Self-Meaning Based Therapy® Basic Training
Next dates:
May 16-17, 2026 | 11:00AM — 4:30PM PST
July 18-19, 2026 | 11:00AM — 4:30PM PST
At a Glance
- Who is this for?: Licensed Clinicians (PhD/PsyD, LPC/LMHC, LCSW, LMFT, Psychologists, Counselors, Clinical Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists, Psychiatrists/PMHNPs)
- Format: Two 5.5 hour training sessions live online via Zoom
- Includes: Pre-requisite recordings, slides, notes.
- Prereqs: Included, three 1-hour recordings.
- CE Credits: 14 hours (certificate upon verified attendance).
About the Training
A Groundbreaking, Integrative Model for Deep and Lasting Change
What You’ll Learn by the End of the Training
By the end of the foundational training, you will learn:
01
How to identify and work directly with a client’s Core Negative Self-Meaning (SM)
including how it forms, how it persists beneath awareness, and how compensatory strategies conceal it.
02
How primary consciousness, emotional memory, and the unconscious shape one’s self-experience
and why experiential access—not cognitive insight—is required for deep therapeutic change.
03
How to use bilateral stimulation (BLS) within SMBT
to access, process, and dissolve the lived experience of the SM in a safe, attuned, and grounded way.
04
How to guide clients through the full SMBT method
from therapist embodiment and preparation, to the Early Experiences Exercise (E3), to processing and transformation.
05
How to integrate SMBT into your existing clinical orientation
and support the emergence of truth-based meaning, emotional freedom, and the client’s inherent creativity and True Self.
How the Training Works
Learn
SMBT in plain language—how early experiences shape our sense of self, how one’s negative self-meaning gets formed.
Practice
Guided exercises, live demos, and session-ready application. Didactic, experiential, and immersive learning.
Apply
Case examples, live role plays, and experiential exercises to deepen the learning experience.
Support
Live Q&A each session; optional consult groups available separately.
What Clinicians Are Saying
“Groundbreaking, transformative, innovative, and pioneering with great integrative reach!”
— James B., Ph.D.
A quiet revolution in trauma treatment.
When clients contact the essence of their self-meaning, something sacred happens—an unburdening that feels cellular. As a clinician, I’ve watched lives reorganize around truth instead of trauma. SMBT has quietly revolutionized how I view both suffering and healing.
—Anna, LMFT
Curriculum
Module 1 — Foundations of Meaning-Making and Relational Being
Overview
This module introduces SMBT’s foundation: humans are inherently meaning-making beings whose earliest relational experiences shape one primary, deeply held Core Negative Self-Meaning. When caregiver mirroring or attunement is inconsistent, the child forms a single core meaning about themselves that becomes the organizing principle of identity. Therapists learn how this one meaning, formed beneath awareness, drives lifelong emotional suffering and relational patterns.
Learning Objectives
- Explain the human drive for meaning.
- Describe how early relational experiences shape one’s core Self-Meaning.
- Define Self-Meaning and distinguish it from thoughts or schemas.
- Discuss the role of intersubjectivity and attachment in meaning-making.
Module 2 — The Formation and Function of the Core Negative Self-Meaning (SM)
Overview
Children interpret painful experiences through adaptive egocentrism, often creating a single, globalized meaning about themselves. This core meaning becomes the nucleus of identity and persists into adulthood. Compensatory strategies—perfectionism, withdrawal, caretaking—develop to protect against the distress of this one SM. Therapists learn how these patterned defenses consistently point back to the same, singular self-meaning.
Learning Objectives
- Define Core Negative Self-Meaning and its phenomenology.
- Explain how early caregiving relational patterns contribute to SM formation.
- Identify compensatory strategies (COMPS).
- Recognize how SMs persist in adult relationships.
Module 3 — The Unconscious and Primary Consciousness in SMBT
Overview
A person’s Core Negative Self-Meaning lives in primary, nonverbal consciousness—where emotional memory, somatic self-states, and early relational imprints reside. Because the SM is encoded beneath rational awareness, insight alone cannot change it. Therapists learn how unconscious processes and the primary state sustain a single, fixed identity meaning that organizes suffering, and why only experiential access allows this meaning to transform.
Learning Objectives
- Summarize unconscious processing models relevant to SMBT.
- Distinguish primary vs. secondary consciousness.
- Describe the role of the Default Mode Network.
- Explain why SMs exist in primary consciousness.
Module 4 — The Role of Bilateral Stimulation (BLS) in Accessing and Transforming One’s Core Negative Self-Meaning (SM)
Overview
Bilateral stimulation helps clients enter the emotional and somatic experience of their Core Negative Self-Meaning by accessing primary consciousness. In SMBT, BLS is not used to target incidents but to reprocess the felt sense of the singular SM that underlies distress. Therapists learn how BLS supports nonverbal processing and why it is essential for contacting and dissolving this one primary Self-Meaning.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the function and impact of bilateral stimulation.
- Explain how BLS mimics REM processes and supports integration.
- Summarize research on BLS effectiveness.
- Differentiate the use of BLS in EMDR vs. SMBT.
Module 5 — The SMBT Method: Phases and Therapeutic Stance
Overview
SMBT unfolds in three phases designed to safely access and transform the single Core Negative Self-Meaning. Therapists cultivate presence and attunement, prepare clients with grounding and regulation, and guide them into the embodied experience of their one SM. Emphasis is placed on witnessing rather than fixing, pacing for safety, and trusting the client’s inherent capacity to move beyond the core Self-Meaning that has defined their life.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the three phases of SMBT.
- Explain dual awareness and attunement.
- Understand the therapist’s role in facilitating transformation.
Module 6 — Identifying the Core Self-Meaning (SM): The Early Experiences Exercise (E3)
Overview
The Early Experiences Exercise (E3) helps clients uncover the one repeating relational theme that reveals their Core Self-Meaning. By examining early life experiences, emotional reactions to them, and compensatory strategies in response to them, therapists trace patterns back to the singular meaning that organizes suffering. This module teaches a structured, reliable way to detect the one foundational SM that shapes the client’s life.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the purpose and structure of the E3.
- Identify relational episodes that reveal SM and compensatory strategies.
- Describe the CCRT model.
- Use the E3 to hypothesize a client’s core self-meaning.
Module 7 — Processing the Core Self-Meaning (SM)
Overview
Processing centers on helping clients enter the lived emotional and somatic experience of their one Core Negative Self-Meaning while maintaining Anchored Experiential Awareness. With BLS, the emotional charge tied to this meaning dissolves, and truth-based self-experiencing arises naturally. Therapists learn how to pace the work, support safety, and recognize when the single core SM has neutralized and completed.
Learning Objectives
- Describe how to access and neutralize the core SM.
- Apply BLS to the phenomenology of the SM.
- Distinguish rational awareness from embodied experience.
- Recognize signs of completion and transformation.
Module 8 — Comparing SMBT and EMDR
Overview
While both EMDR and SMBT use bilateral stimulation, their targets differ dramatically. EMDR focuses on traumatic incidents and associated cognitions, whereas SMBT focuses on the one enduring Self-Meaning that underlies all distress. Therapists learn why EMDR may reduce distress without altering this primary SM, and how SMBT works at a deeper, relational, and experiential level to transform the one meaning that organizes the person’s life.
Learning Objectives
- Identify methodological differences between EMDR and SMBT.
- Explain why SMBT is relational and meaning-based.
- Discuss Self-Meaning vs. incident-based cognitions.
- Understand how SMBT reaches primary consciousness.
Module 9 — Outcomes of SMBT: Liberation and Emergence of the True Self
Overview
Once the single Core Negative Self-Meaning dissolves, clients experience profound relief from shame, fear, and self-criticism. Compensatory defenses fall away as new, truth-based meanings emerge spontaneously. Therapists learn how to support the client’s reconnection to creativity, presence, and their inherent True Self.
Learning Objectives
- Describe outcomes of dismantling the core SM.
- Identify truth-based meanings that emerge spontaneously.
- Discuss the neutralization of compensatory strategies.
- Recognize SMBT as a path to creativity and self-actualization.
Module 10 — Integrating SMBT into Clinical Practice
Overview
SMBT integrates seamlessly with trauma-informed, psychodynamic, somatic, experiential, and other therapies. This module covers readiness, pacing, and blending SMBT with existing orientations while maintaining a non-pathologizing stance. Therapists learn to orient treatment around discovering, accessing, and transforming the one Core Negative Self-Meaning that organizes the client’s symptoms and relational patterns.
Learning Objectives
- Identify client populations suited to SMBT.
- Recognize contraindications and preparation needs.
- Develop integration strategies with existing modalities.
- Understand SMBT’s ethical and humanistic grounding.
In-Session Snapshot
Jan’s Story* — When Meaning, Not Memory, Was the Wound
Jan had endured ritualized abuse by her mother throughout childhood. Like many survivors, she formed a painful conclusion to make sense of what happened: she must somehow be the reason for the abuse. Despite years of therapy, this meaning lived beneath her awareness, quietly shaping her sense of self.
Read the complete session
When asked what the abuse implied, Jan said:
“It means something must be terribly wrong with me.”
As they followed the meaning further, she added:
“It must mean I’m worthless… I’ve struggled with this feeling my whole life.”
When Lawrie asked what “worthless” ultimately meant about her, Jan paused — and the core meaning emerged:
“It means I’m trash.”
With that realization came the additional lived experience of her Core Negative Self-Meaning:
A huge black cage
A deep empty feeling in her stomach
And an overwhelming sense of dread
These sensations, images, and emotions were the embodied imprint of “I’m worthless as trash” — a meaning too painful for her younger self to hold consciously, yet powerful enough to organize her emotional world from the inside out.
This is precisely where SMBT becomes necessary.
While Jan could name aspects of her story in therapy, the Self-Meaning itself — its emotional weight and experiential signature — remained untouched. Traditional approaches could help her understand what happened, but not transform what it came to mean about who she was.
Through SMBT, Jan was guided into the direct, lived experience of her Self-Meaning. With attuned presence and gentle bilateral stimulation, she accessed the part of herself that had carried this core meaning since childhood. This allowed this Self-Meaning to be reworked from within, rather than processed rationally.
As the Core Negative Self-Meaning dissolved, the associated sensations of dread and worthlessness began to loosen. For the first time, Jan experienced herself outside the cage she had carried for decades.
SMBT allowed Jan to move beyond understanding her past — and into transforming the meaning that had defined her sense of self, and her life.
Course Structure
A Progressive, Experience-Based Training Pathway
Level 1: SMBT Foundations
- Format: 2-day live online sessions (5.5 teaching hours each day)
- Focus: Core theory, framework, and guided practice
- Includes: Live demonstrations, case applications, and peer discussion.
- CE Credits: 14 hours (certificate upon verified attendance).
Level 2: Basic Certification
- Format: 4-days (2 weekends) live online sessions (22 teaching hours total)
- Focus: Case-based refinement, advanced conceptualization, clinical practica, and consultation
- CE Credits: 22 hours (certificate upon verified attendance).
Optional Directory Listing:
Clinicians who have completed Levels 1 & 2 may be listed as SMBT clinicians, and may be listed in the official SMBT Clinical Directory.
Who It’s For
For licensed mental-health professionals
- Psychologists
- Counselors
- Clinical Social Workers
- Marriage & Family Therapists
- Psychiatrists/PMHNPs
SMBT is particularly effective for clinicians working with:
- Attachment and Complex Trauma
- Chronic Shame and Self-Criticism
- Repetitive or stalled clinical cases
- Difficulty with intimacy
How SMBT Changes Practice — and Benefits the Therapist
01
A paradigm shift in psychotherapy.
02
Working at the level of Self-Meaning.
At the heart of SMBT is the Core Negative Self-Meaning—the unconscious conclusion a child once made to make sense of painful or confusing experiences, which becomes the primary template for adult relational life. Therapists learn to identify and gently guide clients into the lived phenomenology of their meanings, bypassing verbal defenses, core self-experiences, and cognitive strategies that often reinforce it.
03
Integrating depth and neuroscience.
SMBT unites psychodynamic, humanistic, and attachment-based understandings of human psychology with modern neuroscience, using bilateral stimulation to bypass the brain’s default mode network, access the emotional brain, and transform subcortical imprints of trauma, thereby bridging relational, experiential, and neurobiological models of healing.
Therapeutic Benefits for Clinicians
Training doesn’t end when the workshop does. We provide a “Post-Training Companion” ecosystem to ensure valid application.
Deeper efficacy
SMBT helps clinicians reach the root of suffering more directly, often producing lasting change where insight and rationally-based methods plateau.
Restored therapeutic presence
The therapist’s stance evolves from fixing to witnessing and shepherding transformation. This orientation fosters authenticity, reduces burnout, and reawakens the sense of wonder that drew many to psychotherapy in the first place.
Integrative adaptability
SMBT enriches existing modalities—CBT, psychodynamic, EMDR, IFS, somatic, and existential—by offering a unifying meaning-based framework.
Observable outcomes
Clinicians consistently report the neutralization of one’s core negative Self-Meaning, the dissolution of compensatory defenses and strategies, and the spontaneous emergence of truth-based, life-affirming self-meanings.
An Invitation to Psychological Freedom
As one’s Core Negative Self-Meaning dissolves, therapists often witness in their clients a quiet clarity and freedom. SMBT not only transforms the client’s life; it revitalizes the therapist’s own sense of purpose, deepening their confidence, compassion, and creative engagement with the healing process.
Join the next Level 1: SMBT Foundations 2-Day Trainings
Upcoming Trainings
Tuition: $349.00
Live Online
Dates:
May 16-17, 2026 | 11:00AM — 4:30PM PST
July 18-19, 2026 | 11:00AM — 4:30PM PST
- Format: Two full days + three (3) self-paced videos
- CE Credits: 14 hours (certificate upon verified attendance).
Can’t make these dates?
Would you like to request a different training time?
Fill out the form below to tell us which months or days work best for you—and we’ll notify you as soon as new sessions open that match your availability.
Policies
Group Rates Available: Buy 4 or more trainings and save $30 per training with promo code SMBTGROUP
Accessibility: Captions; additional accommodations may be requested
Frequently Asked Questions About SMBT
What is Self-Meaning Based Therapy® (SMBT)?
How is SMBT different from other therapy models like EMDR or CBT?
While EMDR and CBT focus on memories, beliefs, or thoughts, SMBT works with the experiential essence of meaning itself.
EMDR targets specific incidents and memories.
CBT works on identifying and restructuring distorted thinking.
SMBT, by contrast, identifies the self-defining conclusion beneath all of it—the Core Self-Meaning that unconsciously organizes perception, emotion, and relationship patterns.
SMBT doesn’t just desensitize distress or restructure thinking; it dissolves the false meaning that has shaped one’s life.
What changes when a therapist begins using SMBT?
Therapists report that their practice becomes deeper, more intuitive, and less effortful. SMBT helps them move beyond managing symptoms toward facilitating transformation at the root.
Rather than intervening from the outside, the therapist attunes to the client’s lived experience and guides access to unconscious meaning. This shift from doing to witnessing and shepherding renews the therapist’s presence, prevents burnout, and restores genuine connection in the therapeutic relationship.
What does a typical SMBT session look like?
Sessions begin with identifying the client’s possible Core Negative Self-Meaning and the compensatory strategies used to avoid and manage it. Once readiness and safety are established, the client is guided to gently access the lived experience of the SM (its emotions, imagery, sensations, and associated memories).
Through the use of bilateral stimulation (e.g., eye movements, tapping, or tones), the therapist supports the transformation of the Core Negative Self-Meaning until it loses its emotional charge—creating space for truth-based self-meanings to emerge naturally.
What kind of issues or clients benefit most from SMBT?
SMBT is effective for a broad spectrum of issues, particularly:
Complex or developmental trauma
Chronic relational patterns and attachment wounds
Anxiety, shame, self-criticism, and inner conflict
Identity struggles and existential distress
Because every person carries a Core Negative Self-Meaning, SMBT can benefit anyone seeking deeper authenticity and emotional freedom.
Can SMBT be integrated with other approaches?
Yes. SMBT integrates naturally and seamlessly with psychodynamic, cognitive, humanistic, and other therapies.
It provides a unifying meaning-based framework that enhances whatever methods therapists already use, deepening their effectiveness rather than replacing them.
Is SMBT evidence-based?
SMBT draws upon well-established, evidence-supported foundations:
- Attachment theory and early relational development
- Research supporting the primacy of the unconscious
- Neuroscience of trauma and consciousness
- Bilateral stimulation research demonstrating emotional and memory integration
- Humanistic and existential principles emphasizing authenticity and meaning
While SMBT is a new integrative model, it rests upon and extends these empirically grounded traditions.
How does SMBT support therapist growth and well-being?
Therapists often describe SMBT as personally transformative. Its process encourages attuned presence, humility, and authentic connection rather than performance or control.
By helping clients dismantle false their self-meaning, therapists often experience parallel shifts—rediscovering their own creativity, compassion, and sense of purpose in the healing encounter.
What training or certification is available in SMBT?
Level 1: SMBT Foundations 2-Day Live Online Sessions focusing on the core SMBT theory, it’s framework and guided practice. Includes live demonstrations, case applications, peer discussion.
Level 2: Basic Certification
Format: 4-day live online sessions (22 teaching hours: 5.5 teaching hours each day)
Focus: Didactic learning, live demonstration, experiential hands on direct practice
Includes: Post-training practica and consultation requirements
How can SMBT be described to clients or the public?
SMBT helps people uncover and transform the deep, hidden meaning about themselves that has shaped their pain, relationships, and life patterns.
Rather than “fixing” what’s wrong, SMBT helps release what’s false—allowing individuals to reconnect with who they truly are. Clients often describe it as freeing, profound, and unlike any therapy they’ve done before.
How does SMBT differ philosophically from traditional models?
SMBT is not a pathology-based model; it’s a humanistic and meaning-based one.
It views symptoms as adaptations to unhealed meaning rather than evidence of disorder. The therapy honors each person’s innate drive toward truth and wholeness—what Rogers called the actualizing tendency and Jung, the movement toward individuation.
In this sense, SMBT is both clinical and spiritual: it heals separation, restores connection, and fosters authenticity.
What outcomes have clinicians observed in their clients?
Common outcomes include:
- Dissolution of one’s lifelong Core Negative Self-Meaning as well as secondary self-meanings
- Relief from anxiety, shame, and trauma symptoms
- Release of compensatory defenses and strategies
- Improved relational intimacy and trust
- A spontaneous sense of self-acceptance and creative vitality
Therapists consistently describe SMBT results as deeper and more enduring than those achieved through conventional methods alone.
How does SMBT use bilateral stimulation (BLS)?
SMBT uses BLS—such as gentle eye movements or alternating tactile/tone stimulation—to access and integrate primary states of consciousness where one’s Core Negative Self-Meaning resides.
This process facilitates the transformation of subcortical emotional memory, helping the brain and body re-organize around truth-based rather than trauma-based meanings.
What makes SMBT especially relevant today?
In a time when burnout, disconnection, and surface-level coping are common, SMBT offers a return to depth and authenticity.
It unites science, psychology, and human meaning in a single model—helping both therapists and clients heal the root of separation and reclaim the experience of being whole.
What is the ultimate goal of SMBT?
*Confidentiality Note. The clinical vignettes presented throughout this website draw from professional therapeutic practice and are written in a fully disguised, composite manner. Identifying characteristics, life circumstances, timelines, and contextual details have been intentionally modified and blended across experiences to safeguard confidentiality and prevent recognition by any individual or family. These narrative constructions preserve the phenomenological depth, clinical processes, and theoretical principles central to the SMBT model described while ensuring that no identifying information—directly or indirectly—is disclosed. All case material has been prepared in accordance with established ethical standards governing confidentiality.
Bring a Self-Meaning-Based Process to Your Practice
Join the next SMBT training and learn how to help clients transform their Core Negative Self-Meaning and rediscover their authentic design for connection, creativity, and freedom.
Enroll in SMBT Foundations · 14 CE · Starts in June
