“The DNMS is a deeply transformative approach that offers the potential to heal a wide variety of psychological disorders. Its therapeutic effects reach beyond any other approach I have encountered — not only to provide emotional relief, ego-strengthening, affect tolerance, insight and trauma desensitization, but to restructure complex defenses so as to allow for changes in behavior and personality at a root level. It has provided real hope to clients who have come to me as a last resort, including one woman who was such a chronic high-risk danger to herself and so severely anxious and suicidally depressed that she was rejected for electroconvulsive therapy and was handed a guarded prognosis by dozens of psychiatrists, psychiatric hospitals and psychotherapists. The DNMS is so profoundly effective that I endearingly refer to it as “psycho-surgery” rather than psychotherapy.”

NADINE WINOCUR, PsyD, Private Practice, Los Angeles

“The DNMS has shifted deep seated problems for my clients when nothing else, either myself or others tried, had worked. This is great stuff.”

RICHARD HOLCOMB, Registered psychologist from Christchurch, NZ

“During the 78 years of my life, I have devoted 52 years to the practice of psychotherapy. Down through these years, I’ve had the wonderful personal experience of knowing and being trained by Carl Rogers, Eric Berne, Fritz Pearls, John and Helen Watkins, Mary and Bob Goulding, and Milton Erickson, to name a few. I’m simply overwhelmed by Schmidt’s skill in integrating these theories of giants into an outstanding treatment program.”

GERALD W. HUFF, PhD, Private Practice

“I’ve been an enthusiastic practitioner of the DNMS since 2001 – because it gives me, simply and profoundly, the best treatment results I’ve ever achieved. The DNMS is a truly amazing therapeutic model for both client and therapist. It meets my highest therapeutic goal: to give a person back to their own self.”

JOAN BACON, MA, Psychologist, EMDRIA-Approved Instructor and Consultant

“I have used DNMS successfully with a wide variety of clients, from top level Executives and CEO’s, to teachers, to people more down on their luck (like homeless people or people embroiled in the state welfare system). The DNMS has brought my clients to places of understanding and healing not possible with just plain “talk therapy.” It is especially valuable for people who know something in their lives is “not quite right” but are unable to find a circumstance or issue that tells them why this is so. The DNMS is a fantastic and efficacious form of therapy that helps people grow in ways they sometimes have never believed possible.”

DEBRA ANTARI, MS, LPC, Private Practice, Southbury, CT

“DNMS has been the most valuable tool I could ever have as a therapist! My clients have walked into my office with symptoms of chronic pain, fatigue, fibromyalgia, dissatisfaction with themselves and their lives, or dissatisfaction in their jobs and relationships. After just a few months using the DNMS protocols, they are energized, feeling connected in the moment–if there could ever be a therapy that could allow someone to ‘have a happy childhood today’–it is the DNMS.”

JESSICA BOLLINGER, LCSW, Private Practice, Lexington, KY

“Not only has the DNMS helped many of my clients make significant breakthoughs from old destructive or self-defeating patterns, it has helped me become more patient, gentle and compassionate as a therapist.”

LIZ DOUGHERTY, LCSW-C, BCD, Private Practice, Silver Spring, MD

“Just the sharing of the DNMS process through discussion and the slide show has clients seeing, with relief, that what they’ve been struggling with is understandable and can be healed. This safe and loving approach gives them the courage to open to things they could not uncover in other methods. It is very empowering for them.”

CANDACE SINCLAIR, LCPC, Private Practice, Cary, IL

“The DNMS has been of enormous value to my work – providing a comprehensive, skillful, and compassionate method of treatment that effectively heals clients of their unresolved attachment wounds. It has truly revolutionized my clinical practice.”

CYNTHIA ENGEL, LCSW, Santa Rosa, CA

“In 30 years of doing psychotherapy, I have found nothing that comes close to the DNMS for giving patients relief from troubling childhood experiences. It has transformed my practice. I use it with all kinds of patients – from highest to lowest functioning, including my most and least impaired patients. It is startlingly effective for early losses, traumas, and developmental gaps and strains. People immediately feel better and do better.”

GINGER JOHNSON ENRICO, PhD

“At last – a way to help clients actually, literally, heal from early childhood wounds. The DNMS has transformed my practice. My clients are experiencing profound and lasting change at levels deeper than I would have believed possible. Thank you, Shirley Jean.”

LYNN FOERSTER, PhD, Private Practice, Westlake Village, CA

“I have seen how the DNMS assists patients in understanding how their childhood experiences affect how they interact with others in the world. I have also seen the relief they experience with the process and the hope it gives them about the future.”

PATTIE PARDINI-BARRETT, LMFT, Chico, California

“The DNMS is the most useful method of psychotherapy I have encountered so far. Shirley Jean Schmidt has brilliantly interwoven parts of other therapies into a clear, reproducible procedure that effectively treats chronic, deep-seated problems related to unmet developmental needs. How gratifying it is to see my patients relieved of struggles and burdens they have carried for a lifetime!”

ROBERTA RICHARDSON, MD, Private Practice, Lakewood, CO

“The DNMS has transformed my practice and my view of the psyche. Many clients are truly ‘free’ of their past and have new perspectives about themselves and the possibilities for the future. I love the DNMS model for its comprehensiveness, its ease of use, and its effectiveness. And above all that, it’s fun to use!”

MELANIE SMITHSON, LPC, ADTR, Private Practice, Greenwood Village, CO

“I continue to find the DNMS to be the most exciting and comprehensive treatment modality that I use for my clients. It has successfully afforded my clients tremendous growth and gains in so many ways. The DNMS has been incredibly effective in terms of helping them overcome areas where they had previously felt hopelessly stuck. As an addictions counselor, I have also found the DNMS to be invaluable in terms of helping clients desensitize previous emotional triggers that would have promoted relapse. The DNMS has also proven to be emotionally liberating for those who are codependent.”

BILL SOLZ, LCSW, CASAC, Private Practice, Bellmore, NY

“I think of the DNMS as the “Clean Sweep”! Using the comprehensive, definitive inventory of negative or limiting beliefs, we sweep them out and we have a clean plate; all of the emotional baggage is miraculously gone! So rewarding!”

JAMES DAVID, CSW, Private Practice, Silver Springs, MD

“Working with English-speaking expatriates in Europe, I have seen so much positive change in the lives of my clients, who often suffer the feelings of abandonment which can be common in families which move around a great deal. The DNMS process works efficiently and effectively in ways that have lead my clients to deal with old self-defeating beliefs and make positive changes, even when far from ‘home’.”

DR L’ANNI HILL, Atlanta, GA

“DNMS therapy enables my clients to stop the triggers that create paralyzing dysfunctional cognition and behavior patterns, and instead gives them the ability to effortlessly challenge misperceptions in their thinking processes. Unlike other therapies, which may require clients to be “sentries at their mind’s door” for every irrational or limited thought, (an exhausting process at best, and an often ineffective endeavor for those whose levels of depression and/or anxiety makes this nearly impossible), DNMS therapy creates neurological shifts which appear to result in permanent new neural pathways. These new pathways increase a person’s ability to adapt to their internal and external worlds with appropriate behaviors and cognitive responses. Results I have observed in my practice have been impressive: increased satisfaction and confidence with themselves and their relationships, lessening or complete elimination of OCD behaviors, elimination of chronic depressive disorders, reduction or elimination of anxiety including panic attacks and phobias, and much more. I am a much better therapist because of the DNMS work!”

LAUREL FRASER, LMFT, Private Practice

“I searched for many years for a way of doing therapy that was EFFECTIVE, gentle, and empowering. The DNMS meets all of these criteria. At first, I was concerned about the amount of structure that is in the DNMS protocols, but now I find the protocols provide a framework within which clients can freely explore, and thus heal, their deepest wounds. DNMS therapy is a true partnership between therapist and client, and as such, is incredibly empowering for clients. When doing DNMS work with clients, I do not worry as much about their safety, since they quickly learn to use their own resources to care for themselves and sooth themselves in their day-to-day lives.”

TERRI ALLENDER, MA, LPC, Private Practice, Vail, CO

“DNMS has benefits for a variety of clients: those struggling with never having felt understood, those who need affirmation, those who cannot turn off the inner “tapes” of hostile caretakers. While other methods can also be helpful, the DNMS is exquisitely gentle and gives the patient a sense of control of the session. It offers the patient insight, but by the actual experience of healing.”

DEBORAH COLE, PsyD, Private Practice, Columbia, MD

“I have been working with children, adolescents, and adults in a wide spectrum of settings, including foster care, psychiatric hospitals, group homes, and outpatient settings for over 40 years. Throughout those years, I found many good theories on how individuals acquire the sense of self that shapes their lives so tragically. I could never find a therapeutic intervention that effectively restored them to their true nature until I discovered DNMS. I immediately recognized what Shirley Jean Schmidt has given to us. I began to study DNMS intensely and to practice it whenever I could. I work in an agency with a highly damaged population, all of whom did not get childhood needs met. Once I get clients stabilized, I begin the DNMS. I have achieved results that both my clients and I agree are staggering and utterly transforming. All clients that I’ve been able to successfully take through the entire DNMS process, left therapy either completely free of the symptoms they came in with and off all medications, or the few remaining symptoms were controlled by less medication. This is a powerful intervention that deserves to be studied carefully by anyone who works with adults who did not get basic needs met as a child.”

PAM FARNHAM, LCSW Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Peoria, Bloomington, IL

“I have been happy for the many clients who have told me that the DNMS has been more helpful than any prior therapy experience.”

RAY BOOTH, PhD, Private Practice in Boise, Idaho

“The DNMS can be used to systematically identify and rectify those developmental gaps and wounds that are exerting ongoing negative influence on the client. My own experience with this approach has been positive. I recommend it to those I supervise.”

RICKY GREENWALD, PsyD, Founder Child Trauma Institute