Where Meaning Meets Healing
A Message from the Co-Founders
Self-Meaning Based Therapy® (SMBT) was born out of decades of clinical work and a shared realization: beneath every symptom, every defense, and every story lives a deeper truth about how we came to know ourselves. We discovered that lasting healing does not come from greater insight, cognitive restructuring, or rational change alone, but from transforming the meaning we unconsciously made of our earliest pain.
SMBT emerged as a way to reach that level of truth—the place where language ends and lived experience begins. It brings together our collective backgrounds in psychodynamic, trauma, and humanistic work, grounded in neuroscience and meaning-making theory, into a single, integrative model that restores authenticity to the healing process.
Our hope is simple: that both clients and clinicians experience psychotherapy not as correction, but as emancipation—a return to the truth of who we were always meant to be. SMBT is more than a method; it is a movement toward psychological freedom, creativity, and human wholeness.
Dr. Lawrie Ignacio & Dr. Graham Taylor
Our Story
Born from Clinical Practice and Lifelong Inquiry
Their collaboration began with a simple but profound question: Why are best-practice approaches to therapy unable to create lasting and permanent change?
They discovered that lasting healing comes from transforming the meaning about the Self unconsciously made of our earliest pain.
This insight led to the creation of SMBT: a structured, compassionate process for helping clinicians and clients uncover, access, and reset this unconsciously held Self-Meaning where it lives.
Our Philosophy
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Every Person Is a Meaning-Maker
Human beings are meaning-making creatures, creating a sense of self—more specifically, a Core Self-Meaning (SM)—that has the power to dictate the expression of our lives.
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Core Negative Self-Meaning and Its Impact
Among the many self-meanings we form, there is often one Core Negative Self-Meaning—one negative self-definition—that organizes and governs most aspects of our life.
03
Living the impact of one’s core Self-Meaning does not have to be permanent: Self-Meaning Based Therapy® provides the opportunity to experience healing and freedom from this impact and ultimately facilitates an awakening to our True Self.
What Changes in Practice and in the Client’s Experience
What Changes in a Therapist’s Practice When Using SMBT
Therapy shifts from fostering insight, changing cognitions and behaviors, to uncovering and transforming the client’s Core Negative Self-Meaning—the unconscious organizing self-experience driving emotional suffering and relational repetition.
The stance moves from doing to witnessing and shepherding, restoring depth, precision, and renewed meaning to practice, reducing burnout, and reigniting a sense of purpose.
What Changes in a Client’s Experience Through SMBT
SMBT feels unlike any therapy they’ve done: clients are gently guided into the live, wordless “I am…” that has quietly organized their lives.
As this Core Negative Self-Meaning is brought into awareness and reworked, resistance and looping give way to release, clarity, and peace, and clients rediscover themselves as whole, connected, and free.
The SMBT Training Institute
Advancing Meaning-Level Change in Clinical Practice
Therapeutic Benefits for Clinicians
Through structured programs, community events, and ongoing consultation, the Institute provides clinicians with:
01
Education
Basic and advanced SMBT trainings designed for licensed mental-health professionals.
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Consultation
Small-group and individual consultation that deepen clinical skill and confidence.
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Research & Development
Ongoing research and exploration of meaning-level mechanisms of change and their integration across modalities.
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Community
A collaborative environment for clinicians to exchange insights, refine practice, and grow together.
Core Values
Integrity
Grounded in ethical, evidence-informed care
Curiosity
A commitment to continuous learning and discovery
Understanding
Seeing the person beyond pathology
Freedom
Fostering psychological emancipation
Meet Your Instructors
Dr. Lawrie Ignacio, PsyD
Co-Founder
Dr. Lawrie Ignacio is a licensed clinical psychologist, educator, and researcher based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Over more than two decades, she has blended psychotherapy practice, academic rigor, clinical innovation, and community leadership to advance the practice of psychotherapy.
As a practicing psychologist and faculty member at the Hawai’i School of Professional Psychology at Chaminade University, Dr. Ignacio plays a pivotal role in educating and training doctoral psychology students. Her teaching integrates philosophy, psychological theory, and the clinical practice of psychotherapy, cultivating clinicians who think critically and work compassionately.
Beyond academia, she has made lasting community contributions — including co-founding Hawaiʻi’s first pro-bono virtual mental-health clinic to provide care for uninsured residents.
Dr. Ignacio is co-developer of Self-Meaning-Based Therapy® (SMBT) and Intensive Psychodynamic Couple Therapy (IPCT) — two integrative, evidence-informed models that reflect her lifelong commitment to understanding human suffering at its source. Her work explores how one’s implicit Self-Meaning formed in early life shapes identity and relationships, and how psychotherapy can safely transform self-experiences at the deepest level of meaning-making.
She is the recipient of multiple awards for clinical excellence and service, including the Hawaiʻi Psychological Association Distinguished Service Award, and continues to lecture and present nationally and internationally.
Dr. Graham Taylor, PsyD
Co-Founder
Dr. Graham Taylor is a clinical psychologist, educator, and integrative therapist whose work bridges psychodynamic, humanistic, and trauma-based psychotherapy with neuroscience. With over 30 years in clinical practice and supervision, he is widely known for helping therapists translate complex theory into effective, compassionate clinical work.
His research explores how implicit self-meaning — formed before conscious memory — drives emotional pain and relational patterns. His collaboration with Dr. Lawrie Ignacio began from a shared recognition that therapy must work at the level where self-meaning was formed to create lasting change. This led them to create SMBT, an integrative model that unites developmental psychology, affective neuroscience, and attachment theory into a precise, replicable method for personal transformation. They have presented SMBT nationally and internationally.
Dr. Taylor also co-founded with Dr. Ignacio the “Hawaii Pro-Bono Mental Health Center,” Hawaiʻi’s first pro-bono virtual mental-health clinic to provide care for uninsured residents. Together, they also co-developed Intensive Psychodynamic Couple Therapy (IPCT).
Dr. Taylor is also the Chief Learning Officer at Triad, the leading provider of education, community, and career resources for behavioral and mental health professionals and organizations. He hosted Triad’s weekly podcast, “Behavioral Health Today,” in which he interviewed over 300 leaders and innovators in their respective mental health fields. Dr. Taylor also periodically guest-hosts on the Trauma Therapist Project podcast, and co-hosts on Jon Steel’s podcast, Mental Fitness Stories.
Bring a Meaning-Level Process to Your Practice
Join the next SMBT Training and learn how to transform the Core Negative Self-Meanings that keep clients stuck.
