SOUTH HILLS, PA · TELEHEALTH STATEWIDE
Lauren Stark, LCSW
“I would love to work with you to create the life you want.”
Lauren Stark is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker at CPA Counseling’s South Hills office, also seeing clients by secure telehealth across Pennsylvania. A Women’s Mental Health Specialist practicing since 2007, she works with adults and couples on anxiety, depression, boundary setting, grief and loss, parenthood and postpartum stress, midlife and menopause-related concerns, codependency, and self-esteem. Her approach draws on CBT, DBT, IFS, and Exposure and Response Prevention for OCD.
WHO LAUREN WORKS WITH
Who she’s for
Lauren sees adults 18 and over, individually and as couples. She doesn’t work with children or adolescents, and doesn’t take drug and alcohol cases — if that’s what you need, our intake coordinator will match you with the right person on the team.
why work with Lauren
Start where you actually are
Life brings challenges often. Maybe you’re a couple who stopped hearing each other somewhere along the way, or a woman who spent years taking care of everyone else and doesn’t quite recognize the person looking back. You don’t have to have it sorted out before you walk in. Lauren meets you where you are and takes the journey with you.
HOW LAUREN WORKS
One approach, assembled for you
Lauren doesn’t run a protocol. She’s trained in several bodies of work and chooses between them based on what’s actually happening — which means two clients with the same diagnosis often get very different work.
CONDITIONS TREATED
What Lauren treats – who Lauren sees
- Anxiety
- Depression
- OCD
- Marital & Relationship Issues
- Controlling Relationships & Gaslighting
- Grief & Loss
- Postpartum
- Codependency
- Life Transitions
- Women’s Mental Health & Midlife
- Caregiver Stress
- Self-Esteem
For OCD
Exposure and Response Prevention — rare in this region
“Life brings challenges often. My goal is to assist in bringing higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress and overwhelm.”
CARE PHILOSOPHY
No program. A plan built with you.
There’s no curriculum here and no set number of sessions. Lauren starts from what you bring and builds from there, which means the pace is yours — some people want to move fast on one specific thing, others need several sessions before they’ll say the real one out loud. Both are fine.
What stays constant is the strengths-based frame she’s worked from since 2007. She isn’t looking for what’s broken in you. She’s looking for what’s in the way — the boundary never set, the conversation avoided for years, the habit of putting yourself last that once made sense and no longer does. Those are the things you take on together.
She’ll also laugh with you. Lauren treats humor as a legitimate clinical tool rather than a lapse in seriousness, and clients often say it’s what made the hardest sessions survivable. Therapy with her is warm, direct, and honest about how hard some of this is — and built on the belief that you already have more capacity than you’re currently able to reach.
ABOUT LAUREN
Working together to create the life you want
Lauren Stark has spent her career on a single question: what’s actually standing between a person and the life they want, and how do the two of you take it apart together. She meets each client where they are and takes the journey of self-discovery with them, rather than handing down a plan from across the room.
She earned her MSW at Youngstown State University in 2007, trained from the start in a strengths-based approach — the assumption that you arrive with real capability, and the work is clearing what’s blocking it. Years in community mental health followed, and she has practiced at CPA Counseling for the past eight. Over that time her work has centered on anxiety, depression, interpersonal communication, life transitions and adjustment, women’s mid-life struggles, grief and loss, parenthood stress, boundary setting, and self-esteem and self-worth.
She holds a Women’s Mental Health Specialist credential and recently served on an expert panel at St. Francis University on how mental health is affected through the stages of perimenopause and menopause. That focus runs through much of her caseload — the transitions women move through with very little said out loud, and the strain on partnership and parenting that tends to arrive alongside them.
Lauren works with adults 18 and over, both individuals and couples, and is a particularly good fit for couples working on communication or on parenting together. Her approach is multi-faceted, and humor is a real part of it — she considers it a vital coping strategy for the hard things we face, not a detour around them.
Years with CPA
MSW 2007, Youngstown State
Women's Mental Health Specialist
Midlife, postpartum & menopause
Personalized Care Plans
No program commitments required
CONDITION GUIDE
Therapy guides from Lauren Stark
Addiction
What Therapy Actually Does in Recovery
In recovery, stopping and staying stopped are two different challenges. Detox, rehab, and recovery programs help you stop; therapy helps with what comes after — the reasons the substance was useful in the first place. It builds coping skills, emotional regulation, and self-understanding, and works alongside (never instead of) recovery programs and medical treatment. Nicole Duley, LPC specializes in addiction treatment in Pittsburgh’s South Hills and by telehealth across Pennsylvania.
Children & Adolescents
Tween to Teen: When Your Child Changes & You Can’t Say When
Somewhere between about ten and fourteen, many children pull away, go quiet, or get moodier — often with no event you can point to. Much of this is normal development, but not all of it. The useful thing isn’t to decide between “just a phase” and “something serious” on your own, but to know which changes are ordinary and which are worth a conversation with a professional. Caitie Beatty, LSW works with children and teens in Altoona and by telehealth across Pennsylvania.
Mental Health
Strengths-Based Therapy: A Kinder Approach to Hard Times
Strengths-based therapy focuses on identifying and building on the strengths, resilience, and resources a person already has, rather than concentrating only on what’s broken. It doesn’t ignore real problems — it approaches them from a place of capability and hope. Everyone who has survived hard things already carries strengths worth building on. Haley Childers, LSW uses a warm, strengths-based approach at CPA Counseling in Pittsburgh’s South Hills and by telehealth across Pennsylvania.