About Us
Contact Us
Denver location: 190 E. 9th Ave., Suite 140, Denver, CO, 80203.
Westminster location: 8120 Sheridan Blvd. Suite C-206
The Love and Trauma Center main office: 720.663.7254
Saj Razvi, LPC
Saj Razvi is the Executive Director of the Love and Trauma Center. He is a national CAR trainer, board licensed psychotherapist (LPC) and supervises graduate psychology students in the Love and Trauma graduate externship program. Saj maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Denver; his primary clinical interests focus on the traumatic roots of addiction and compulsive behavior. Prior to becoming a psychotherapist, Saj worked as a consultant for IBM. He has graduate degrees in both counseling psychology from Naropa University and Eastern Civilization studies from St. John’s College.
Contact information:
720.299.2599 (saj.razvi@loveandtrauma.com)
Dr. Mike Barnes
Dr. Michael Barnes is a Licensed Professional Counselor who specializes in the study and treatment of traumatized couples and family systems. He comes to the Love and Trauma Center from the University of Colorado Denver where he served as Assistant Clinical Professor and the Training Coordinator in the Masters Program in Counseling. At the Love and Trauma Center, he is a principle researcher of the CAR Model and a therapist for individuals, couples, and families in the Westminster, Colorado office. In addition, Dr. Barnes continues to teach as an adjunct faculty member at CU Denver, provides training to community and professional groups on trauma related issues, and consultation to healthcare agencies, hospitals, and mental health service providers regarding the impact of compassion fatigue on organizational and employee wellness.
Dr. Barnes interest in trauma began while he was a doctoral student at Florida State University where he received his Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy. While at FSU he studied the secondary and systemic trauma of families following an acute trauma to a child. He also served as a counselor in the Vietnam Veteran Families Project and the FSU Psychosocial Stress Research Center. After leaving Tallahassee in 1995, he spent many years as a program administrator and published author before accepting a full time academic position in 2006. Throughout the years, he has remained true to his passion for trauma treatment, choosing Program/Clinical Director positions at mental health treatment facilities that focused on traumatized youth, crisis stabilization, and trauma informed mental health services for chronically mentally ill patients and their families.
Contact information:
941.962.8763 (mike.barnes@loveandtrauma.com)
Dr. Will Van Derveer
Dr. Will Van Derveer is a psychiatrist who practices an integrative approach to medicine. He regards people as inherently healthy and whole — in contrast to the conventional and widespread belief that people with psychiatric symptoms must be in long-term or permanent treatment. Chronic maladaptive thoughts and behaviors cause chemical changes in the body, leading to psychiatric illness. Psychological health can truly be achieved by learning new techniques of managing stress, releasing traumatic charge stored in the autonomic nervous system and overcoming f ear-based habits. He prescribes medications as a temporary tool for softening intense symptoms and works in close coordination with staff psychotherapists so that deeper healing can occur.
Low doses and brief medication treatments are often used. Alternative treatments uch as vitamins and supplements are encouraged when appropriate.
Dr. Van Derveer consideres the whole person: body, mind, spirit and social context. He practices deep listening with his patients in order to understand their experience and symptoms. He is trained in EMDR, Somatic Experiencing and Containment and Resolution. He is a long time meditator and part of the teaching faculty at the Love and Trauma Center.
Contact information: (303) 260-9685
Christina Oshier, MA
Christina Oshier is a trainer with the Love and Trauma Center and a private practice psychotherapist. Christina worked in advertising account management for 6 years before changing careers and attending Naropa University’s Transpersonal Counseling Psychology program. She spent her initial year after graduate school working with the Jefferson Center for Mental Health as the program assistant in the International Trauma Consultants department, focusing her interest and knowledge of trauma disaster response, and vicarious or secondary trauma. Christina teaches about trauma treatment, vicarious trauma, and stress resolution to graduate level students in psychology, mental health workers, and the lay public.
Contact information: 720.209.2609 (christina.oshier@loveandtrauma.com
Dr. Eric Wolterstorff
Dr. Eric Wolterstorff’s specialty is social trauma, meaning the impacts of disasters, deprivation and violent conflict on the capacity of societies to adapt to the world, nourish themselves, and develop. His work is based in the intersection of psychology, trauma, culture and group behavior. His dissertation, A Speculative Model of How Groups Respond to Threats, addresses the unconscious behaviors of groups in response to stress or traumatic shock.
In the 1990s, Wolterstorff developed protocols to heal individuals from the effects of trauma. He studied body-based approaches to psychotherapy and added to Peter Levine’s body of work. He practiced structural integration, and spent years exploring meditation techniques and how they could be applied to healing trauma. He studied large group conflict resolution under Arnold Mindell, and Murray Bowen’s family therapy work. Since then, he has structured new approaches to healing attachment wounds, and to interrupting the transgenerational transmission of trauma through families. Over the past fifteen years, he has led trainings for psychotherapists and group facilitators in the United States and Europe.
Professional associations:
• The American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA)
• The International Psychohistorical Association (IPA)
• The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS)
• The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS)
Wolterstorff will present on “Memory, Trauma and Transference” at the European Association for Body Psychotherapy (EABP) in Cambridge in September, 2012.
Contact information:
303.638.2451 (eric.wolterstorff@loveandtrauma.com)
Crystallin Dillon, MA
Crystallin graduated from Naropa University with a Master’s degree in Contemplative Psychotherapy and is part of the Love and Trauma externship program. She recently served as a teaching assistant in the 2012 Denver CAR training. She has worked as a milieu counselor with a group of severely traumatized teenage girls at a residential treatment center and completed her internship at the Rape Assistance and Awareness Program where she practiced trauma therapy with survivors of sexual abuse and assault. Her Master’s thesis was a synthesis of her contemplative training and her understanding of the psychobiology of trauma. It was entitled, “The Dharma of Trauma: Towards a Contemplative Foundation for Trauma Therapy.” Crystallin holds the precise and intentional means of trauma therapy within the larger container of openness, compassion and wisdom that stem from her training as a Buddhist and a Contemplative Psychotherapist.
Contact information:
720.663.7254
About our approach:
We strive to discover, test, apply, and spread the best therapeutic techniques in an ever evolving field while valuing care and relationship. We practice an integrative approach to therapy: drawing upon neuro-scientific research, Western psychiatric medicine, human development, attachment, and Eastern mindfulness practices. When possible, we ground our models and interventions in neuro-psychological research, as well as clinical studies of efficacy. Over time we anticipate that our selected best practice techniques will be altered and replaced as the understanding and practice of psychotherapy advances.