Imagine an approach to trauma work that follows a subtle symphony of sensations in the face, head, and neck. This is the fascinating world of Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), an emerging trauma therapy that provides people with a new way to address trauma.

We interviewed the founder of DBR, Frank Corrigan, a Scottish psychiatrist and author specializing in trauma. He first published on DBR in 2020, and he has since been training clinicians in this approach.

When someone initially experiences a shocking event, the brain’s first instinct is to move the eyes toward the event, which is done in concert with the brainstem. While this orients the person toward the situation, this part of the brain also activates the muscles of the neck, eyes and forehead to prepare the head to move. DBR recognizes that the initial way the brain registers the shock of trauma is through the brainstem. Clinicians offering DBR argue that treating this initial shock response in the order that it occurred during the trauma is crucial to healing.

What does the client do during a DBR session? The therapist tells the client to think about a trigger called an “activating stimulus” – either a present trigger, or a small part of the initial traumatic memory itself.

While thinking about this, the therapist guides the client to focus on tension – called the orienting tension – which manifests as sensations in the patient’s face, head and neck. During most of the session, the patient focuses deeply on these sensations. Corrigan explains that while clients often stay still when processing the sensations, sometimes they move the head. Ultimately, patients often experience a decrease in levels of shock and distress, often accompanied by emotional release and psychological and physical relief.

A randomized controlled trial of DBR published in August 2023 showed promising results. In the study, 29 people with PTSD underwent DBR therapy, and they experienced improvements in the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS-5), which measures PTSD symptoms. Symptoms in patients who underwent DBR therapy improved by 36.6% at the end of 8 sessions and continued improving to 48.6% at a 3-month follow-up. After doing DBR, at the end of the 8 sessions, 48% of patients no longer met criteria for PTSD, and at a 3-month follow-up, 52% of patients no longer met criteria for PTSD. DBR treatment can even be administered virtually, as was done in this study, which increases the accessibility of the treatment.

We interviewed Ruth Lanius, a professor of psychiatry at Western University in Ontario, co-author of the study, who explains that once people process sensations in the body through DBR, their thoughts and the way they perceive themselves and the world changes. Patients are able to re-evaluate who they are and how they interact with the world. By relieving the visceral impact of trauma, DBR reduces re-living the horror.

Lanius explains that after DBR, “Most frequently, we see that people are literally dropping back into their bodies. They’re comfortable reinhabiting their body again. And they will report that they feel like their body is no longer holding their trauma. And as a result, they often will tell us ‘I’m starting to feel alive again.’” Lanius further notes that at the end of a DBR session, clients will often finally feel “I am safe,” and have other significant insights. Corrigan says that after DBR, patients will often have more self-compassion for what they’ve gone through, and tend to have more energy and vitality.

Corrigan adds that people with sleep issues have shown improvements in sleep following DBR. One client, Ruby (name changed for anonymity), explains that, “After just a couple DBR sessions, I finally started regularly sleeping through the night after experiencing disrupted sleep for 10 years.”

But how is DBR different from other somatic (body-oriented) and neurologically-informed trauma therapies? Corrigan believes that DBR reduces the overwhelm associated with trauma processing, and DBR helps the patient process trauma at a deeper level of the brain than other trauma therapies.

Art O’Malley, a psychiatrist in Ireland who has trained in DBR and other trauma therapies, shares that he has found it useful clinically to use DBR first before using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a well-established trauma therapy, so that sensations in the body are processed prior to working on a more emotional level. He also finds it helpful to use DBR prior to or along with other somatic approaches like sensorimotor psychotherapy.

To date, no studies have been done to confirm what areas of the brain are in fact being activated during DBR, although studies are underway.

-Lauren Rudolph, Contributing Writer and Senior Editor 

Image Credits:
Feature: Photo8 at Freepik, Creative Commons
First: Cottonbro at Pexels, Creative Commons
Second: KindelMedia at Pexels, Creative Commons