Potential connections between Deep Brain Reorienting and the Alexander Technique
Our predictive brain is always trying to care for us. How can we care for it?
One of your brain’s biggest jobs is to sort through a lovely abundance of sensory information and choose what is most essential for your wellbeing. This goes relatively smoothly when you are within a “window of wellbeing:”
Wellbeing could be:
Learning and growth: Oooo! What’s that new thing over there? Let’s investigate.
Movement: Ooooo, that feels good! Let me do more of that.
Protection: Danger, danger! Stay quiet and still until you find out more – then we can figure out what to do next.
The common term in psychology for this window is “the window of tolerance.” Trauma is at the far end of a spectrum much bigger and more nuanced than this. Dissociative trauma and shock is at the far end of the far end. Shock is what a new trauma treatment process called Deep Brain Reorienting addresses.
DBR has been influenced by the Alexander Technique, which is why I’m excited to learn more. Therapists are starting to see the benefits of the AT for their clients in the special DBR healing process – and this makes me think they may see it’s benefits for themselves too.
I am not an expert in trauma, but I’ve had my healing work to do. Alexander work was, for me, the beginning of a healing arc, when combined with dance and improvised movement – which puts your brain in the present moment as a matter of course!
Embodied learning happens inside the window of wellbeing.
We can’t absorb new sensory experience or cognitive information unless we feel safe. Feeling loved is even better! You don’t need a scientific study to know that a child who feels loved learns more easily. The first Alexander touch I experienced was definitely a loving touch, even though I had never met that person and didn’t have a therapeutic relationship with them.
We don’t know exactly why or how our predictive brain gets us in so much trouble; but lots of research shows that it does.
Pain, addiction, trauma responses that happen when there is no “actual danger,” and even racism or other kinds of fear based biases are examples. One thing we do know is that it takes lots of energy to predict the future, so our bodies evolved to conserve that energy as much as possible.
“While most of the time the brain’s predictions are accurate guesses, the cost of efficiency is that the system jumps to conclusions based on partial information and is sometimes wrong.”
Now that Polyvagal Theory has been thoroughly disproven as an explanation for how our central nervous system gets hijacked by suffering, practitioners and researchers are going back to the drawing board looking for new explanations.
Deep Brain Reorienting is gaining attention.
This new method, developed by psychiatrist Frank Corrigan, has some science behind it. No one knows if the current explanations for how this method works are true, but reports of its efficacy abound. I’m curious, with a healthy dose of “wait and see” – as I am sure many people are about the AT, since it is in a similar category.
DBR is strongly influenced, in its current form, by the Alexander Technique. From the reading I’ve done so far, it also relies on the model of the predictive brain and the healing potential of focusing attention on sensory experience.
I have my hunches about why the AT might come in handy.
Let me stress that I am not trained to work with PTSD. I would never frame an Alexander lesson as a treatment for it either. If there is a benefit (which many of my students confirm!) it is indirect. Like many of the benefits my students report, they are to a large extent difficult to…predict. I think that’s a really good thing.
Intersection of the AT with neuroscience and Deep Brain Reorienting
The basic idea behind Deep Brain Reorienting is that both trauma and healing reside in the brainstem, which processes and responds to sensory information before it ever gets to the limbic or cortical areas of your brain.
As you probably know, I’ve created a practice called Cranial Nerve Sequencing which somatically explores each cranial nerve, thusly centering in the brainstem. That’s why it’s exciting to find out that Alexander Technique had a direct influence on the evolution of DBR.
Frank Corrigan began a collaboration around 2014 with Martin Warner. Martin has been teaching the AT since 2003, and like me, trained primarily with first, second, and third generation AT teachers. Martin is also a clinically trained psychotherapist.
Martin has created something called “AT Interweaves” and DBR therapists are using these interweaves in the DBR process. I’m very intrigued and reading Sensory Pathways to Healing Trauma, a book by the people researching DBR, as well as the study detailing research in process.
Frank Corrigan has also published his own book. I haven’t read that yet. But it’s all got me thinking about what makes the Alexander Technique unique.
The AT restores your relationship with sensory experience.
The Alexander Technique provides a specific intervention in the cycle of:
- Sensory experience
- Your interpretation of sensory experience
- Your active response to sensory experience
This might sound vague and abstract – so I made this week’s video, which guides you through a short two step practice.
The Alexander Technique can restore your relationship with sensory experience, freeing you from tricky loops of habitual interpretation, and habitual responses to those habitual interpretations…and on and on and on.
This happens through a process that we call “inhibition.” Loosely translated, this word means suspending judgement or assessment of our experience, and potentially suspending corrective action. One thing that seems to emerge naturally from this state is better postural tone and a clear, organized relationship to gravity.
The trick is, at the level of our brainstem, we can’t always control corrective action.
It happens before our cortex can get a word in, depending on our window of wellbeing. You can, however, witness corrective action or re-action with curiosity rather than judgement.
You can just be with it.
I guide you through the following prompts in the video:
- Part 1: Sensory Awareness
- Prompt: “I am sensing and feeling.”
- Prompt: “and I don’t have to feel anything in particular.”
- Part 2: Thought Awareness
- Prompt: “I am thinking, I have thoughts.”
- Prompt: “and I don’t have to think anything in particular”
It’s worth watching, as there are non-verbal meanings, prosody, and cues that contribute nuance to the experience!
Sensory information (with one exception, smell) passes through your brainstem before being digested and responded to by your limbic system and cortex.
When you are in your window of wellbeing, there’s a little space to play in!
This quiet “non-doing” ground – ripe with potential discoveries – is what we explore in my open Cranial Nerve Sequencing class every Thursday. Go HERE to find out more. Monthly subscriptions are also available HERE.