The Self-Identification Program (SIP): A Clinically Implemented Third-Wave CBT Deepening Dysfunctional Self-Identification in Mood Disorders.
Martin Leurent, Déborah Ducasse
Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) November 20, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.3390/medicina61112071 via PubMed
Summary
The Self-Identification Program (SIP) is a new therapy for mood disorders that targets how people mistakenly identify with temporary thoughts and feelings as if they define a permanent self. SIP combines mindfulness, loving-kindness and compassion, and insight practices to address this core mechanism. It aims to reduce rumination and self-judgment in depression and bipolar disorder by transforming how people relate to their sense of self, offering a process-based approach beyond symptom reduction.
Study at a glance
| Key finding | SIP provides a novel, mechanistically grounded pathway toward enduring change in depressive and bipolar spectrum disorders by targeting dysfunctional self-identification. |
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Abstract
Third-wave cognitive-behavioral therapies (CBT3) have progressively shifted the focus of psychotherapy from symptom reduction to process-based and transdiagnostic mechanisms of change, emphasizing self-identification as a core dimension. Within this evolution, the Self-Identification Program (SIP) represents a conceptual and clinical advancement particularly relevant to mood disorders, where maladaptive self-identification, rumination, and self-judgment play central roles. SIP directly targets dysfunctional self-identification-the reification of transient and maladaptive mental contents as defining features of a self-through a framework integrating the three levels of CBT3: mindfulness (CBT3.1), loving/kindness and compassion (CBT3.2), and deconstructive insight into the nature of a self (CBT3.3). Theoretically, SIP aligns with dimensional psychiatry (AMPD, HiTOP, RDoC) and recent advances in behavioral linguistics (Relational Frame Theory) and psychotherapy (Process-Based Behavioral Therapy). By integrating linguistic, affective, and neuroscientific perspectives, SIP bridges contextual behavioral science and contemplative practice, offering a unified, process-based model of identity transformation. Clinically, SIP extends CBT3 beyond mindfulness and loving/kindness and/or compassion training to specifically address the mechanism by which self-identification becomes a source of suffering-namely, the mistaken identification with an independent and permanent self. In doing so, SIP provides a novel, mechanistically grounded pathway toward enduring change in depressive and bipolar spectrum disorders.