photo credit: Celine Viravong

ABOUT RITA:

Rita is the founder of Healing Out Lao’d, a global healing platform dedicated to increasing mental health awareness, access, and community support for Lao and Southeast Asian communities through storytelling, digital media, consulting, and educational programming.

As a Los Angeles-based Lao American licensed psychotherapist (LCSW #109144), consultant, mental health educator, and speaker, Rita’s work centers Lao and Southeast Asian mental health, intergenerational trauma, storytelling, and collective healing. Grounded in liberation psychology, transformative justice, and anti-oppressive practices, she creates spaces where individuals and communities can reconnect with authenticity, cultural identity, healing, and belonging.

Drawing from her clinical and interdisciplinary training through her Master of Social Welfare (MSW, LCSW) and Master of Arts in Asian American Studies (MA) in addition to lived experiences, Rita integrates mental health education, storytelling, and community-centered healing into workshops, healing circles, consultations, and trainings across the globe.

Her work explores the intersections of identity, grief, displacement, survival, resilience, and healing within the Lao and broader Southeast Asian diaspora.

Core Values & Practices

Rita’s core values and practices are guided through a holistic framework including a further acknowledgement of:

Transformative & Healing Justice

The need to create accessible healing and transformative spaces for communities oppressed by interpersonal and institutional violence and meeting them where they are at. Created by queer Black femme & women leaders, transformative/healing justice frameworks elevate individual and collective liberation through the means of centering self-care needs, inner work, transformation, and body-based healing strategies to help sustain oneself in the greater movement for social justice and change.

Liberation Psychology

Acknowledgement that mental health cannot be separated from systems of oppression, culture, historical/ancestral trauma, community, and the social conditions that shape people’s lives. Many emotional and relational patterns are rooted in survival behaviors, adaptation, and intergenerational experiences rather than personal failure or incompetence.

Interdependence

The notion that we as people are interconnected to systems, the land, plants, animals and how we are impacted will send a rippling impact on the environment that surrounds us.

Accountability

Inspired by femme leaders on accountability, the notion that building emotional intimacy, closeness and being in “right relationship” with one another is about messing up and taking responsibility for those mess-ups. This platform is open for feedback to learn from past, present, and future mistakes in order to grow in community with you.

Somatic practices

The body as a navigational system filled with trillions of cells that are constantly impacted by surrounding institutions and systems. Integrating embodied movement work and breath can allow for greater connection between the spiritual self, heart, and mind.

Intergenerational wisdom & resilience

Keeping in mind the ancestral wisdom and cultural traditions passed from previous generations that resource us in navigating challenging situations.

Individual & collective action

Committing to action on an individual/collective level that strengthens our movement to address social inequities and shift towards positive social change.