Founders Reflection.

Below is NeuroConnect's founder Mary Rawson Foreman's refection of professional and personal impact of CIMBS

I was already an established psychologist in private practice when I attended my first CIMBS training.  Although, I wanted to be involved in a supportive psychotherapy community, at that time, I was felt like there was a level of confidence in my work that I had not satisfied despite appreciative clients and a full client load.

What started during that weekend of training is something I would not have predicted.  I felt more hope for my work. I was energized by a paradigm that utilized

an attachment-based approach which helped increase clients’ capacity for core consciousness, as well as, a sense of safeness, connection, caring, playfulness and curiosity.

As I began to use this approach with my clients and saw some dramatic changes, I began to see positive outcomes that pleased both my clients and myself.  Clients were having their own experience of increased insights and being moved by their experiences.  I began small group trainings with other therapist expanding their knowledge of CIMBS, because of a sense that this practice was giving my work more of a sense of aliveness, it encouraged me to increase my capacity as a therapist. 

I wanted to try this therapy for myself.  I began my own therapy with Beatriz Sheldon, a co-founder of CIMBS, and it helped me gain new awareness of myself.  I was also able to see how Beatriz worked with me and incorporate her methods in my sessions.  Being in therapy with Beatriz has been an amazing experience. It has help shift my core experience; I have begun to feel more secure inside of myself, reduced ongoing shame from the past that was encroaching on my present experience of joy.  I continue to be more able to give myself credit for being who I am without feeling a need to change. 

My compassion has grown for myself and for others, an area I would have said I was well-established. Yet now, I notice I am more able to be moved by clients and this helps both of us experience more of a feeling of connection.  I have developed a sense of autonomy that has made me more solid as a person and as a clinician.  This type of psychotherapy is different and hard to describe, without internally experiencing it.  Below is one example of how my experience as a therapy client directly impacted my work. During one session I was fully aware of myself and feeling some resistance particularly the more Beatriz focused on me being delightful.  I could not accept that in the moment and my resistance rose, Beatriz and I collaboratively acknowledged this and she continued to delight in me as my oppositionalism rose. I then I felt an awareness of my own delight which encouraged me to open my heart to accept this experience of being delighted-in, despite my own resistance. 

Later that week I began to notice a delightfulness within many of my clients that I had not explicitly recognized previously.  I believe that as my expanded brain system was more receptive and accepting to my own delight, I was now fully able to experience this. I was then able to see delightfulness in others and began to help them expand this. The experience in my own therapy enlivened my work as a psychotherapist. It helped me realize I could help others develop new positive aspects of themselves that I may not have been aware of without my own insight from personal therapy. Because of this work I am a more confident psychotherapist.  Personally, I have more joy, which promotes a stronger sense of self-care and an increased capacity to feel my connection with others. This is just the beginning of the many positives my experience with CIMBS have brought me.