Deep Brain Reorienting: Understanding the Neuroscience of Trauma, Attachment Wounding, and DBR Psychotherapy, by Frank M. Corrigan, Hannah Young & Jessica Christie-Sands
How can it be that at the highest echelons of mental health, professionals are trained to avoid talking about trauma because it destabilizes patients? Yet, according to Frank M. Corrigan, this seems to be the status quo in our mainstream medical system. Like Frank, I believe that so-called developed countries need to do better in acknowledging the impact early relational trauma has on our nervous systems and our lives. Only in this way can we actually begin to provide the kind of welcome our most vulnerable community members need in order to grow into their best, fullest lives. And only in this way can we begin to reclaim our own nervous systems so that we can live in harmony with our bodies and the planet, starting now, at whatever stage of health we’re at, which is something that is so vital to all of us during this important moment in human history.
How can it be anything but obvious that our earliest experiences set the tone for our lives, and that the tender love and consistent-enough attention of our mothers is central to our wellbeing and development? So much so that in the first hours and days following birth, the availability or absence of a warm and conscious presence imprints on the nervous system and puts in motion ways of being in the body that will shape our relationships and our physical health for a lifetime. What should not be earth shattering news is that when a human infant does not get these early needs met, the body responds with shock. If these ruptures are not repaired, it will leave the body in a chronic state of hypervigilance and trauma.
This is what mental health providers the world over are facing today. How to help clients and patients with chronic anxiety, depression, troubled relationships, and a general sense of disconnection from themselves, others and their own agency in the world.
Frank M. Corrigan suggests a sort of cultural dissociation from the reality of early relational trauma that lies not-so-subtly alongside an implied institutionalized decision by our medical establishments that trauma-derived disorders are simply too expensive to treat. Frank M. Corrigan is speaking my language. Though it’s clearly not USAian English. In fact, he’s Scottish! Corrigan is the creator of Deep Brain Reorienting, a body-oriented tool to treat shock, trauma, attachment wounding and deeply stored, unprocessed pain.
Deep Brain Reorienting brings something revolutionary to my toolbox, though I’ve specialized in trauma for almost 20 years. With DBR, we are slowing things down, looking under the hood, and addressing some important things that happen in the brain well before trauma sets in – even before emotions. It’s basic physiology, but it’s also sociopolitical. In this trailblazing book, I’m finding answers to questions I didn’t even know I had. Frank M. Corrigan speaks to my nervous system in a way I’ve never been spoken to before.
Learning Yet Another Technique
With DBR, “The therapist must be directive in eliciting the underlying sequence and then supportive as the healing process flows from within the client towards a new perspective.” (Pg 9)
Orienting Tension
As a practitioner of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), I have learned how to watch for the subtle cues that tell me when a client is effectively processing trauma; I know the landmarks that happen when we effectively transform a vivid, sensory-laden memory that feels here and now when recalled, into a narrative story that can be told with thoughtfulness, current-moment presence, and compassion for the self. But what EMDR is not as good at is effectively addressing pre-verbal trauma. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t acquire the use of spoken language as a means of communication until I was probably well into my third year. And as much as it vexes me, talking about the unresolved trauma my nervous system has been managing since birth would not be a worthwhile pursuit for me in a therapy session. Still, growing up in a family that had little time or energy for emotions, there is still a considerable amount of work to do in that addled nervous system of mine. Lucky for me, now that I’ve been introduced to Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), I understand that there is a whole additional set of cues that we can become familiar with when we work with clients, and when we begin to heal our own nervous systems from the ruptures in attachment we experienced when we – as infants, toddlers and small children – were so completely dependent on the adults in our lives. And when we address these things, our worlds begin to expand. We are capable of so much more than we ever imagined.
This new set of cues includes tension in the muscles at the base of the skull, around the eyes, and/or in the forehead. The sensations here are referred to as orienting tension because they include muscles that become activated when “our attention is drawn to something salient, even if we do not move our eyes or our head.”
This orienting tension provides a connection with the system for the ‘whereness’ of the body, and (during therapy) it enables attention to traumatic material without being dislocated from present reality. This is where we obtain the grounding anchor, which reduces the risk of being overwhelmed during trauma processing. (Pg 5)
In the next weeks and months, I hope to process and share more about Frank Corrigan and colleagues findings and thoughts. Here are a few of the things I want to take in and “digest.”
- The Nervous System Structures involved in the orienting reflex and shock
- Neurological foundations of Disorganized Attachment – And how they’re healed
- Implications of the diffuse pain of an infant for whom there is insufficient meeting of the need for contact
- The sense of personal agency, and how it responds to early attachment disruptions
- Neurochemical Dissociation and the endogenous opioids that deliver analgesia for emotional pain
- Recognizing the physiological symptoms of shock
- Bracing: The degree of holding in the axial structures is indicative of the level of underlying pain that is being continually braced against
Photo Credit: Rosy Ziegler / Bad Homburg / Germany