Lowell Routley, Ph.D.

Lowell Routley (Ph.D., Counseling Psychology, Walden University) is founder and executive director of Heartland Trauma Initiative, an organization dedicated to transforming lives impacted by trauma. As a professional, he has counseled hundreds of survivors of extreme abuse, torture, and mind control during the past twenty-five years. These survivors represent a range of contexts from dysfunctional families, deviant religious or social movements to contracted human engineering. Based on his interactions with trauma survivors, Dr. Routley pioneered the Core Integrity Model© (CIM), a new approach to treating those who have been psychologically injured. For more than a decade, he has been passing this knowledge on by teaching other therapists the concepts and tools of this innovative approach.
The Core Integrity Model suggests a bold paradigm shift in mental health care on behalf of cult and mind control survivors with the focus of mental health intervention being that of the “injury” model. By necessity, the law of parsimony requires treatment to proceed from the most basic explanation for presenting symptoms. To first rule out psychological “injury” before assigning an “illness” diagnosis will address the needs of many without assigning a stigmatizing label that the person is “sick.” Survivors of cults who have been wounded in mind, body, and spirit need said change to facilitate return to normative society without further alienation and shame.