Our trainings are designed to enhance therapists’ capacity to effect life-altering change in their work with patients in ways typically inaccessible to conventional modes of therapy.

Our trainings provide an immersive experience of our SBMT approach, and a bridging of this experience with its direct applications to therapeutic practice. 

As a result of our trainings, practitioners will learn how to:

· Work with patients’ core Self-Meaning (SM) and its related aspects.

· How to use SMBT to heal attachment injuries and trauma

· Integrate SMBT with other therapeutic frames and models

· Discover your own core Self-Meaning, how it developed, and learn about its impactful influence in your life

Our Trainings are for therapists, and for students pursuing advanced mental and behavioral health degrees only.

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 challenging experiences shape the way we connect with 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 nonideal circumstances from which to make sense of ourselves and others; in many cases, these influences can be so distressing that existence itself becomes debilitating. Such experiences leave us with core needs unfulfilled, for which we are left to make sense of why. While primitively functional, negative self-meanings unconsciously created in response to these experiences become internalized relational templates that carry forward into adult life where they often unconsciously wreak havoc, particularly in relationship with intimates. While patients are often able to consciously name and identify their core SM, they are unable to transform them consciously. Conventional methods of talk therapy are insufficient toward this end. SMBT is designed to allow direct access to the lived experience of one’s SM where it can be reworked and transformed, thereby allowing patients to realize a newfound psychological freedom.

We work as a co-therapist team in conducting our Couple Intensives. Co-therapy is a form of psychotherapy practice in which the relationship between the co-therapists becomes a critical factor in our work. Working as a co-therapist team has numerous benefits. Among them is the opportunity to magnify the impact of our therapeutic encounter with couples, while offering the experience of greater depth into each person’s complex inner workings, given that each is provided two mirrors, two reflections of themselves to contemplate.

Our couple therapy approach is grounded in several distinctive features and interventions, including, but not limited to:

Identification of recurring themes and patterns. In working with couples psychodynamically, we focus on identifying and exploring recurring themes and patterns that characterize each partner’s life experiences, and how these patterns interact in the context of a couple relationship. These patterns may be obvious, while others remain out of awareness.

Emphasis on past experience impacting the relationship in the form of each partner’s core negative Self-Meaning (SM) and their respective intersection within the couple dynamic. We believe that early experiences with primary attachment figures affect our relation to, and experience of, current intimates. Our goal is to help couples understand their attachment histories and the experience of their respective SMs the interest of freeing themselves from unwanted interpersonal patterns and living more fully in the present.

Focus on emotion and the handling of feelings. In our work, we encourage the exploration of the full range of one’s feelings, to include identifying what the feelings are, why one is or might be feeling this way, and to help individuals handle their emotions in a way that benefits themselves and those they love.

Focus on the therapy relationship. The relationships we forge with the couples we work with not only become a source of meaning and fulfillment for us. The experience of the therapy relationships co-created in our work with couples often provides a unique opportunity to explore and rework family-of-origin patterns that keep couples stuck.

Focus on mature love, autonomy, and mutuality. In our work, we emphasize the need for a mature sense of mutuality and autonomy—of healthy togetherness and separateness—in the context of intimate relationships. We help couples develop an appreciation for the wholeness of the other person while balancing the needs of the self. Mutual intersubjectivity allows one to feel more accepting of one’s own complex internal life, while appreciating the complexities and shortcomings of the other’s.

We strive to utilize the breadth of our training and skills as licensed psychologists to provide a range of Consultative Services. These services include one-time as well as ongoing partnership with individual practitioners, trainees, and agencies. We aim to help other professionals and agencies get the support they need while being sensitive to theoretical frames, intervention modalities, and general practice. We also value working with mental health professionals who want to develop their clinical skills and become more self-confident in their abilities.

Our Institutional-Based Trainings provide many opportunities for learning about Self-Meaning Based Therapy (SMBT). The following is a non-exhaustive list of our offerings:

· Courses in Basic and Advanced SMBT

· Courses in SMBT for Couples

· Weekend Certification trainings in Basic and Advanced SMBT

· Weekend Certification trainings in SMBT for Couples

· Training the Trainers of SMBT

· Agency-based trainings in SMBT