CIMBS

Complex Integration of Multiple Brain Systems was developed by Beatriz Sheldon, MEd, and Albert Sheldon, MD. A novel and innovative therapeutic paradigm, CIMBS provides many practical and understandable explanations for the complexity of our emotions and emotional behaviors. This knowledge can be useful to any person whether they are part of the helping professions or not, and goes hand in hand with mindful approaches to life and to all forms of treatment. It integrates knowledge from various fields such as neuroscience, attachment theory, affect regulation, developmental psychology, and mindfulness practices. CIMBS is the love child of two conventionally trained therapists that felt the need to break away from the mainstream, and even popular alternative, approaches towards therapeutic practice.

In 1970's Mexico, Beatriz, a newly graduated psychologist, stood at a crossroads. Societal pressure urged her towards marriage and motherhood, while her ambition pulled her towards advanced studies abroad. Defying the norm, she secured a scholarship all the way over at McGill University of Montreal Canada. Upon arrival, she was drawn to the groundbreaking Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) developed by Dr. Habib Davanloo(over all other conventional approaches.) However, his training program exclusively accepted men. Unwilling to yield, Beatriz staged a persistent three-day vigil outside Davanloo's office, ultimately convincing him to break with tradition. She learned a lot, and after finishing school, she established a successful practice in Vancouver. Beatriz also joined the faculty of the West Coast International ISTDP Institute, and taught what she had learned over the next 15 years, earning a reputation as "the therapist to call when you are stuck." Despite her success, Beatriz sensed a missing dimension in therapy. She felt there was a greater healing potential for patients that she couldn't figure out how to access. She began to experiment by being more connected to who she was working with. Beatriz would audibly declare positive feelings towards her patients, and welcome their positive feelings back, explicitly making the caring nature of their relationship visible. Some of her colleagues were visibly uncomfortable with this practice of "caring out loud," fearful that she may be overstepping therapeutic boundaries and making her patients dependent. Beatriz was told "That is wrong!" and "You don't say those things out loud," but what began to happen demonstrated that the opposite was true. Patients were empowered to form intimate relationships in their day to day lives, needing their once-a-week therapy less and less. She knew that she was onto something.

Albert was initially drawn towards economics, language and philosophy, but decided that he would study the natural sciences. He went to medical school in order to learn the skills that would allow him to interact with multiple cultures around the world. Here he became interested in the doctor-patient relationship and chose to go into family practice while the majority of his classmates specialized. After school, Albert began working for Doctors without Borders and was placed in the rural Bolivian Altiplano. His patients, members of the indigenous Aymara community, spoke only their native language. Communication through translators proved ineffective, as the patients' cultural understanding of illness differed vastly from Western medicine. Unable to rely on verbal histories or lab tests, Albert depended entirely on physical examination and clinical observation. He learned to meticulously observe his patients, paying close attention to even the slightest physiological responses during the exam. Through fine-tuning, based on just the physical, Albert was able to test a wide range of biological capacities. These tests mobilized innate physiological shifts, revealing the underlying function of different biological systems in the body. These nonconscious phenomena, subtle or not so subtle, became the key to understanding his patient's illnesses. In the same way that a blind man develops extra-sensory hearing, Albert naturally became adept at seeing subtleties. He learned to read the story that the patients' body would tell, developing an intuitive understanding of his patients' conditions based on what their bodies revealed. His positive experiences with patients in primary care motivated Albert to explore mental health further, leading him to specialize in psychiatry and in residency as a psychotherapist. He immersed himself in various therapeutic approaches, including cognitive-behavioral, psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, systems-centered, group, interpersonal, hypnosis, and some experimental methods. During this period, he attended an Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) course at McGill University, taught by Dr. Habib Davanloo. Albert was particularly drawn to Davanloo's scientific approach to psychotherapy, especially his use of video recordings to analyze and demonstrate effective interventions. This resonated with Albert's own developed wisdom on observable phenomena. Inspired, Albert joined a small training group that met in Montreal for a week four times a year. Around this time he was accepted into the Bush Medical Fellowship program as-well, where he began a research project focused on the intricacies of the psychotherapeutic process.

One of these years, due to certain circumstances, what we could perhaps preclude as the workings of the universal synchronistic function, Albert had to miss the first day of the annual meeting. When he arrived on the second day, to a full conference room, the only place for him to sit was in the empty seat next to Beatriz, who's friend faced an emergency and had to depart early. Over the next four days, getting to know one another, they adhered to this cosmically ordained seating chart and found themselves comparing notes. They immediately noticed that they shared a common outlook, both observing that much more was going on in the video recordings of the sessions than what was being addressed during the presentations. It seemed as though the teacher was getting locked into their own method of addressing the trauma and not paying attention to the other possibilities present for a patient in the moment. The two of them made a deal to explore these aspects and study their own sessions before they attended the next annual meeting.

Over the next couple years, Beatriz and Albert would meet up and continue their discussions. They came from different cultures, backgrounds, and therapeutic trainings, having intense brainstorming sessions that were stormy. Eventually the two came to learn that their contrasting viewpoints all had merit. There was so much more to learn.

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The two of them experimented with interventions based on what was being observed, and at first, it seemed impossible to describe what they were discovering. Within the first 20 minutes of a therapy session, they could create remarkable changes in patients, observable moves forward which sustained between sessions. Trying to understand what was unfolding in the brains and minds of their patients, Beatriz and Albert turned to studying the science of neurobiology and affective neuroscience. What they found was both simple and profound. Neuroscience literature had revealed to them the existence of "brain systems," established neural circuits that perform dedicated physical and behavioral functions. By doing some digging, they were able to discover brain systems that appeared relevant to their patients strengths and difficulties. Some of the most important of these systems were operating mostly out of their patients awareness, aspects of their nonconscious, but were accessible to be worked with in treatment. Over time, they developed numerous practical ways to mobilize the energy and wisdom which was stored within these nonconscious emotional brain systems(evolutionary powerhouses). They found that by harnessing these many emotional brain systems, they could not only help provide treatment for their patients difficulties, but enable them to change the trajectory of their entire lives. As they were working with patients, Beatriz and Albert were able to access their own nonconscious emotional brain systems, freeing themselves to become more fulfilled and effective in their work as-well.

After over two decades of practice and empirical clinical research, Beatriz and Albert expanded and organized their methodology into an innovative therapeutic paradigm that they call Complex Integration of Multiple Brain Systems, or CIMBS. Once you get past the novelty in understanding and embracing the emotional brain systems, the effectiveness and potential of this model will become quite clear. In comparison to other models, CIMBS stands out as being at the forefront of integrating our most advanced scientific understanding of how the mind, body, and emotions work together. While other therapies incorporate aspects of science and neuroscience, CIMBS excels in utilizing every element of what we know to facilitate comprehensive healing and transformation. This makes it one of the most sophisticated approaches available today for working with complex psychological, emotional, and relational issues.

CIMBS helps clients gain awareness of their present-moment experience, allowing for real-time integration of emotional, cognitive, and physiological processes. This focus on dynamic, moment-to-moment engagement is rare among therapeutic models. As I was going through the book, it was quite interesting to me that deep presence, on the therapists part, was one of the largest driving forces behind the models success. Through the cultivation of presence and awareness, traits which are heavily focused upon in spiritual traditions, the therapist is able to use their focus like a laser beam to creatively untangle brain systems which are wired in an unsavory manner. This untangling then releases a tremendous amount of energy and naturally equips the patients innate resources to reorganize the structure of the brain in favorable ways. Is the disentanglement of hyper or hypo-neural subcortical brain regions similar to the releases of kundalini referenced to in Eastern traditions?
See Kundalini (Fertilizer)

Potential Cuts / Additions

She was not well versed in the English language, many of the essays and tests were incredibly difficult for her. Nonetheless, she made it through (after sweating bullets and shedding tears), reflecting that, given the chance she probably wouldn't do it again. "It was very courageous and a little bit crazy."

Beatriz and Albert originally met at a scientific conference and found an immediate synergy with one another(bow chicka bow-wow).

They came from different cultures, backgrounds, and therapeutic trainings, but were able to find an ability to channel wisdom which combined their diverse experiences. They had a shared ability to see therapeutic phenomenon and opportunities that their colleagues did not. This synergy lead them to discover and uncover profound sources of energy and knowledge within their patients that were completely nonconscious and had escaped detection previously.