings particular attention to the relational layer of therapy in her supervision conversations, and contributes directly to the clinical standard we hold across our clinicians.
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Clinical work with adults navigating anxiety and chronic overwhelm, boundary work and people-pleasing patterns, emotional reactivity inside close relationships, and the residue of past experiences that still feel present. Brings additional depth from bilingual clinical access in English and Armenian, Pepperdine training in clinical psychology, and a relationship-centered lens grounded in trust and collaboration.