Deep Brain Reorienting – DBR Background
There are many well-researched trauma psychotherapies which offer hope of full recovery from trauma symptoms. Approaches such as EMDR rely on the human brain having an inherent ability to find healing from emotional trauma when the memory of the initiating event is approached in a specific way.
However, it can often be difficult to get to the core of an adverse experience to liberate this healing flow. Sometimes it is difficult because returning to the event is emotionally overwhelming and there is a protective tendency to turn attention away from the memory as soon as possible. Sometimes there is dissociation from the present-day experience through numbing, blanking out, shutting down, or switching into a self-state like that which occurred at the time of the original trauma. Sometimes there has been a shock – before the emotions became intense – which replays so fast that it is easily missed during treatment.
More commonly it is because the original experience was so disturbing it has been covered in layers of thoughts and feelings and distressing re-experiencing. It may also have been compounded by relational problems which themselves were precipitated by the continuing distress.
Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR)® aims to access the core of the traumatic experience in a way which tracks the original physiological sequence in the brainstem – the part of the brain which is rapidly online in situations of danger or attachment disruption. Threat and attachment wounding may have occurred together, when for example, an experience of abandonment in infancy activates age-appropriate fears for survival.
The first structure capable of initiating a movement response is the superior colliculus (SC), which can direct eye movements. The SC also prepares the head for turning by bringing in tension in the muscles of the neck. This orienting tension, although often fleeting and unnoticed, is a major component of DBR. The focus in a DBR session on face and neck tension arising from turning attention to the memory of the traumatic event, or to whatever has been the present-day trigger, gives an anchor in the part of the memory sequence that occurred before the shock or emotional overwhelm that is leading to the continuing symptoms. Deepening awareness into this orienting tension provides an anchor for grounding in the present so that the mind is neither swept away by the high intensity emotions, nor diverted into a compartment holding a self-state frozen in time in which contact with the present is lost. Although the theory is simple the practice of DBR requires much training. These approaches do not rely on restructuring of thoughts or meanings at a complex verbal level for “top-down” control of symptoms, nor do they rely on ‘exposure’ for establishing cortical control of fear responses.
In more complex forms of PTSD there may be more derealisation and depersonalisation, consistent with the brain’s attempts to avoid being overwhelmed by shock and horror, and by intense affects of fear, rage, grief, or shame. The more dissociative forms of PTSD occur when there has been early life attachment disruption preceding other traumatic experience. Dissociative disorders may arise from early life separation experiences experienced as painful and unresolved even when there has been no later abuse. The pain of aloneness may be an internal driver of defensive and affective responses and may thus contribute to difficulties in regulating emotions. Any such difficulty may lead to efforts to control distress through substance abuse, eating disorders, or self-harm – or it may be expressed through troublesome anxiety or mood disturbance. It is not so much the clinical presentation which is important for DBR – but whether there is an underlying event or experience at the origin of the distress.
(from the DBR website: https://deepbrainreorienting.com/history-of-dbr/)
