Traumatized Students

Kim Johancen, M.A., LPC is a Denver-based author and therapist who has developed specialties that include working with people at risk of suicide, survivors of suicide loss, and individuals struggling with self-injury. She has worked extensively with both adolescent and adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Her ability to work with people who have experienced grief and loss extends throughout her career and she remains committed to helping people resolve their post trauma symptoms along with the events that fuel them. Over the last several years she has developed a passion for working with families through divorce. She utilizes a variety of approaches including Internal Family Systems, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Kim is at heart a strengths-based therapist. She has presented her work on self-injury at Harvard University and her work with suicidal patients at Stony Brook University in New York. She recently co-authored a book for educators entitled Traumatized Students: School-Based Interventions for Reaching Under the Surface.

Aaron started his journey as a pre-med major in college, and then quickly became fascinated with the underpinnings of human behavior and process, in particular environmental psychology. With an interest in brain physiology, he received his masters degree in Counseling Psychology in 1997, and promptly started working at the brain injury center he was interning at. He moved to Colorado in 1998 to work at an emancipation group home in Arvada, Colorado working with teens coming out of detention centers, shifted to a 3 year stint at a residential treatment center in Northwest Denver, and eventually moved into private practice in 2003. Aaron built a successful private practice serving primarily children and families in the adoptive, foster care and human service system and generally became know as the therapist to call when they had a case or child no one could or would work with. In 2015, he took a detour and became the Dean of Students at a K-8 charter school in Littleton, Colorado where he pioneered the integration of mental health into the education and disciplinary system. He left the school to return to private practice in 2018.

Aaron conducts trainings nationally and is an expert in the neurophysiology of trauma, attachment & adoption and has worked successfully with the most difficult of clients and with the most chaotic and conflictual systems. His pioneering work and program development led to highly successful outcomes that increased permanency in least restrictive settings and ultimately reduced fiscal spending particularly in the mental health, educational and legal systems. Aaron has authored 2 books on developing emotional intelligence including school-based curriculum that can be implemented in short 15-minute increments to not interfere with the demands of classroom instruction. In 2019, he co-authored School-Based Interventions for the Traumatized Student, which is the culmination of a life’s work centered around creative ways to reach, work with and inspire hope in children who have experienced trauma. He is in the process of writing a new soon to be self-published book called The TEACHER Therapist: A Guide to Becoming the Teacher You Were Never Trained to Be; a title that speaks for itself.