Anxiety and depression are considered ‘common’ mental health issues and can vary from being ‘mild’ to extremely debilitating. We live in a world that urges us to be resilient, to “snap out of it,” and to find solutions to the issues that may be contributing – whether the anxiety and depression are partly fuelled by chemical imbalances or by challenging life circumstances. Frequently, many are sent from the offices of their medical practitioners, having had only a brief conversation, accompanied by a ‘label’ and a prescription for medication. While these may be necessary and helpful, at times, they can leave people feeling unheard, unseen and as if bandages have been applied to a wound that continues to bleed from the inside.
What if the sudden waking with anxiety in the middle of the night, the looming sense of dread, the moments of nausea or the crushing fatigue are not recent and temporary disruptions in our brain chemistry, but perfectly logical, protective responses to a past that never truly passed?
There can be a profound and often overlooked connection between trauma and the often persistent emotionally distressing landscape of anxiety and depression. It is possible that we don’t have recollection of key events, or that things have been laid down in our nervous systems before we even had words or have developed episodic memory. Understanding the possible link to things that are past having continuing effect on the present, is not about seeking blame, but more about discovering the true path to healing—a path rooted in compassion, understanding, and the revolutionary work of reorienting the deep brain.
Anxiety and depression may only be treated as a ‘current-day’ issue within some services. Where we have experienced early life wounding, or endured a history of neglect or chronic absence or where other trauma has occurred, this perspective is incomplete, and frequently leads to treatments being recommended and sought that manage the presenting symptoms without even considering nor ever addressing any underlying root causes. When treatments are offered, one favoured approach is CBT – described usually as a ‘top down’ approach – meaning that if we work on changing our thoughts and behavours, the problem will resolve. While this can be helpful, if such approaches have not provided lasting relief, and the problem keeps returning, it is often a signal of the distress being locked deeper than conscious thought or emotion – and the deeper issues have yet to be attended to. Sadly the apparent failure of treatments can render people feeling more wretched or hopeless, as if they have failed themselves.
Trauma is best understood as experience on a continuum — whether a single catastrophic event, or the corrosive stress of chronic neglect and absence, or the sometimes nuanced, subtle but steady invalidation of early relationships. Even thinking about ‘events’ can miss what trauma can mean. The absence of something is harder to capture than the discrete narrative events that are often better remembered, even where such absences have been repetitive. Significantly, the experience of trauma is effectively a dictate for our unfolding developmental trajectory – a recipe and neuro-biological instruction set. Trauma, early life shock and wounding can effectively rewrite the ‘rules’ of the nervous system, turning the body’s safety and protection mechanisms into instruments of self-erosion and persecution.
When something shocking, horrifying, threatening or potentially dangerous occurs, the brain responds by prioritising our survival. It does this in such a way that it is responding before we have conscious awareness – the shock arises from nuclei deep in the brainstem and happens in milliseconds – often we may not even register the cascade of shock features coursing through the body other than a momentary or fleeting sense of something registering as ‘not right’. Thereafter we may very quickly become hijacked by the affect – the panic, terror, fear, rage or shame and corresponding defensive urges – wanting to flee or hide for example.
Where this happens regularly, our nervous system can become ‘sensitised’ and we may become hypervigilant, learning to expect danger, to trust no one, or to be left ruminating and playing things over and over in our minds. The body becomes primed for our nervous system to respond and while this can happen in many ways, states that are commonly recognised in anxiety and depression are those of feeling hyper-aroused – as if constantly ready for battle, or the hypo-arousal where the body shut down to conserve energy and minimise pain. Our nervous system responses are more than two dimensional and can be much more complex – so we can be a mixture of states – for example, where someone appears calm, but may in fact be very aroused on the inside.
This recognition is vitally important, as it helps us to instantly appreciate ‘symptoms’ not as a sign of something or someone being broken, but as a signal, as an echo from within, that someone may be operating under an outdated, but well-intended mandate for survival which is unresolved and still trapped inside.
To truly grasp the personal nature of this struggle, we must endeavour to understand where and how trauma resides within us. It doesn’t sit neatly in the part of the brain that holds day-to-day narrative(the cortex) and that handles factual history (“It happened on Tuesday”). Instead, it gets trapped in the deeper, non-verbal, and highly reactive structures: the limbic system and the brainstem.
Many people who have anxiety and depression (and potentially trauma histories as well), have dedicated years to treatments that focus on challenging negative thoughts or processing emotions through talking. While understanding and insight may be acquired, and often some relief as a result, so often, the core of the anxiety or depression rumbles on, and can soon be reactivated when confronted by the next life challenge that comes along. There may be several reasons for this, including:
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Pre Conscious Awareness : Many approaches are based in models of the triune brain and entail cognitive and emotional processing that primarily engage the upper cortex—the thinking and doing brain – the information that we have largely stored and have ready access to. However, the initial shock response and subsequent survival responses (where the body first responds to what is happening and the roots of how trauma is held) is housed deeper in the midbrain and brainstem responses – the shock responses and initial defensive responses that can be pre-verbal, pre-affective – and pre-conscious awareness. In the present, we may know that we are safe and can (try) to convince ourselves of this through the many strategies and techniques we are taught , for example, but despite these, our body can continue to feel unsafe, we can continue to hold ourself in mind with distaste or – the activation being driven from the deeper part of our brain and tricky to manage through ‘top down’ control. that you are safe, or , but the deeper survival brain operates on sensation and reflex, not reason.
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The ‘Body Holds the Score’: is the name of a seminal text on trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, where he helps us to understand the ways in which trauma can like trapped energy and sensation held in the body (armouring, tension, shallow breathing, chronic bracing). In order to dissipate and release this energy, working in ways that primarily engage upper cortical functioning, is simply not going to be enough. We need to get into the origins of what arises in response to traumatic responding – to slow the sequence down so that we can pick up on the underlying shock, to give this space to dissipate, so that we can reorient to and process the underlying core pain that drives the affective and defence responses. No amount of talking alone can release all that the body holds.
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The Need for “Bottom-Up” Processing: Most therapies are “top-down” (thought to feeling to body). When trauma is the root, “bottom-up” approaches that are theoretically and practically base in addressing the deep brain first, to clear shock, to reorient to what has hitherto been unbearable – the core pain, that fuels the affective and defensive responses. Unprocessed shock and the impacts of this can sensitise the system and bring rise to all sorts of symptoms, including those of generalised anxiety and depression. Processing at this deeper level can in turn support what comes after to clear more readily.
Not all therapies will work for everyone, and therapies that haven’t worked is not your fault; it may simply be that a deeper approach is needed.
Given that the brains very first response to threat arise in the deepest parts of the brain—trauma treatment must be capable of reaching this primordial core. This is where Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) offers a truly thought-provoking and revolutionary approach.
Unlike therapies that primarily focus on cognitive content (thoughts), emotional catharsis (feelings), or completion of thwarted or incomplete behavioural responses, DBR uniquely first targets the initial shock response prior to then processing the core pain and the consequent affective and defensive responding. This is proving to have remarkable effects – and all coming from our own innate healing capacity. When the conditions are right to support this, and the work approached in a very specific way, there is the potential for recovery and restoration – even where things have been unresolved, trapped for many decades and not been able to be touched by other approaches. There is hope.
The illumination of DBR lies in its understanding that true, lasting regulation of anxiety and depression requires addressing the deepest core of the nervous system’s reactivity, not just the thoughts and feelings it produces. By reorienting the deep brain to be able to ‘turn towards’ what was once necessary to ‘turn away’ from, DBR seeks to truly dissolve the outdated survival instructions, allowing us to be able to inhabit and embody the present moment without the constant, haunting echo of the past dictating day to day living.
The journey from trauma-rooted anxiety and depression is rarely a linear march toward a cured state; it is a profound and personal process of integration and reclamation.
Our anxiety is our body loudly proclaiming it needs for safety, depression our body exhaustedly begging for rest and protection. When we are able to understand more about how the brain has initially served to protect us, to enable us to get through, and to begin to reorient towards what is underlying what is manifest through the myriad of symptoms, you begin to heal not just the symptoms, but the true core of the self.
While the path can be challenging, DBR has been developed to be as least overwhelming as is possible, and the reward can be the profound and quiet dynamic freedom of more ease, more spaciousness, more vitality, and reconnection with the true core of self as it emerges from the shadows of the past.
For further information:
Contact Me – DBR Therapy and Consultation
Deep Brain Reorienting – Blog Post
Deep Brain Reorienting – About DBR – Official DBR Website
Deep Brain Reorienting – Therapists Directory
Deep Brain Reorienting – Training for Professionals
