Our clinical focus

Specialized support for trauma in its many forms.

Trauma does not always look like one dramatic event. Sometimes it is a childhood you had to survive, a relationship that trained you to doubt yourself, or a workplace that eroded your nervous system.

Trauma and Complex PTSD

No two traumas are created equal. The shock of a single life threatening moment lives in the body differently than the slow erosion of growing up unsafe. Surviving a violent assault is not the same as surviving a controlling marriage. Inheriting your grandmother's grief is not the same as witnessing a coworker collapse on shift. Each type of trauma writes itself onto the nervous system in its own language, and each requires care that speaks that language fluently.

At Heal the Hurt Counseling, we specialize in identifying what kind of trauma you are actually carrying, because effective treatment depends on it. Acute trauma, chronic trauma, complex trauma, developmental trauma, vicarious trauma, and intergenerational trauma each respond to different clinical approaches, and our therapists are trained across the full spectrum of evidence based modalities, including EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems, and trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy.

Trauma is not a weakness or a story you simply need to get over. It is a physiological and psychological imprint that deserves skilled, individualized care. Healing is possible, and the path there begins with understanding what you are healing from.

Grief and Loss

Grief is the price of love. It is not a disorder, not a diagnosis, and not something to be efficient about. Most grief is the work of a life and does not require treatment so much as time and people who can sit with you in it.

Some grief, though, does not move the way grief is supposed to move. It compresses into the body, fragments into intrusive material, lodges in the nervous system as something closer to trauma than to mourning. This happens when a death was sudden, violent, or witnessed. When a relationship ended in ways that did not allow closure. When the loss is not the kind your culture, your workplace, or your family knows how to recognize. When grief and trauma are tangled and the trauma is keeping the grief from being able to do its work.

Heal The Hurt provides specialized treatment for the grief that has become stuck. Not to rush you through it, but to help your nervous system finish what it could not finish in the moment, so that what you have lost can take its place inside the life you are still living.

Veterans

Service shapes the nervous system in ways civilian life often does not understand. The training that kept you alive, the experiences that did not get processed, the loss of structure, the loss of the unit, the gap between what you saw and what the people around you can hold: all of it lives in the body and continues to organize how you function long after you have come home. Heal The Hurt provides trauma-specialized care for veterans across California.

We work with all branches, all eras, all combat and non-combat experiences, and all discharge statuses. Confidential. Clinical. Outside the VA system. We treat the cases where standard PTSD protocols have not landed, including chronic, treatment-resistant, and complex presentations, and we address what civilian-trained clinicians often miss: the moral injury, the identity rupture, the depression that does not look like sadness, the hypervigilance that has nowhere to go in civilian life.

LGBTQ+ affirming. Identity-affirming. Available via secure telehealth to veterans across California, including those in rural areas where in-person specialty care is scarce.

Childhood & Attachment Trauma

The child you were did exactly what was needed to survive. The adult you are is now living with the cost. Childhood trauma, whether physical, sexual, emotional, or the chronic absence of attunement, installs survival strategies before you have the cognitive scaffolding to understand them, and decades later they show up as personality: hypervigilance reframed as observance, self-erasure reframed as easygoingness, over-functioning reframed as responsibility.

The attachment system organizes around the same early data and runs the same patterns into adult relationships below conscious choice, which is why most adults with attachment wounds already know what they should do and still cannot do it.

Heal The Hurt closes the gap between knowing and capacity by reaching the developmental layer where the wounds were laid down, using EMDR, Brainspotting, somatic therapy, parts work, and attachment-based therapy to help the parts of you that froze at five or eleven or fifteen finally update their information.

Maternal Mental Health

You wanted this and you are not okay. Both can be true. Pregnancy, birth, and the early years of motherhood reshape a body, an identity, a nervous system, and a partnership all at once, and the cultural mandate to perform gratitude through every part of it makes the harder pieces of the passage nearly invisible. Maternal mental health is its own clinical territory. Postpartum mood and anxiety disorders are not just regular depression that happened to a new mom. Birth trauma is not erased by a healthy baby. The grief of pregnancy and infant loss is not made smaller by the silence around it. Infertility is not a project you can think your way through.

Heal The Hurt provides perinatal mental health treatment to clients across California, with clinicians trained in the developmental, hormonal, identity, and relational realities of this passage who do not minimize any part of it.

Couples & Relational Therapy

Most couples do not come to therapy when things get hard. They come when things get unbearable, and by the time you are searching for a couples therapist, one or both of you has been carrying something alone for a long time. Heal The Hurt works with romantic couples and with the other relationships that shape a life: parents, adult children, siblings. These are the relationships that often hold the deepest unprocessed material, and they rarely get clinical attention until they have already broken.

Our relational work is trauma-informed and structured. We do not stage emotional reenactments and call it intimacy. We slow the system down enough that you can actually hear each other, then we work on the underlying dynamics. When trauma history in one or both of you is driving the pattern, we say so. When the relationship itself is the problem, we say so. We are not a "save the marriage at all costs" practice and we are not a "split up and stop wasting time" practice. We help you see what is actually happening between you and decide, with clarity, what to do with what you see.

Self-worth, Boundaries & Codependency

Knowing your boundaries should be respected is not the same as being able to hold them. Knowing you are worth more than people-pleasing is not the same as not abandoning yourself in the next conversation.

The gap between knowing and capacity is where this work lives. Self-worth, boundaries, communication, codependency, self-trust, the anger that never had a safe place to land, the chronic shame, the sense of self you had to set aside in order to be acceptable to the people around you: these are not character skills you should have developed and somehow missed. They are nervous-system capacities that get built, or fail to get built, in early relationships where it was either safe to have a self or it was not.

Heal The Hurt treats this as the personal growth work that lets you live as the person you actually are, not the version that survived your circumstances. We address these patterns at the developmental layer where they were laid down, not the behavioral surface where they show up.

For clients who look "fine" but do not feel fine.

Who We Help

You may be successful, responsible, articulate, and deeply exhausted. You may be the person everyone relies on. You may have learned to minimize what happened because someone else had it worse, or because slowing down felt too risky.

THERAPY CAN HELP WHEN YOU ARE DEALING WITH:

  • Feeling numb, detached, or emotionally flooded

  • Overreacting and then criticizing yourself for it

  • Avoiding places, people, conversations, or memories

  • Difficulty trusting yourself or others

  • Trouble sleeping or relaxing

  • Panic, irritability, or constant scanning for danger

  • Shame that does not respond to logic

  • Relationship patterns you understand but cannot change