The Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM®) is a neuro-biologically based, affect-focused trauma treatment model which facilitates targeting of traumatic experiences by bridging the most primitive aspects of the person and their brain (midbrain/brainstem), to their purest, healthiest parts of the self. This bridge catalyzes the mind and body to access all forms of emotional trauma and stress by utilizing layers of internal resources such as attachment neurobiology, breathwork skills, somatic resources, our connection to the natural world, toning and sacred geometry, and one’s relationship with self, our intuition, and higher consciousness. The sequencing and combination of these resources, and the eye positions that anchor them, provide the opportunity for unbearable emotions and pain to be stepped into and felt fully while the client is fully present and aware moment to moment which changes how the memories affect the person.
The new perspective obtained when the pain is stepped into allows a new orienting towards the emotions that have stayed, perhaps under the surface, since the time of the traumas. This provides a mismatch experience where the neurobiological confusion that arises when the body activation of “The pain is so unbearable I can’t possibly step into it” occurs closely in time before resource-based processing that leads to “I’ve just stepped into the pain and it looks different now. I’ve survived and it is bearable”. The mismatch occurring when the trauma memory has been activated concurrently with an opposing tolerable experience of that memory promotes reconsolidation of the memory so that it is laid down again in the brain’s memory systems without the distress it previously carried. We argue that CRM® is a memory reconsolidation therapy in which the crucial mismatches happen at the brainstem, rather than the cortical, level.
CRM® uniquely accesses and clears the origin of the split second moments of intolerable affect that result in defense responses which lead to life-interfering symptoms, addictions, and disconnection from self and others. The potential for clearing neurobiological debris from the nervous system clears the way for positive neuro-plasticity and personal expansion whether that is seen as spiritual or otherwise, and which is separate from one’s history of pain and woundedness.
Work is done from the time of conception through the present and includes methods for working with generational trauma out of the realm of the client’s conscious knowledge. This is a heart-centered approach in which clients are guided to re-member who they really are and to learn to embody their true authentic self in their day to day lives.
Deep Brain Reorienting was developed by Dr. Frank Corrigan mainly for the treatment of attachment shock; but it can also be applied to the processing of other unresolved traumatic experiences.
Τhere are well-researched trauma psychotherapies which offer hope of full recovery as they are not dependent on top-down management of symptoms. These transformational approaches rely on the human brain having an inherent ability to find healing from emotional trauma when the memory of the initiating event is approached in a specific way.
However, it can often be difficult to get to the core of an adverse experience to liberate this healing flow. Sometimes it is difficult because returning to the event is emotionally overwhelming and there is a protective tendency to turn attention away from the memory as soon as possible. Sometimes there is a more evident dissociation from the present-day experience through numbing, blanking out, shutting down, or switching into a self-state like that which occurred at the time of the original trauma. Sometimes there has been a shock – before the emotions became intense – which replays so fast that it is easily missed during treatment. More commonly it is because the original experience that was so disturbing has been covered in layers of thoughts and feelings and distressing re-experiencing. It may also have been compounded by relational problems which themselves were precipitated by the continuing distress.
Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR)® aims to access the core of the traumatic experience in a way which tracks the original physiological sequence in the brainstem, the part of the brain which is rapidly online in situations of danger or attachment disruption. There may be threat and attachment wounding together when, for example, an experience of abandonment in infancy activates age-appropriate fears for survival.
The first structure capable of initiating a movement response is the Superior Colliculus (SC), which can direct eye movements. The SC also prepares the head for turning by bringing in tension in the muscles of the neck. This orienting tension, although often fleeting and unnoticed, is a major component of DBR. The focus in a DBR session on face and neck tension arising from turning attention to the memory of the traumatic event, or to whatever has been the present-day trigger, gives an anchor in the part of the memory sequence that occurred before the shock or emotional overwhelm that is leading to the continuing symptoms. Deepening awareness into this orienting tension provides an anchor for grounding in the present so that the mind is neither swept away by the high intensity emotions, nor diverted into a compartment holding a self-state frozen in time in which contact with the present is lost. Although the theory is simple the practice of DBR can be difficult. It does not work for everyone. Therapists who will find it most useful are those who use transformational trauma therapy approaches that are body-based, or “bottom-up”. These approaches do not rely on restructuring of thoughts or meanings at a complex verbal level for “top-down” control of symptoms, nor do they rely on exposure for establishing cortical control of fear responses.
In more complex forms of PTSD there may be more derealization and depersonalization, consistent with the brain’s attempts to avoid being overwhelmed by shock and horror, and by intense affects of fear, rage, grief, or shame. The more dissociative forms of PTSD occur when there has been early life attachment disruption preceding other traumatic experience. Dissociative Disorders may arise from early life separation experiences experienced as painful and unresolved even when there has been no later abuse. The pain of aloneness may be an internal driver of defensive and affective responses and may thus contribute to difficulties in regulating emotions. Any such difficulty may lead to efforts to control distress through substance abuse, eating disorders, or self-harm – or it may be expressed through troublesome anxiety or mood disturbance. It is not so much the clinical presentation which is important for DBR – but whether there is an underlying event or experience at the origin of the distress.
Taken from the official website of DBR®