Co-authored by Lauren Rudolph and Robert Muller, Ph.D.

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.

The founder of DBR, Frank Corrigan, a Scottish psychiatrist and author specializing in trauma, first published on DBR in 2020, and 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 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 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, 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 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) underwent DBR therapy, and PTSD symptoms in patients improved by 36.6 percent at the end of eight sessions and continued improving to 48.6 percent at a three-month follow-up. At the end of the eight sessions, 48 percent of patients no longer met the criteria for PTSD, and at a three-month follow-up, 52 percent of patients no longer met the criteria for PTSD. DBR treatment can even be administered virtually, as was done in this study, which increases the accessibility of the treatment.

Ruth Lanius, a professor of psychiatry at Western University in Ontario, and co-author of the study, explains that once people process sensations in the body through DBR, their thoughts and the way they perceive themselves and the world change. Patients can 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 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, “After just a couple of 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 before working on a more emotional level. He also finds it helpful to use DBR before or along with other somatic approaches like sensorimotor psychotherapy.

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

© Psychology Today