About Us
Our Mission: Make trauma recovery accessible to all!
To achieve this, we are committed to equipping not only mental health professionals but also dedicated individuals supporting trauma survivors, including the survivors themselves.
While we encourage collaboration with mental health professionals versed in ITR, we recognize that this may not always be feasible due to resource constraints or long waiting periods. Too often, individuals endure lengthy waits for therapy without experiencing sustainable relief or completing their healing journey.
We advocate for universal access to mental health treatments and we offer viable solutions to facilitate the recovery journey for trauma survivors with ITR's web app. Soon, with the help of AI and machine learning, we believe many people will be able to do much of their own work with out the assistance of a professional. If a person suffering from traumatic stress is too dissociated or chooses to use a professional, they may still be able to do some work on their own to facilitate the treatment.
As Dr. Tinnin said, "Of all the mental health issues, the ones related to trauma are the most treatable. We find with our method they are easy to treat and it doesn't take long to do it."
Louis Tinnin, MD
Co-Founder of ITR®
Dr. Tinnin (1932-2014) had a successful 50-year career as a psychiatrist. He served as the founder of two outpatient trauma clinics: Trauma Recovery Institute (1996-2006) and Intensive Trauma Therapy (2006-2017). He and his wife, Linda Gantt, developed Instinctual Trauma Response® from early clinical trials at Chestnut Ridge Hospital at West Virginia University (Morgantown, West Virginia) and the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Administration Medical Center (Clarksburg, West Virginia). He and Dr. Gantt worked tirelessly together to help people fully recover from trauma symptoms to live a healthy and productive life.
Dr. J. Eric Gentry said “Dr. Tinnin turned Pierre Janet’s work of the 1880’s into a comprehensive treatment model for effectively treating trauma and dissociation.”
Bessel van der Kolk described Dr. Tinnin at a conference as ‘the greatest trauma mind of the 20th Century.’
We miss him greatly and honor Dr. Gantt for continuing their commission to make trauma recovery accessible to all.
In the 1970s, Dr. Tinnin had a private practice in psychiatry in Laurel, Maryland. He was active in the politics of mental health and instrumental in getting the state of Maryland to pass a law requiring that general hospitals have psychiatric units at a time when even the most prestigious hospital in the state was little more than a warehouse for seriously disturbed psychiatric patients.
After moving to West Virginia in 1979, Dr. Tinnin served as the medical director of a community mental health center. In 1984, he joined the faculty of the Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at West Virginia University, serving as associate professor and professor. He began learning more about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an area that interested few people at the time.
Some cases that Dr. Tinnin saw in medical school stayed with him his entire life. He questioned the received wisdom of older doctors who did not comprehend how invasive medical procedures without anesthesia for babies could be traumatic. These doctors assumed the child’s nervous system was too immature to feel pain and, even if the child did feel it, he or she would not remember it. His clinical observations impelled Dr. Tinnin to work out procedures for dealing with early memories that were nonverbal but resulted in long-lasting and disturbing symptoms.
In 1992, Dr. Tinnin developed a Fellowship in Psychotraumatology in conjunction with WVU and the VA Medical Center. It was then that he began doing research on how to process traumatic events without reliving them including those in infancy and childhood.
After retiring from WVU in 1996 with the rank of professor emeritus, Dr. Tinnin established his own clinics, the Trauma Recovery Institute (TRI) (1996-2006) and Intensive Trauma Therapy (ITT) (2006-present), where he refined his ideas about effective, simple, and brief trauma treatment.
Dr. Tinnin wrote a number of professional papers and made over 200 national and international presentations. He and Linda authored The Instinctual Trauma Response and Dual Brain Dynamics (2013). Although Dr. Tinnin knew his health was failing, he continued to work on several projects until two weeks before his death.
Dr. Tinnin was a strong supporter of the mental health freedom and recovery movements. He devoted his life to collaborating with other professionals and spreading the good news that trauma can be easily and effectively resolved and that it doesn't take years to do it.
LINDA GANTT PhD, ATR-BC
Co-Owner, Art Therapist and Co-Founder of ITR®
Linda Gantt is dedicated to the mental health freedom and recovery movement. She strives to keep her contributions to trauma recovery and art therapy up to date with the ever-changing neuroscience and the challenging mental health field. Dr. Gantt's Formal Elements ArtTherapy Scale (FEATS) is a powerful art-based assessment used by many mental health professionals and is studied at graduate art therapy programs. The Instinctual Trauma Response protocol is quickly being adopted by many agencies and programs that help people recover from trauma. She has not stopped working hard to continue the work she started with Dr. Tinnin over 45 years ago.
Dr. Gantt is the co-owner of the ITR Training Institute LLC. She just closed her Intensive Trauma Recovery virtual intensive clinic to focus on getting the ITR protocol out to as many practitioners as possible to exponentially help more trauma survivors.
She is a board-certified art therapist (ATR-BC) with the Art Therapy Credentials Board. Her contributions to her profession are well known among art therapists, having served as president and editor of the inaugural issue of the journal of the American Art Therapy Association, and as the chair of the National Coalition of Art Therapies Associations. She is also a leading art therapy author. She, along with Carmello Tabone, developed the internationally recognized Formal Elements Art Therapy Scale (FEATS).
Dr. Gantt has taught in a number of graduate art therapy programs including the George Washington University, Vermont College, Notre Dame de Namur, and Florida State University.
Dr. Gantt worked for 7 years in her first art therapy position on the psychiatric and detoxification units at Prince George’s General Hospital, Cheverly, Maryland. During that time in the mid-1970s, the hospital staff did no routine screening for psychological traumas.
The conventional wisdom was that such things were better left alone. But the art therapy program Dr. Gantt conducted provided patients a means of showing their subjective experiences when they had no words for them.
With the benefit of hindsight, Dr. Gantt can look back and see that a number of people who were hospitalized repeatedly were actually trauma survivors. Over her 45-year career, Dr. Gantt watched the field of traumatology grow and develop in its theories and research.
As she and Dr. Tinnin developed their Intensive Trauma Response® theoretical model, Dr. Gantt contributed her expertise in the nonverbal techniques of art therapy to create Graphic Narrative®. She demonstrated that these techniques--along with ”finishing the story”--have the ability to not just manage trauma symptoms but to eliminate many of them for good. This also frees any dissociative parts to engage in Externalized Dialogue® and be relieved of their burdens, and to be helpful in the person’s present-day life.
Dr. Gantt is committed to spreading the word about ITR with the professional training programs she has developed, her writings, and the ITR® web app, now being developed with the guidance of AI. She will never stop working to give trauma survivors access to full trauma recovery with ITR in whatever way she can.
Danni Davis, MSW, LCSW-C, CCSOTS, ITR-CT
Training Director of ITR®
Danni Davis serves as the Training Director at the ITR Training Institute. With certifications in EMDR, ITR, and as a Clinically Certified Sex Offender Treatment Specialist, Danni brings over 30 years of clinical expertise to the table. Danni's clientele spans across children, adolescents, adults (including numerous first responders), and couples.
Having witnessed the transformative power of support and effective treatment methods throughout her career, Danni specializes in addressing trauma-related disorders. She firmly believes in the efficacy of Instinctual Trauma Response (ITR), viewing it as a revolutionary tool in the mental health field capable of rapidly alleviating symptoms and fostering long-term healing and well-being.
Watch More About DanniYves Hughes, MBATM, MSDS
Chief Product Officer
Yves concentrates his efforts to make sure our tools are always cutting-edge, user-focused and accessible with the vision to bring healing to the masses.
Yves and his wife Khalila, a UX designer, were foster parents to a sibling group of four and have since adopted. Understanding trauma and the need for access to therapy motivates him to keep innovating.
Yves has a BFA in Multimedia & Web Design from the Illinois Institute of Art an MBA in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix and an MS in Data Science and Machine Learning from Southern Methodist University.
Mary Carlson, ITR-CTC
Co-Owner and Chief Experience Officer
Mary Carlson is a 3rd generation filmmaker and worked in the movie business for decades before she was introduced to Drs. Tinnin and Gantt.
When Mary learned the immediate and long-lasting healing power of ITR, she jumped on board to help Dr. Lou and Linda get the word out. When Dr. Lou suggested anyone could do ITR, she recommended they make a DIY app so individuals could do their own work. Dr. Tinnin and Gantt agreed and and now with AI as a guide ITR is available to anyone who wants to use it.
Mary says, "We will continue to train therapists who want to heal trauma but most are overwhelmed and not taking clients. We have also started to train coaches, foster parents, educators and first responders. Many lay people want to do what they can to assist in this mental health crisis we have going on worldwide. It affects everyone. Trauma is an epidemic and with ITR, and AI guidance, we can empower people to do their own work and make a real impact worldwide".
As Dr. Tinnin said, "There is no reason in the world why anyone should suffer from even a minimal trauma symptom. In our work, we see it is easy to treat and it doesn't take long to do it."
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