Shock and Terror: Tracking (Down) Their Persistent Clinical Effects Through DBR (HS Corrigan 052722)

Course overview

This workshop offers participants an opportunity to understand the key role of deep midbrain systems in traumatic experiences which have clinical consequences. There is an emphasis on attachment shock, which may be historic or recent, and early life adversity. A distinction between circuits for shock and circuits for affective and defensive responding underlies the clinical approach of Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR). DBR is a trauma memory processing modality that has developed from an understanding of stimulus-response sequences in the upper brainstem. Tracking these sequences, with the knowledge of how they occur physiologically, activates a healing process and, optimally, complete resolution of the clinical consequences of the traumatic experiences. DBR can also be useful when attachment urges are conflicted because of adverse experiences. For example, when the capacity to orient toward connection simultaneously triggers the impulse to move away, often with negative affects emerging, there can be a deeply conflicted urge to connect with significant others.