About

Arizona Trauma Institute

High quality professional training for trauma, trauma treatment, and those who support the healing of trauma sufferers.

Arizona Trauma Institute is the leader in Trauma Sensitive Care in Arizona. We offer community trainings that focus on individuals increasing their knowledge of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), stress as a physiological response, and healing as a collaborative process. These classes are designed to help you develop an understanding of trauma and teach how to recognize when trauma has occurred. After taking these classes caregivers see an increase in the intimacy they share with their children, professionals are able to increase their effectiveness in helping their clients, and clients see a growth in their own treatment progression. We believe that organizations can also benefit from a Trauma Sensitivity that is achieved through a top-down approach. Organizations see the best results when the leadership incorporates Trauma Sensitivity into their policies, procedures, and in how they interact with and care for their clients. We will work with your organization to create a Master Healer Community where clients are cared for, treated, and cured completely of their trauma. Using the Trauma Sensitive Method clients are able to move forward fully healed and without the need for ongoing treatment. We start this process with a customized consultation with the organization’s leaders where we gain a better understanding of your goals and how we can best meet them using the Trauma Sensitive values and mission. Next, we work with you to create a custom plan to apply Trauma Sensitive practices into your organization. This approach will work to increase the efficiency of your resources and create better outcomes. Most organizations already have the intention of healing and by using our top-down approach the organization sees a decrease in compassion fatigue and burnout, an increase in morale, and an improvement in the consistency and quality of their care. Organizations find that Trauma Sensitivity becomes a part of their culture and not a perspective shared by only a few individuals. Our goal is for your new Master Healer Community to be self-sufficient, but we do offer additional consultation and support if needed.

Arizona Trauma Institute’s foundational values for training and consultation are:

  • Maintain a humane and professional approach
  • Address culture specific concerns
  • Identify ways to appropriately enter complex environments with conditions that may be insecure
  • Help recipients face both short and long-term challenges caused by trauma
  • Provide curriculum that is designed to be the best fit for those being trained and the population that is being served.

Arizona Trauma Institute’s core elements for training and consultation are:

  • Competence in listening and other communication skills
  • Assessment
  • Strategies and interventions that reduce distress
  • Evaluation of the situation and the ability for an intervention to be effective.
  • Methods of problem solving
  • Practices that increase intervention effectiveness
  • Reduction of somatic pain
  • Building on current skill sets using available resources and collaboration
  • Encouragement of the establishment for on-going supervision
  • Introduction of self-care and awareness of resiliency support
  • Regularly updated through feedback and monitoring of outcomes

Arizona Trauma Institute believes that to be a great professional, knowledge is not enough. Our curriculum is designed to help mental health professionals intervene more effectively by applying what you learn in our lectures to a hands-on clinical. The clinical will help translate the information you received during the lecture and apply it to an everyday setting. When you leave our training, you will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to handle real-world situations when they arise.

Arizona Trauma Institute trains clients in the following areas:

  • Clinical skill development for counselors and therapists in the treatment of trauma for families and children
  • Clinical skill development for counselors and therapists in the treatment of trauma for adults and couples
  • Promoting organizational structure and management that are trauma sensitive
  • Structuring treatment to work more effectively using best practice models
  • Empowerment and Resiliency Treatment Structure (Rhoton and Gentry, 2013)
  • Promoting broader knowledge of the physiological and neurobiological aspects of trauma.
  • Strengths assessment and resiliency support
  • Trauma’s impact on attachment and family dynamics
  • Foster and adoptive parent education
  • Using trauma informed approaches to education, juvenile justice, and child protective services.
  • Trauma Sensitive clinical supervision
  • Trauma Sensitive assessment strategies
  • Building resiliency and post trauma growth