Self-Meaning Based Therapy (SMBT) is an innovative therapeutic approach created by Dr. Lawrie Ignacio and Dr. Graham Taylor to address deeply ingrained, unconscious negative self-meanings. With over 25 years of experience, Drs. Ignacio and Taylor developed SMBT to fill the gaps left by traditional therapies that often struggle to access and transform these core self-meanings.

Several reliable, observable, and experiential outcomes are realized by patients who undergo SMBT:

 

SMBT completely dismantles one’s core SM.

We have found that those who fully undertake SMBT realize a complete dismantling of the core, negative SM that in most cases organized their entire lives, such that they become free to experience significant shifts in their intra- and inter-relational psychology. We find that the results of this shift are experienced at least neutrally, often subtly, and at other times profoundly. The undoing of one’s negative SM simply renders it gone. With this, the person notices, among other things, the absence of negative self-based admonishments, as well as the negative emotions and other visceral experiences associated with the core SM that once prevailed. Interpersonally, the person tends to release intimate others of projections related to a once negative sense of the self, and in some cases may even leave intimate partnerships altogether, to the extent that these relationships no longer support a newly realized, healthier self-experience.

With this complete dismantling, positive, truth-based self-meanings naturally emerge.

We have found that the undoing of one’s negative SM organically allows for more truth-based self-meanings to emerge. So, there is no need, as is the case of EMDR, to install positive self-cognitions. As an example, one of our patients whose core SM was “I’m worthless” prior to SMBT came to the following post-SMBT: “I now know that I’m basically a good and worthwhile person, in spite of all of the bad things that have happened to me.”

With this complete dismantling, Compensatory Strategies developed to offset, deny, or hide one’s core negative SM are also neutralized, and more adaptive styles of life naturally emerge.

As mentioned previously, COMS are designed in one way or another to counterbalance our negative self-experience, our SM. Successful SMBT more often than not renders them moot.

SMBT is effective for both single incident and complex trauma.

SMBT is readily effective for eliminating trauma symptoms such as flashbacks, panic, anxiety, and hypervigilance consistent with trauma-based responding. As with EMDR, single incident traumas can be resolved relatively quickly and easily. SMBT is particularly effective for complex trauma which began in early childhood, when young children are especially prone to developing magical self-meanings about why bad things were happening to them.

SMBT potentially benefits anyone, to the extent that we all carry within us a negative SM.

As stated previously, flawless parenting and perfect contextual influences in which to grow up do not exist. As such, each of us has, as children, experienced to a greater or minor extent nonideal circumstances from which to make sense of our experiences. Imperfect interpersonal interactions in childhood necessarily leave each of us with relational needs unfulfilled, for which we are left to make sense of why. This why takes the form of negative self-meanings we maintain as true. To the extent that “good enough parenting” prevailed, our SM will likely be experienced more situationally, and as ego-dystonic. Conversely, in the case of complex trauma, our core SM is experienced more characterologically and globally, and as ego-syntonic. In any case, we contend that SMBT can be healing for anyone.

SMBT ultimately potentiates our psychological freedom.

We believe that SMBT has the capacity to awaken within us what Carl Rogers calls the mainspring of creativity, or our inherent tendency to actualize ourselves, marked by an inner urge to expand, extend, develop, and mature our fullest selves (Bohart, 2013). We contend that SMBT effectively removes the encumbrances that shroud this potential, in the form of negative self-meanings. It thereby incites the process by which we become free to develop a greater understanding of ourselves beyond what has happened to us. We have found that SMBT powerfully potentiates an uninhibited, truth-based evolutionary discovery process of awareness of our true identity. As such, at its best, it can even become a gateway to higher states of awareness.