Author: Steve Olweean, MA

Steve Olweean, MA is founding Director of Common Bond Institute (CBI), co-founder and President of International Humanistic Psychology Association, and past President of Association for Humanistic Psychology. He has extensive expertise in peace and cross-cultural psychology, local capacity building and empowerment, and designing culturally sensitive emergency human service training and treatment programs for developing societies where there is a large population in crisis, the local service infrastructure is underdeveloped or severely compromised by war and disaster, and skill and hard resources are scarce. He is founder and coordinator of more than 50 international applied conferences in several countries on social healing and conflict transformation, including “Transgenerational Trauma,” “Engaging The Other,” and “Transforming Conflict,” and for 15 years was coordinator of the International Soviet-American Professional Exchange. Olweean is a therapist with a graduate specialist degree in Clinical Psychology, adjunct faculty with Michigan State University Department of Psychiatry, and former clinical director of a whole-person oriented community-based mental health center in Kalamazoo, Michigan serving underserved populations. His primary treatment focus has been recovery from individual and communal trauma and abuse, victim/perpetrator dynamics, empowerment and resilience building for marginalized and at-risk populations, and healing negative belief systems. This orientation and his social activism during his university years have shaped his work over more than 3 decades in developing culturally sensitive models and methods for psychosocial healing and recovery at the communal level in regions of conflict. Near the end of the Balkans Wars he developed the Catastrophic Trauma Recovery (CTR) model for treating large populations of victims, operated local capacity building training programs for treating communities traumatized by war and violence in Russia, the Balkans, Caucuses, and Middle East, and is co-coordinator of CBI’s local capacity building Social Health Care training and treatment program in Jordan serving refugees that is based on the CTR model. He is 2011 Recipient of the Charlotte and Karl Bühler Award from the American Psychological Association for outstanding contribution to Humanistic Psychology internationally, and recognized for his life long work in a chapter devoted to his role with CBI in “The New Humanitarians.” Among published writings on the above issues are: “Psychological Concepts of The Other: Embracing The Compass of the Self,” “When Society Is The Victim: Catastrophic Trauma Recovery,” “Common Bond Institute: Vision and Journey,” “Wounded and Uprooted: Seeking Refuge In The Land Of Others,” “A Recurring Global Syndrome: Challenges in Treating An Epidemic of Communal Trauma,” and “Whole Person Approaches In Individual and Communal Healing of Trauma.” -- Email: SOlweean@aol.com / Web: https://cbiworld.org/speakers