SELF-MEANING BASED THERAPY: AN INTEGRATIVE MODEL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

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 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.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 SMBT, its model and method, as well as its capacity to emancipate those we work with in therapy toward a newly realized psychological freedom.