Described as groundbreaking, transformative, innovative, and pioneering with great integrative reach, the heart of Self-Meaning Based Therapy (SMBT) is the uncovering of one's core negative Self-Meaning (SM), which lies deeply within the unconscious. SMBT is an approach to psychotherapy based firmly on the understanding that we are all inherently relational, meaning-making beings, and that difficult to traumatic events shape our primary experiences of connection within ourselves, with others, and with the world. Given that perfect contextual influences do not exist, each of us has experienced to a greater or minor extent non-ideal circumstances from which to render understanding. Such experiences leave us with the need to make sense of why. This why takes primary form in a negative, core self-definition, or SM. While primitively functional, it becomes an internalized relational template that can unconsciously wreak havoc on one’s life across time. The subjective phenomenology of one’s SM tends to remain out of day-to-day awareness, sometimes wholly, until activated. While we are able to consciously name our SM, we are unable to heal it consciously. Conventional methods of talk therapy are therefore insufficient toward this end. Our SMBT method is designed to allow direct access to the lived experience of our SM where it can be reworked and transformed. This paper introduces readers to SMBT, its model and method, and its capacity to emancipate those we work with in therapy toward a newly realized psychological freedom. Invaluable contributions from the psychoanalytic and humanistic traditions inform our SMBT model.

Authors:
Lawrie Ignacio, SMBT Institute, United States
Graham Taylor, TRIAD Behavioral Health, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Lawrie Ignacio is a clinical psychologist in Honolulu, Hawaii where she maintains a full-time private practice. She is the co-creator of Intensive Psychodynamic Couple Therapy™ (IPCT) and Self-Meaning Based Therapy™ (SMBT).

See this presentation on the full schedule – On Demand Schedule

Bookmark