A Love Letter to Bottom-Up Processing and CMT

(From one complicated brain to another)

If you’ve ever felt like you’re piecing together a puzzle, but the pieces refuse to show you the picture until you’ve connected enough, welcome to the world of bottom-up processing. It’s slow, it’s unyielding, and it’s like assembling a mystery novel in reverse. But it’s also the foundation of Connected Meaning Therapy (CMT), and - spoiler alert - it’s a game-changer.

Bottom-up processing means we start with the details. Instead of trying to cram everything into a tidy, pre-designed box, we give the complexity room to unfold naturally. No rules—just a focus on finding scattered pieces and figuring out how they fit into the bigger picture. It’s like receiving a love letter piece by piece, each sentence revealing something new about the person on the other side. At first, it’s just isolated fragments—disjointed and elusive—but as we move through it, a fuller picture begins to emerge, with all its contradictions, depth, and nuance.

This approach is a love letter to the complexities that make us human: the contradictions, the unexpected connections, the quiet layers of meaning that only reveal themselves after we’ve spent enough time with them. CMT doesn’t ask you to “fix” yourself. Instead, it invites you to notice the pieces, honor them, and see how they fit together to tell the story that’s been there all along, just waiting to be understood.

Here’s the kicker: this process isn’t fast or linear. There’s no straight path. Think of it like a series of letters you’re writing to yourself. Each draft builds upon the last, refining your understanding of who you are. Some things will feel obvious, while others take time to clarify. That’s the heart of bottom-up processing: discovering what’s always been there, even when you couldn’t see it yet.

That’s where CMT comes in. The five pillars - Grounding, Joy, Absurdity, Connection, and Integration - are the tools that help you process and make meaning from the raw details of your experience. We start with the real stuff - the lived moments that don’t always fit neatly into the boxes society hands us. Then we use those pillars to explore, honor, and piece them together in a way that makes sense for you.

Bottom-up processing is, in a way, a love letter to everything you are. It’s about starting where you are, in all your beautifully complex contradictions, and growing into self-acceptance and understanding. Like a handwritten letter, it doesn’t always come out perfectly. It’s often unpolished, sometimes meandering, but ultimately richer because of that.

In therapy, we’re co-writing this letter with you, starting with the smallest details that make up your lived experience. If we treat these fragments as pieces of a story that haven’t fully clicked yet, it opens up an entire world of possibility. You’re not broken -you’re just in the process of learning how to connect the dots.

So, let’s embrace that. Let’s write this love letter to complexity, to contradictions, to everything that makes us uniquely us. Bottom-up processing isn’t a quick fix. It’s the art of piecing things together slowly and thoughtfully, honoring the intricacies of the journey. In the end, the picture that emerges will be entirely yours—authentic, unfiltered, and free from the pressure to force everything into life’s neat little boxes.

Ready to start? Let’s open the first envelope of this love letter together.