the heart of therapy
Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR)
"The healing of trauma is a natural process that can be accessed through an inner
awareness of the body" ~ Peter Levine
Deep Brain Reorienting is a transformative trauma-processing psychotherapy grounded in neuroscience. It is designed to heal the psychological challenges and mental health symptoms caused by traumatic and adverse experiences and attachment wounds experienced during adulthood and childhood.
What is Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR)?
Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) is a neuroscience-based therapy developed to treat trauma and attachment wounds by accessing and transforming the brain’s response patterns. When a traumatic event occurs, including unmet attachment needs in early life, the brain initiates a survival response that can continue to replay in the nervous system long after the event has passed—especially when something triggers a memory or emotional echo of the trauma. DBR helps by gently revisiting and slowing down this early, automatic sequence, offering the brain a chance to transform it, with the aim to lead to deep and lasting healing.
How DBR Works
Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) is a cutting-edge trauma therapy that works by targeting the brain’s earliest responses to shock—before conscious thoughts or emotions arise. Rooted in neuroscience, DBR guides clients to access and notice subtle physical sensations and feelings in their body that reflect deep brain activity, where the trauma response begins. By slowing down this pre-conscious sequence with the support of a trained therapist, DBR allows the nervous system to safely process and release unresolved trauma.
This bottom-up approach helps rewire survival patterns such as fight, flight, freeze, shutdown and dissociation, without needing to talk through the traumatic event—making it especially effective for PTSD and relationshiip attachment-related wounding. DBR supports deep healing by harnessing the innate healing mechanisms of the brain.
DBR AT - Incorporating Somatic (body-based) Techniques into DBR for Trauma Healing
Why Combine DBR with the Alexander Technique (AT) Interweaves?
DBR-AT brings together Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) with specialised somatic–verbal interventions adapted from the Alexander Technique. Developed by Martin Warner, drawing on his background in the Alexander Technique and in collaboration with Dr Frank Corrigan, founder of DBR, these interweaves are designed to support the DBR process when patterns of physical bracing, armouring or defensive contraction appear to interrupt or constrain its natural flow.
Importantly, DBR can be a powerful and transformative therapy in its own right, and for many clients the core DBR process unfolds effectively without additional intervention. According to Dr. Frank Corrigan, the AT Interweaves are not a necessary part of every DBR session. Rather, they offer an additional clinical option when the unfolding process suggests that somatic support may be useful.
The interweaves are guided through precise, moment-to-moment verbal instructions between therapist and client. This means they can also be incorporated into online telehealth sessions when clinically appropriate.
Training and safe use
AT Interweaves are powerful clinical interventions and require thorough training, sound DBR competence and careful clinical judgement. Their effective use involves considerably more than learning particular words or somatic cues: clinicians need to understand when, how — and importantly, whether — to intervene within an unfolding DBR process.
Used without sufficient skill, attunement or sensitivity, an interweave may interfere with processing and the healing process rather than facilitate it, or contribute to overwhelm rather than helping to reduce that risk. For this reason, AT Interweaves should be used by clinicians who have received appropriate training and supervision in their application within DBR.
What Can Deep Brain Reorienting Help With?
DBR has helped many of our clients with a wide range of emotional, physical, and relational challenges:
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Trauma & PTSD
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Anxiety and chronic stress
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Depression linked to early pain or unresolved trauma
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Somatic symptoms (e.g., tension, chronic pain, medically unexplained symptoms)
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Attachment wounds and relationship insecurity
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Trust and connection issues
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Fear of abandonment and rejection in relationships.
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Emotional numbness or disconnection
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Survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, shutdown, dissociation
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Emotional dysregulation and reactivity
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Low self-worth
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Unresolved grief and loss
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Compulisve behaviours and obsessive patterns of thinking
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Excessive rumination
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Sleep issues
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Nightmares
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Dissociation
What Happens in a DBR Session?
1. Where-Self
The first step in DBR involves your therapist guiding you to ground yourself in your “where-self”—the sense of here-nowness—creating a stable foundation for safely accessing and resolving the trauma response.
2. Identifying your target for the session (Activating Stimulus)
Your therapist helps you choose a recent situation that triggered distress, or the unwanted symptoms or pattern of emotional reactivity that you want to change. In DBR this is called the activating stimulus.
3. Accessing the orienting tension
Your therapist guides you to find the orienting tension that can feel like tension, tightness, pulling or a fingerprint that appears in the muscles across your forehead, around your eyes, or at the base of your skull.
When we are faced with a threatening situation, these muscles are used to turn our head, eyes, or attention towards or away from the threat, even before any emotion sets in. This marks the beginning of the trauma sequence and becomes the grounding anchor for the session.
If the processing starts to feel intense or even close to overwhelming at any point during the session, you can return your attention to this grounding anchor. The orienting tension provides an anchor to help you stay connected and present while shock, emotions and defensive responses are safely worked through.
4. Allowing your brain and body's responses to change
Your therapist guides you to stay attuned to your body's physical sensations and emotions as your brain's sequence unfolds. Using a thorough understanding of neurobiology, your therapist guides you to be present with the process in a way that allows it to be safely and effectively modified, minimising overwhelm and the intense emotional flooding often associated with trauma work.
The Research and Evidence
Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) is a relatively new trauma therapy, and its research base is continuing to develop. Early clinical findings are very promising, and DBR is also informed by an extensive body of neuroscience research into how the brain responds to trauma, threat and dissociation.
Research into DBR and PTSD
In a randomized controlled trial, 54 adults with PTSD were allocated either to eight online DBR sessions or to a waitlist control group. Those who received DBR experienced significant reductions in PTSD symptoms, while the waitlist group showed little change.
Immediately following treatment, PTSD symptom severity had reduced with almost half of participants no longer meeting diagnostic criteria for PTSD. At the three-month follow-up, without further DBR the average reduction in PTSD symptoms had increased even more.
DBR was also well tolerated in this study, with only one participant not completing the eight-session treatment.
What does the brain imaging research show?
An important part of the research behind DBR comes from Professor Ruth Lanius and her team, who have used functional MRI (fMRI) to investigate how trauma and dissociation affect brain systems involved in detecting threat and organising defensive responses.
This research has identified differences in the functioning and connectivity of deep brain regions involved in rapid responses to threat, including the superior colliculus and periaqueductal gray (PAG). Research from Lanius's team has also demonstrated different patterns of PAG connectivity associated with active defensive responding and the dissociative subtype of PTSD. This work contributes to the neuroscientific understanding from which DBR has developed.
Researchers are now investigating what happens to brain functioning following DBR itself. Participants in the DBR PTSD research have undergone high-resolution 7-Tesla fMRI scans before and after treatment. Preliminary findings presented by researchers from Ruth Lanius's team suggest measurable changes in patterns of brain connectivity following DBR, including changes involving networks associated with bodily experience and self-referential processing during trauma recall.
These DBR-specific brain-imaging findings are exciting, but they should still be considered preliminary until the complete neuroimaging results have been published and peer reviewed.
Emerging research
Research into DBR is continuing, including further investigation of PTSD and emerging clinical research involving dissociation and depersonalisation.
Overall, the evidence for DBR is encouraging, particularly given the clinical improvements and low dropout reported in the initial PTSD trial. However, DBR does not yet have the extensive research base of longer-established trauma therapies. Larger controlled studies, independent replication, longer-term follow-up and publication of the full neuroimaging findings will give us a clearer understanding of how DBR works, who is most likely to benefit and how lasting its effects may be.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/20008066.2023.2240691?um
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40098781/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987719309673?via%3Dihub
Learn more
https://deepbrainreorienting.com/history-of-dbr/
https://deepbrainreorienting.com/hypothetical-basis/
https://deepbrainreorienting.com/dbr-theory-videos/