Understanding the Role of Meaning-Making in Our Lives: A Deeper Dive into Self-Meaning Based Therapy

Dr. Lawrie Ignacio and Dr. Graham Taylor, the founders of Self-Meaning Based Therapy (SMBT), spent a lot of time thinking about the role of meaning-making in our lives. They came to realize that we are all inherently relational, meaning-making beings. It’s within our early family encounters that we learn about the world and our place in it.

Most developmental theories—whether psychoanalytic, humanistic, or systems-based—share one assumption: The Self develops early, in interaction with others, and self-construction is a meaning-making process. How children come to know and understand themselves is a complex, dynamic journey. The role of parents, caregivers, and larger family systems is integral to the context in which self-concept is formed. These early influences shape the foundation of who we are.

We all know, however, that flawless parenting and perfect contextual influences do not exist. Each of us has experienced, to a greater or lesser degree, nonideal circumstances from which to make sense of ourselves, others, and our place in the world. In many cases, these situations can be so detrimental that even existence itself can feel debilitating. The point we’re getting at is that imperfect, even harmful interactions in childhood leave us with the task of making sense of why things happened the way they did.

Through meaning-making processes—especially the magical thinking and adaptive egocentrism characteristic of early childhood—young children often assume personal responsibility for these “whys.” They ask themselves, “Why did this happen?” and the answer becomes, “It must be because of who I am.” This captures the essence of the intuitive reasoning invoked in early childhood and is characteristic of the omnipotence all young children share.

One’s negative self-meaning is like a hole in the sidewalk—it’s the core vulnerability that remains impenetrable to most therapeutic methods.

Dr. Ignacio and Dr. Taylor talk about this hole in the sidewalk. It’s our Self-Meaning, self-created and never fully removed and it holds our deepest suffering. 

 But here’s the key that became very clear: while we can name one’s self-meaning, this self-meaning is stored in the unconscious. This is why it remains inaccessible and unamendable through traditional talk-therapy approaches that operate primarily at a conscious, day-to-day level of awareness.

Think back to Freud’s Topographical Model of the mind—the Iceberg. Our Conscious Mind is above the waterline, and our Unconscious Mind is at the bottom, hidden beneath the surface. When we consider the unconscious, we remember what van der Kolk says: “Consistent with empirical research on trauma and the mind, difficult-to-traumatic experiences tend to remain locked in nonverbal, nonrational, nondeclarative areas of the brain, which contain core programming about the self.”

So, what happens to our experiences, and the negative self-meanings we develop from them? These self-meanings get unconsciously stored in our neural network, along with their experiential aspects. While we may be able to identify and name our self-meaning at a conscious level, we can’t access or transform it there. It resides in the unconscious, a place that’s far more challenging to reach.

Remember the metaphor we used previously of the hole in one’s sidewalk? SMBT renders the hole simply gone. There’s no more hole in the sidewalk.

Take the example of a patient, a woman who “knew” she shouldn’t stay in an abusive relationship but stayed because she experienced herself as “unworthy of love.” 

This points to an important insight: trauma is often held in the form of self-meanings. These self-meanings are not rational. They’re not reducible to thoughts or even core schemas. They are experiences, unintegrated and often beyond words.

When we work with patients’ self-meanings, we find that a self-meaning is best understood as an unconsciously held, unintegrated experience—one that can even defy verbal and rational description. It tends to be lived at a place before words even emerge.

Our self-meaning has the power to shape our daily lives, often functioning unconsciously. It impacts us without us even knowing it. When emotionally or experientially activated, it profoundly influences how we interact with others and the world around us. Because of this, self-meaning remains virtually untouchable by traditional therapies. It’s powerful, pervasive, and often remains hidden in the depths of our unconscious.

Through all of this, Dr. Ignacio and Dr. Taylor realized that they needed a new approach to work effectively with trauma. This new approach had to be able to address the negative self-meaning that we all carry, the lie that says, “I am not good enough, I’m unlovable, I don’t matter, I’m worthless.”

Dr. Ignacio and Dr. Taylor also recognized that this new approach needed to allow for a resetting of who we are, based on truth—not the lies we’ve internalized through trauma.

But they knew that to access the unconscious, this new approach would need to bypass defense mechanisms—those mechanisms that protect us from facing painful negative self-meanings. And importantly, Dr. Ignacio and Dr. Taylor wanted this approach to seamlessly blend with the natural therapeutic process, complementing any theoretical model that a therapist might use.

That’s how Self-Meaning Based Therapy (SMBT) was born. SMBT is an integrated and comprehensive treatment model, grounded in psychoanalytic, humanistic, and family systems theory. It strategically incorporates the effectiveness of bilateral stimulation, which enables us to create profound and lasting change.

In SMBT, the core self-meaning becomes the focus. We target that early adaptive “lie” that was never true but was learned during childhood. With SMBT, therapists help patients dismantle this false self-meaning, which no longer serves them, and reset it based on truth.

Rather than simply teaching patients to manage the unconscious effects of their core self-meaning using traditional best practices, SMBT allows for a complete dismantling of the negative self-meaning, freeing the patient from its grip.

Through this transformative process, patients can reconnect with their true selves, experience psychological freedom, and begin to actualize their fullest potential. It’s like the hole in the sidewalk is simply gone—no more hole. It’s been healed.

Dr. Ignacio and Dr. Taylor have witnessed this process over and over with their patients: SMBT enables them to not just manage but truly dismantle their negative self-meanings. It provides an opportunity to reconnect with who they are—resetting their lives and their sense of self.

Enroll in Self-Meaning Based Therapy now.