Healing from the inside out.
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The Multilevel Method
We believe the inclusion of relational, behavioral, and coping strategies are not specialties but baseline components that should be present in all forms of therapy. We assess from the structural view of psychology.
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The Neurology of Psychology
You will not only learn new perspectives and better adaptive functioning - we work from the Core to heal long-standing emotional pain and trauma. Learn about our practice philosophy.
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Ego Integration Theory
We have incorporated and synthesized long standing psychological theory and research with neurological science to pioneer a brand new groundbreaking and innovative form of therapy: integration of the ego.
You will be continually assessed from four different levels of personality functioning. When broken down this way, it becomes easier to see where the root of an issue lies, and how to best target interventions to ripple outward into long-term effects.
The Multilevel Method
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This is the deepest root of your psychological functioning, and contains the organization of your sense of self. The way you view and understand the world was shaped in the earliest years of life, before you had language. These unsymbolized, nonverbal experiences continue to influence you as your deepest knowing. How you attached to your caregivers, your self image, and all of your internal objects (inner representations of people, feelings, and experiences) are encoded here and expressed in deeply embedded somatic patterns of relating. All of your deeply ingrained perceptions flow from the intrapsychic structure and is the architecture from which you manage your wants and needs with the demands of society.
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Your mood and emotional functioning is part of your biology, the sensations, memories, and autonomic strivings of the self. This entails how you manage and regulate your body from your sleep cycles, to appetite, to temperature, to hormones. The way you respond to stimuli happens on both a conscious and nonconscious processing level. Your preferences, likes, dislikes, and fears all contribute to the biorhythm of your body and is expressed in physiological regulation, down to your breathing and heartbeat.
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Your conscious sense of identity, beliefs, and values are accessible on the cognitive level and also help to guide your choices and actions. Every person has an abstract ego, apart from their cognitive functioning, whose job is to manage the continuity and cohesiveness of the self. While ideally all experiences flow into a continuous timeline of awareness, not everyone has a consolidated and integrated identity. Many people have a split, weak, or unintegrated ego, which results in fragmentation and separate systems of emotional experience. This can be very destabilizing. We work to integrate all aspects of split off experience to help reconstruct a complete historical narrative and achieve a sense of wholeness.
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All these things come together to form the matrix of which your behavior operates. This is the outermost layer that drives the cogs in the system of society. While this may seem to be the obvious observations we use to make sense of a person’s motivations and intentions, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Once there is an understanding of the dynamic interplay of the previous three layers, it becomes easier to tease out what’s happening on the surface that conflicts with or betrays what’s going on underneath. Inner and outer reality have to match – and dissonance must be worked through and resolved if there is to be any hope of authentic, meaningful connections with others.
Neurology of Psychology
Advances in technology and brain imaging now allow us to have greater insights into the neurological correlates of psychology in the brain than ever before. Your sessions will often include psychoeducation of the latest innovations and discoveries in neuropsych research that help us to understand the common mechanisms of normative human behavior. We often think we have quirks or unusual tics that are unique to us – you may find that there is a reason or mechanism behind why you behave the way you do, that is part of how the brain is meant to work and process information!
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Did you know we are initially only able to perceive reality from one dimension at a time? We do not initially have the ability to mentally manipulate, rotate, or reverse objects and processes in our minds. We gradually grow from centration, focusing on only one dimension or characteristic of an object at a time, to multidimensional perception that integrates several different binary dimensions into one unified subjective experience. All humans go through stages of cognitive development that determines their information processing style, but not everyone progresses to what is thought to be completion of full perceptual development – the ability to simultaneously hold 7 dimensional binaries in mind at a time! We work to identify the complexity of your perceptual processing as well as activate and integrate perspectives of dimensions that you have trained your mind to routinely ignore and skip over.
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The brain develops from the bottom up, meaning the development of the previous layer influences the development of the subsequent layer. The brain stem grows into the limbic system – the emotional brain – which grows into the cerebral cortex – the cognitive brain. These complex structures are in constant interaction with each other and optimal development allows for smooth communication between all three layers. We can trace specific developmental and personality disorders to points of arrest during the development of a particular level along a continuum of ego development – pinpointing psychological fixations and impaired cognition underlying your patterns of acting and thinking!
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The way we look at the wholes and the parts of our experiences are not only preferences, but cognitive abilities that have to be acquired over time. Global central coherence is the normative cognitive tendency of working top down from the whole to its parts – big picture thinkers who intuitively understand how all the parts contribute to the whole. Others with weaker central coherence work bottom up, hoping to calculate the parts to see the whole. We help to build cognitive skills that strengthen integrative capacity and lessen blind spots – and the ability to see the forest through the trees.
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From the earliest days of existence, the mind strives to organize your emotions and experiences into cognitive understanding and awareness. The progression of development is linear where one domain shapes the development of the next. When these processes get disrupted and arrested, cognitive disorganization and emotional dysregulation hinder the ability to think on your feet, organize complex layers and responses, and understand the self and others. We have pioneered an exclusive and groundbreaking technique to identify and correct disorganization of development that literally rewires faulty neuronal pathways and strives to integrate incomplete and impaired domains – accessing previously unavailable, transcendent ways of thinking.
Our perceptions and experiences are initially split – separated into extremes of good and bad that must gradually incorporate together and grow from a split ego to a whole ego. Some have an understanding of the self and the world that is biased in good, positive experiences. Others have had experiences that cause them to be biased toward bad, negative expectations and worldviews.
The brain’s job is to integrate things. The left side and the right side, the emotional brain and the cognitive brain, must come together to allow us to zoom in and out of those dimensional perspectives and integrate all aspects of experiences. When we privilege perception of one side, we necessarily minimize and diminish the perspective of the other. It is when there are extreme biases between good and bad, cognitive and affective, and self and other, that a person will struggle to understand things from the opposite end. The poles are too far apart, too strong, and too contradictory, and don’t allow the ambivalence to simultaneously access both sides of experience. This results in black and white thinking, distorted interpretations of reality, and defense mechanisms that block and prevent self-awareness.
We internalize what we repeatedly experience, creating mental shortcuts of cognitive highways. These are the quickest routes of understanding and make information processing more efficient. We prefer to travel along these familiar, safe routes that make sense to us and get us to where we need to be. Challenges and novel experiences cause us to travel on dirt roads, making rocky connections in unfamiliar terrain that is unknown and scary. We must push ourselves to learn how to navigate new paths to comfortably and flexibly reach our destination through many routes, not just one. It’s how we invite others to come along for the ride.
Ego Integration Theory
