About CEI
Clinical reasoning before modality.
CEI develops the psychological thinking clinicians need to understand a client, determine what the work requires, and revise their understanding as the work unfolds.
What the Institute does
Through professional education, clinical scholarship, consultation, and quality improvement, CEI works with clinicians, supervisors, provider organizations, and behavioral-health systems.
Its focus extends across theoretical orientations: the reasoning that connects what a clinician observes to what they offer—and how they evaluate what follows.
The clinical foundations
Capacity and regulation
Assess what kind of psychological work a client can currently use.
Clinical information
Attend to verbal, bodily, and relational information without rushing to an explanation.
Explicit alliance
Clarify the purpose of the work, participation, feedback, and disagreement.
Formulation and revision
Develop an explanation of the difficulty, use it to guide the work, and revise it when observations call it into question.
Founder: Sarah Ozol Shore, MS
Sarah Ozol Shore is a clinical educator, psychotherapist, and clinical quality improvement specialist. She founded CEI to strengthen the judgment and psychological thinking on which responsible psychotherapy depends.
Her teaching draws on psychodynamic, attachment-informed, trauma-informed, and mentalization-based perspectives, with particular attention to real-time clinical reasoning.