Click on the image to watch this weeks video about the vestibuloccochlear nerve, your most ancient orienting system.

And a somatic practice for your vestibulocochlear nerve

I am currently in dialogue with small group of experienced therapists interested in the intersection of DBR and the Alexander Technique. The AT seems to help them, and their clients, move through the DBR process more easily.

DBR and AT are both powerful tools for restoring personal agency, emotional flow, and sensory integration. These things matter most to people who have lost them. (If you want to know more about what DBR actually is, check out this blog post about caring for our predictive brain, or recent research about PTSD and DBR.)

I’m an experiential learner, so I booked two DBR sessions to understand the process better. Without getting too personal, I would like to share the after-effect of these sessions, which is two-fold.

One benefit is a more stable, yet fluid relationship to my own emotional state.

After the sessions, I felt more emotionally integrated than before. I’m still more able to feel emotions as they occur, and less likely to censor them in conversation. I’m taking more risks with emotional honesty, and feeling more forward motion in relationships as a result.

The second benefit is more fluid “use” and a fading of habitual tension patterns.

My movement was easier and smoother in the days after sessions. My old habit of tucking my chin in, tightening my neck, and lifting my chest was gone.

Like, really gone. Not just on vacation. How could this be, since I did nothing to try and make myself feel better or “fix” it?

Could it be this old familiar habit was actually left over shock, and not learned behavior from 20 years studying ballet? This question of whether it’s possible to differentiate trauma/shock from learned bracing behavior is one of mutual interest in my working group.

My sessions began with choosing a particular stimulus in collaboration with the therapist that had a mild charge of shock for me.

We spent ample time sensing into any “orienting tension” in response to the stimuli. I was guided to slowly track the physical sensations underneath that tension, without trying to release or get rid of it. The protocol encourages avoiding the urge to move too much, cultivating a lively stillness akin to the Alexander principle of “inhibition.” 

This gentle approach allows emotional affect to surface on its own, if at all, supported by the therapist. Eventually, there may be some insight that emerges at the end of the session, but that is not imposed. It comes from you.

This is similar to an Alexander Technique lesson, it’s just that we use touch instead of words.

F.M. Alexander was deeply concerned with what he called “unduly excited fear reflexes.”

This phrase didn’t refer to regular old fear, something for which he saw as life-protecting and affirming. It described a kind of fear that didn’t seem to have any cause in the present moment, yet resulted in life-restricting tension.

Perhaps he recognized, through touch, how our predictive brain leads us astray. He called this “debauched kinesthesia,” in the sense that what felt right to the person was not actually healthy for them.

The AT does help people untangle ongoing perceptual distortions in a bottom up kind of way. Perhaps someday we will understand how to connect all the way through from bottom to top, from feeling to words.

We do know that if you tense yourself, you can un-tense yourself. A teacher can’t do that for you, but we can guide you to exercise your innate abilities.

Knowing that you have some agency in your body is simple but profoundly important for wellbeing.

Alexander Technique enhances a sense of agency through exploring a three-part loop:

1. Sensory experience (awareness)
2. Your interpretation of your sensory experience (which you suspend via “inhibition”)
3. Your active responses to sensory experience (by choosing to respond differently through “direction”)

‘If it is possible for feeling to become untrustworthy as a means of direction, it should also be possible to make it trustworthy again.’

• FM Alexander

In this AT process loop, we can exercise a deceptively small (yet mighty) bit of agency in response to fear, rigidity, and bracing.

Over time, this process restores a more accurate and nuanced sensory appreciation, which improves how we move.

Can the DBR process release deeper unconscious habitual fear and constrictions hidden underneath the conscious habits that AT teachers work with? Can the AT help DBR be less distressing and help people ease into and out of sessions better?

It’s possible to get a little stuck in the orienting tension; but conversely, it’s an important part of DBR that you don’t try to change that tension directly.

I know that the cognitive part of me would love to avoid feeling things it doesn’t like. Suspending associations and interpretations so the rest of me can process makes sense. I’m more practiced ins secretly releasing tension than the average person though. I wonder if this part of the work is difficult for people.

Both AT and DBR are, in my view, restoring flow between survival brain, emotional brain, and reflective brain structures. I think the territory in which they meet is fascinating.

Potential for future collaboration and learning

AT teachers and therapists both understand that people can (and often must) force themselves to cope. Being able to unwind coping mechanisms will always be needed. True agency arises when flow is restored between the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves.

Going through this process in the presence of another person that is co-regulating with you, rather than forcing the “right thing” to happen, seems to be a key component of effective therapy.

This excellent article explains why we don’t have good studies of most therapeutic modalities; and why CBT is both most studied and comes out looking the best. Most studies are designed to benefit our crazy health insurance system, not reveal the long term effects of each modality. There is currently only one published study of DBR, but more are in the works.

If you are a therapist interested in these topics, you might be interested in:

• Joining a small working group of DBR trained therapists who meet once a month to study the AT and discuss implications of that experience in their work. If so, email me at clare@claremaxwell.com.

• Joining my upcoming experiential course on the neuroanatomy of the cranial nerves, through which we orient ourselves in our world. Early bird special ends August 31. Watch this week’s video to get a taste of the course content, which includes 17 learning hours and one private session.