What if your trauma was your compass, not your curse?
Healing isn’t becoming someone new. It’s remembering who you are becoming.
Decode Trauma-like Symptoms and Find Purpose: Integrative Self-Analysis
You’ve always sensed there was meaning in the mess, that the patterns, pain, and survival strategies were not random noise but signals pointing to something deeper.
Integrative Self-Analysis (ISA) helps you separate signal from noise, decoding the intelligence beneath trauma-like symptoms into coherent meaning, agency, and direction.
What is Integrative Self-Analysis (ISA)?
Integrative Self-Analysis (ISA) is an open-source, trauma-informed, biopsychosocial framework developed to restore psychological coherence, emotional regulation, and authentic self-direction in individuals with Complex Trauma-like symptoms, especially those who’ve felt unseen, mislabeled, or misdiagnosed by mainstream health systems. ISA operates through a bottom-up model of consciousness, targeting the Instinctual Consciousness (IC), the instinctual, emotional, and symbolic intelligence that precedes thought and drives behavior. Unlike symptom-only or cognition-first approaches such as CBT, ISA focuses on how trauma disrupts affective systems, memory, and meaning, and it works directly with those foundations to support durable integration rather than surface-level symptom management and deterministic labeling.
Integrative Self-Analysis (ISA) Foundational Disciplines and Influences
People most likely to seek out Integrative Self-Analysis (ISA) are typically high-insight, self-reflective adults who have already tried conventional mental health approaches and found them incomplete or limiting. This demographic often includes individuals with complex trauma histories, therapy-experienced clients who plateaued in CBT or symptom-management models, clinicians and coaches seeking deeper theoretical coherence, and intellectually curious individuals drawn to psychology, neuroscience, and depth work.
They tend to value personal agency, ethical transparency, and explanatory depth, prefer frameworks that integrate body, emotion, memory, and meaning, and actively search for trauma-informed, bottom-up alternatives that explain why patterns persist rather than merely how to suppress them. For this audience, credibility depends on clearly naming the real disciplines and scientific traditions ISA draws from, which is why its foundations are explicitly grounded in the following integrated fields rather than abstract or technique-driven methods.
Foundational disciplines and influences
Self-Analysis (Karen Horney)
Building on Karen Horney’s work in Self-Analysis, ISA treats self-analysis as a structured, guided capacity rather than a therapist-controlled process, strengthening agency, insight, and continuity between sessions. The advantage is reduced dependency, faster pattern recognition, and ethical transparency, because meaning and change emerge from the individual’s lived experience instead of a healer/patient hierarchy where authority and interpretation are externally imposed.
Affective Neuroscience (Bottom-Up Consciousness)
Demonstrates that emotion, sensation, and subcortical brain systems organize experience before conscious thought, making regulation and healing impossible through cognition alone.
Trauma-Informed Science (Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk)
Reframes diagnosis and treatment around how trauma alters the nervous system, memory, identity, and self-regulation rather than treating symptoms as isolated disorders.
Ethics of the Enlightened Witness (Alice Miller)
Provides a moral framework centered on truth-telling against gaslighting, emotional relating, and the protection and development of a vulnerable ego structure against denial, minimization, and the coercive normalization of abuse.
Psychodynamic Free Association (Freud)
Uses spontaneous, non-directive expression to surface unconscious material within a psychogenic complex without imposing the ego’s interpretive or cognitive control.
Jungian Psychology (Carl Jung)
Informs ISA’s use of psychogenic complexes, archetypes, symbolic amplification, active imagination, and spiritual integration as functions of the psyche rather than belief systems.
Depth Psychology and Dream Analysis (James Hillman)
Engages symbolic imagery and non-ego states of intelligence to access meaning and regulation unavailable to waking cognition alone.
Psycho-Systems Analysis (Steve and Pauline Richards)
Models trauma as interacting systems of Morphic Fields, drive-states, instincts, ego cognition, psychological complexes, counter-complexes, affect bridges, the relating function, and biopsychosocial feedback loops rather than linear pathology.
Affective Systems Theory (Jaak Panksepp)
Grounds motivation and behavior in the seven primary emotional systems, providing a biological map for understanding affect, defense, and healing trajectories.
These disciplines do not function as isolated techniques but are integrated into a single coherent framework designed to identify, regulate, and transform trauma-formed psychogenic patterns while supporting the emergence of a stable Dominant Ego Personality (DEP).
Beyond Trauma: Be Your Own Therapist
Become the expert of your own Soul, the author of your life. Decode your inner instinctual wisdom and step fully into your life’s purpose with ISA tools and mentorship in today’s fast-moving world of generative AI.
Integrative Self-Analysis’ (ISA) Spiritual Foundations
Integrative Self-Analysis (ISA) is an exoteric, trauma-informed therapeutic framework grounded in a precise spiritual ontology rather than vague spirituality or opaque mysticism. ISA operationalizes ancient metaphysical systems into a psychologically rigorous, symbol-literate, and clinically actionable model for restoring agency, coherence, and meaning after complex trauma.
Drawing explicitly from Christian Mysticism, Neoplatonism, Alchemy, and Gnostic theory, ISA treats trauma not merely as dysregulation, but as a fragmentation of soul-intelligence, symbolic perception, and moral orientation. Its core innovation is translating these spiritual lineages into functional tools that can identify, metabolize, and transform Malignant Complexes through embodied insight, symbolic precision, and bottom-up nervous system integration. ISA positions spirituality not as belief, but as infrastructure for psychological repair, ethical development, and authentic self-direction.
Spiritual Foundations of Integrative Self-Analysis (ISA)
Neoplatonism
A metaphysical framework originating with Plotinus that understands reality as emanating from a single transcendent source, the One, into layered levels of being. In ISA, Neoplatonism provides the ontological map for psyche as Soul, where trauma is understood as a collapse into fragmented states of being rather than moral failure. Evil is defined as privation of the good, operationalized in ISA as “void structures” within psychogenic complexes. Healing is framed as expanded awareness and reintegration, restoring coherence between instinct, ego, and divine immanent meaning.
Christian Mysticism (Gnostic Function)
The experiential, non-dogmatic core of Christian spirituality emphasizing direct, lived knowledge (gnosis) of divine origin. In ISA, this form of gnosis is a functional capacity that allows the psyche to exceed the ego’s working-memory limits and resist collective psychic forces that suppress individuation. This insight is essential for detecting Malignant Complexes that have been deliberately dissociated from conscious awareness. ISA treats gnosis as a neuro-symbolic event that enables recognition of the self as a bearer of divine potential rather than a trauma-defined identity.
Christian Mysticism (Relational and Redemptive Axis)
Beyond insight, Christian Mysticism contributes ISA’s ethical and relational spine. Healing is oriented toward redemption through relational love, imagination, and the heart, not abstraction or moral relativism. ISA frames Christ Consciousness as an internal organizing principle that restores the relating function, allowing Malignant Complexes to be redeemed rather than exiled. Psychological evolution is inseparable from moral embodiment, compassion, and responsibility.
Gnostic Theory (Egregores and Thought Forms)
ISA adopts Gnostic insights into collective psychic structures, treating egregores as real, active forces formed from accumulated belief, fear, and ideology. Trauma is amplified when individual psyches are entrained by these collective thought forms. ISA equips individuals to recognize how Malignant Complexes interface with egregores, allowing liberation through symbolic differentiation, experiential knowledge, and reclaiming sovereignty of perception.
Jungian Psychological Alchemy
Alchemy is used as a symbolic model of psychological transformation rather than proto-chemistry. Following Jung, ISA understands alchemical imagery as projections of unconscious psychic processes. The Great Work represents the integration of opposites and the emergence of the Self. In ISA, alchemical stages map directly onto trauma integration cycles, where dissociated material is transformed into coherent agency rather than suppressed or bypassed.
Hillman’s Imaginal and Soul-Making Alchemy
Building on James Hillman, ISA adopts a non-linear, imaginal approach to transformation. Pathology is treated as meaningful image rather than defect. Alchemical language is deliteralized into a therapeutic grammar that allows clients to stay with symbolic material long enough for it to mature. This supports ISA’s emphasis on Gentle Emergence, avoiding forced catharsis and honoring the psyche’s natural timing. Healing reconnects the individual psyche to the anima mundi, restoring a sense of belonging to life itself.
Integrative Self-Analysis is not spiritually eclectic or metaphorical. It is a built-in feature, a deliberately engineered synthesis of ancient spiritual ontologies and modern trauma science, translated into a practical system for identifying, transforming, and redeeming trauma-formed psychic structures (Malignant Complexes) and developing a spiritual Dominant Ego Personality (DEP). ISA reclaims spirituality as a necessary operating system for deep psychological healing, ethical orientation, and the emergence of a coherent, sovereign self.
We must not be cutoff from the source of our true being. Thinking and speech must be infused with the slow, meandering, uniqueness of Soul. If we lose our connection to the Instinctual Consciousness (IC), emanating from our Soul, and are unable to focus that numinous (psychogenic) energy through a well developed Dominant Ego Personality (DEP), our thinking issues forth stillborn, becoming just a brief phantasm with no permanence, and the understanding of language becomes passive and reactionary, a mere downloading of dead words manufactured at lightning speed and scale.
A Homecoming
This isn’t another clinical model. It’s a return to coherence, to intuition, to the inner authority you had before the world fragmented you.
Because you’re not broken.
You adapted. And now you’re ready to evolve.
ISA isn’t here to fix you.
It’s here to walk you back home to yourself.
Udtalelse
Jeg har arbejdet med Michael i noget tid nu, og det er simpelthen fantastisk. Hans perspektiv på drømmearbejde/Dream Mapping er en stor hjælp i min personlige udvikling og ikke mindst min spirituelle udvikling.
Jeg er rykket længere frem end nogensinde før. Jeg har prøvet alt for at bearbejde mine traumer og komplekser: psykoterapi, regressionsterapi og utallige spirituelle kurser. Intet har været så effektivt som at arbejde med Michael.
Det er hårdt, og det kræver vilje til at arbejde med dig selv og dine drømme, være åben og turde se dine dæmoner i øjnene. Michael siger tingene, som de er, og det er ikke altid let at se eller høre, men det er effektivt og nødvendigt.
Jeg kan kun give Michael mine allerbedste anbefalinger. Din vej til et bedre liv starter her.
De bedste ønsker for din rejse og heling.
—Peter H. P.
1. What if trauma isn’t a disorder but an adaptation? In Integrative Self-Analysis (ISA), trauma is understood as an intelligent survival response, not a defect. What looks like dysfunction is often the psyche reorganizing itself under threat. ISA reframes trauma-like symptoms as adaptive strategies that once preserved life or coherence and now require integration rather than correction. 2. Why do trauma patterns repeat even after therapy? Patterns repeat when therapy addresses insight without reorganizing the underlying affective and nervous-system circuits. ISA identifies these repetitions as psychogenic complexes that remain active below conscious thought. Until those bottom-up systems are engaged, the pattern continues regardless of insight. 3. Why do I understand my trauma intellectually but still feel stuck? Intellectual understanding operates at the cognitive level, while trauma is encoded in emotion, sensation, memory, and meaning. ISA recognizes this gap as a systems mismatch. Change occurs when insight is paired with affective regulation and symbolic integration, not explanation alone. 4. How is bottom-up trauma healing different from CBT? CBT works top-down, focusing on thoughts and behaviors. Bottom-up trauma healing, as used in ISA, starts with the instinctual and emotional systems that organize experience before thought. Regulation and coherence emerge first, allowing cognition to stabilize naturally rather than forcing reinterpretation. 5. Can trauma symptoms actually carry information or meaning? Yes. ISA treats symptoms as signals, not noise. Trauma-like responses often encode unmet needs, interrupted development, or ethical violations. When decoded rather than suppressed, these signals provide direction for restoring agency, coherence, and purpose. 6. Why does my body react before I can control it? Affective neuroscience shows that subcortical systems activate before conscious awareness. ISA works directly with these systems, recognizing that bodily reactions are not failures of will but pre-conscious intelligence attempting to protect the organism. 7. What’s the difference between managing symptoms and integrating trauma? Symptom management aims to reduce discomfort. Integration aims to reorganize the system that produced the symptom. ISA prioritizes integration, allowing symptoms to resolve as coherence, meaning, and self-direction are restored rather than continuously managed. 8. Why do some people feel mislabeled or misdiagnosed in therapy? Many diagnostic models isolate symptoms from context, history, and meaning. ISA addresses this gap by situating symptoms within a biopsychosocial and symbolic framework, reducing mislabeling and restoring the individual’s interpretive authority over their own experience. 9. How does trauma affect identity and sense of purpose? Trauma fragments identity by disrupting continuity between instinct, memory, and meaning. ISA views this not as identity loss but as identity interruption. Integration restores a coherent narrative, allowing purpose to re-emerge organically rather than being imposed. 10. Is healing about fixing myself or becoming more whole? ISA rejects the premise that you are broken. Healing is framed as homecoming, a process of re-integration where adaptive parts are honored, reorganized, and brought into coherence. The outcome is not correction, but wholeness, agency, and authentic self-direction.