Healing Trauma in Minutes using ART with Brooke Bralove & Manon on The Healers Café

just change it a little bit, or, I would say the brain’s kind of lazy. It’s like, Eh, that’s not, I don’t really need to change it because it’s too similar to the other one,

Manon Bolliger  07:43

right? And then what happens is, let’s say there’s again, a touch, which would be an appropriate touch. What happens there’s the the body, forget all of the automatic sort of reflexes. It just doesn’t go there.

Brooke Bralove  08:02

That’s exactly right. So after AR t when there is a trigger, the person is likely to feel completely neutral,

Manon Bolliger  08:11

right?

Brooke Bralove  08:12

And they might be able to know that a week prior, they would have jumped, but they didn’t. And that’s the real knowing. I mean, I’ve had people who, you know, come in, really, just after one or two sessions, and they say, you know, it’s all gone. The triggers are all gone. And you’re really giving people, you know, a new lease on life, because it’s disrupting them now. And you know, with a RT, it doesn’t matter whether the trauma or the incident or what you’re processing happened yesterday or 45 years ago, it often has, especially if you’ve retold a trauma that has happened to you. You know, 30 years ago. I always say it’s like, you know, they are dug in those images, those neural pathways, and we’re basically saying, no, no, look over here. Let’s, let’s work on those new neural pathways. And it’s, it’s really just amazing what the brain can do to heal

Manon Bolliger  09:16

and so, so this is done with so an instance or a memory. Can it be used for pain? Out of curiosity?

Brooke Bralove  09:29

Absolutely. I mean, first of all, I do want to just say kind of a general, sort of here, some of the most common ways AR T is used. It’s used for PTSD, trauma, depression, anxiety, insomnia, ADHD, phobias, OCD, chronic pain, chronic illness, migraines, performance, anxiety, fear of flying, you name it. It. Works.

Manon Bolliger  10:00

Yeah, so. But why I was asking pain specifically is because the other ones I can tell, like, once there’s a story involved in it, or a belief or an opinion or whatever it is, then you know, it weighs on you, whichever way, right. But I mean, and pain, certainly their stories that can be developed about pain, so I can see in those cases, but the actual, you know, like, let’s say post like, neuralgic pain, which is usually triggered by something, otherwise it may be silent, so you’ve got the trigger. But is it? Is it the same like pathway to the brain? I mean, that’s what I’ve understood, but I just, I have a hard time fully getting that, yeah,

Brooke Bralove  10:53

I understand. So it does work exactly the same way. And AR T is very procedural. We have a very clear way to do it, and of course, it involves, you know, bringing in your own flair, but it really does follow very sort of simple steps. And so let’s take someone who has, you know, chronic back pain. We will do a session simply on what their beliefs are about it, as you said, we could do something around that it might be the most amazing way that I see chronic pain get worked through is that we bring up the negative sensations while they’re sitting there, you know? And they’ll say, Yeah, you know, my lower back hurts. And then we ask the brain to show them the very first time, or a much earlier time, where they felt those sensations. And what’s so beautiful is, again, when you pair it with eye movements, the brain can come up with something often in like 10 seconds,

Manon Bolliger  12:06

especially

Brooke Bralove  12:07

when you don’t go thinking about it. And so people will say, you know, oh, my God. I don’t know why, but you know, I’m thinking about this time that, you know, my mom yelled at me because I, you know, didn’t clear the table correctly. And you know, it’s something that they have zero idea that is connected to their pain. And so then you heal that up, you update the brain to say that’s not going on. You have them rewrite that, and their back pain won’t go away, and it literally happens in the session.

Manon Bolliger  12:45

Wow, I’d love to witness that, yeah.

Brooke Bralove  12:52

Another good example is the way, you know, let’s take that same issue, chronic back pain. Usually they have years and years of going to doctors not being believed. So the medical trauma associated with either chronic illness or chronic pain almost always has to be processed, especially around things like Ehlers, Danlos Syndrome or pots or MECFS that you know

Manon Bolliger  13:21

exactly

Brooke Bralove  13:23

where people, really, you know, have made, been made to feel crazy, and again, we have to go through the medical trauma, but we also try to find an earlier time where it started, and I would say about eight out of 10 times that actually exists, or we have them process, you know, a very typical day of just living with chronic back pain. So they would just see themselves on a typical day, you know, they wake up and their back is sore, and then they have trouble walking, and then, you know, they can’t sit for too long at lunch. And, you know, and we just have them see that whole thing, because that’s their experience.

Manon Bolliger  14:04

And

Brooke Bralove  14:05

again, then they change that typical day into clearly a day where they are, you know, moving and proven and beyond functional, flying, jumping, running, you know, living their best life. And then we store that in the brain,

Manon Bolliger  14:22

okay? And when you store that is there, like, because you have the eye movement, how do you store it? How do you get the brain to go, Okay, I’m ready now, like, I know there’s methods where, you know, you can go up to a certain emotion and then you can, you know, put it in your finger or your knuckle, I mean, whatever. There’s, like, all kinds of, what is the method here that seems to be, and you

Brooke Bralove  14:50

just, you just, literally invite the brain to change it. And the brain, again, knows how there’s nothing

Manon Bolliger  14:57

there’s

Brooke Bralove  14:58

actually nothing magical. There’s no. Trick there. You just leave space for them to come up with it. Now, every once in a while, they’ll need to do a couple versions, like they’ll do one, and they’ll be like, That’s not so great. And then we know, because they’re not having positive sensations in their body. But I always say the most, the most amazing moment in an art session is when someone is imagining, you know, the way they wish something had happened, or pain free living, and you all of a sudden see this beautiful smile. And then I always smile, because I think to myself, got them no, they’re in, they’re in. And it’s really beautiful to watch. And in fact, I’ve actually taken pictures of someone when I do it virtually, where I’m showing them when they’re in a, not you know, when they’re in a dysregulated place. And then I take a picture of them at the end, and I show them, and they are kind of amazed. It’s a very serene, you know, look that comes over.

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Manon Bolliger  17:18

So what got you well, how did you find out about this? Or how did you end up adopting this practice?

Brooke Bralove  17:26

Yeah, so I came by it as a client. I went through a very traumatic breakup in 2017 and I had my regular talk therapy. I doubled up on that. I tried, you know, yoga, therapy and all sorts of things, and nothing could move this tremendous grief, nothing. And I really was kind of at my wit’s end. And, you know, one person mentioned this thing. I had never heard of it. And I went and I did two sessions of a RT, and I felt completely neutral about the breakup. So from, you know, intrusive images, intrusive replaying words and things that he had said to me over and over, they just went to kind of a nothingness, like no attachment. So I can tell you, you know, in AR t we say, keep the knowledge, lose the pain. You, of course, would never want to forget any facts of your life. That’s important, but what you don’t need are the images, the beliefs about it and the way it gets stuck in your body. You don’t need that that does not serve you anymore. So we’re updating the brain

Manon Bolliger  18:42

to

Brooke Bralove  18:42

say that’s not happening anymore. You’re good.

Manon Bolliger  18:46

Yeah, very interesting. Yeah. Because do you know a little bit about Bowen therapy?

Brooke Bralove  18:52

I don’t know very much

Manon Bolliger  18:53

about

Manon Bolliger  18:54

1. I won’t, it’s your interview, but I’ll just give you this much because it a lot of people learn that to deal with pain or to help people with pain. And, you know, and and there’s the sort of physical way of looking at pain, you know, frozen shoulder sciatica, all those kinds of things, low back pain, and most people will benefit from it, like, you know, 85% plus between three and five visits. And then there’s some practitioners. And I train people in this in my school and Bowen college that that see it sort of a little bit larger, and they look at it not as 3d pain. But, you know, we got a 5d universe here, and maybe there’s more going on, and there’s trauma and all this stuff, and without again, without doing any pillow throwing or really reliving, there’s none of that you. It, the body releases memories. That is, I believe it has got caught in its tissues. It’s kind of, it’s there, right anyway, so that’s kind of a lot of the audience listening to this. That’s their background as well, or they’ve experienced it. And, you know, I’ve, it’s funny, because I have come across a RT many times. I’ve never actually experienced it, and I don’t have a direct reason, but I’m just curious. There’s people have been listening to my podcast. I’ve been following my dear partner, who’s it’s been two years now, he’s had post herpetic neuralgia, and it’s like in the right ear, around the right ear shoots down. But he’s a very graphic kind of guy. His mind like, you know, he he imagines that he’s got, like, all this metal twisting, he’s got, like, so much to work with. And I’m thinking, you know, it’s getting worse, not better. And many you know, I’ve tried with him. I mean, for him, many, many therapies, I’ve had success in my practice with this. We can’t touch him. It doesn’t work. Is this, and do you have experience with that?

Brooke Bralove  21:31

Well, I think what, what I think is so important that you talked about is that, you know, he is coming up with imagery and metaphors around it. And in AR t we use metaphors all the time.

Manon Bolliger  21:47

And

Brooke Bralove  21:47

so what one of the ways to deal with pain is to put your pain into a picture, into an image, and then you can erase the image, or you can find a solution to the problem that the image, you know represents. So sometimes we we don’t work on just a memory. We change something and we put it into something like this, feels like someone is squashing my ear. Or sometimes people will say, it feels like an elephant is on my chest,

Manon Bolliger  22:23

right? And

Brooke Bralove  22:25

then we have them metaphorically solve the problem. So maybe they go and get the circus tamer who says, you know, let’s bring the elephant, let’s get the elephant off. And usually just by simply them finding the solution to that their pain can lift. And we we cement everything by thinking having them imagine some time in the future,

Manon Bolliger  22:50

right?

Brooke Bralove  22:51

They might be like, maybe the next time he was in a place that was loud, a loud restaurant, if you know. And we have them practice that. And if negative sensations show up in the body, we process those out, and we keep doing it until they’re no negative sensations. So then they leave with the belief that they’re going to be fine, because they saw it in their mind’s eye,

Manon Bolliger  23:16

right, right? And is it a bit like swapping pictures and in the end, I mean, you’ve got this, yeah, so you’re working through a metaphor to make sense. So maybe it’s like winding the other way, and somebody’s pulling out all these electrodes,

Brooke Bralove  23:32

yeah,

Manon Bolliger  23:34

he’s not being zapped from wherever. And then it’s like, and then it’s like having a beautiful day where the wind is blowing and and that’s the image that kind of replaces. So you can frame it kind of thing, right?

Brooke Bralove  23:50

Absolutely. And we often work in snapshots as well. So we might look for a snapshot that’s stuck from a trauma,

Manon Bolliger  23:58

right?

Brooke Bralove  23:59

And you again, erase it and replace it, just like you said, erase and, you know, replace. And what’s amazing is sometimes someone will be working, they’ll say, oh, yeah, I have two snapshots. You know that I have to process. You process out the first one, this happened today, and the person has no idea what the second one was. They cannot think of it. I have a client where we’ve had three AR T sessions, and every single time she’s forgotten what one of her snapshots was when she had had it right there less than two minutes before.

Manon Bolliger  24:35

Wow. Again,

Brooke Bralove  24:36

the brain wants to heal. It’s ready.

Manon Bolliger  24:38

You just gotta

Brooke Bralove  24:39

give it. Gotta give it the right circumstances to do what it naturally knows how to do.

Manon Bolliger  24:45

Yeah, and I think, you know, people, maybe this is just a guess, but over, over qualify the brain. I mean, in the wrong way, in saying that, Oh, it’s, you know, you can’t treat it. Like, it’s just knows what to do, like, it’s so simple, you know? It’s like, oh, it’s complicated. There’s all these neurotransmitters. And you know, it’s like, no, no, you know, like the rest of our body acts normal. Why couldn’t our brain, right? I mean, you know, so it’s very interesting, yeah, so give us, maybe we don’t have lots of time, we’re quite close to them, but maybe, like, one or two stories that really just, you know, warmed your heart.

Brooke Bralove  25:32

Well, there’s so many, it’s really hard. But I think if we’re going to try to stay, you know, with the chronic pain or chronic illness, I had a woman come in, and she’d had toe pain for just about two years after, you know, she she broke her toe, you know, when she was at home one day, and no matter what she did, it wouldn’t get better. And I said, Well, do you want to try to work on it? And she said, I mean, sure. You know, she had no belief it would work, and we had her process the incident that she had just thought was just, you know, whoops, I stubbed my toe and broke it, and it turned out that it was actually during an argument with her husband. And so we needed to process out the emotion, the images around the, you know, little trauma of the argument,

Manon Bolliger  26:28

right? Yeah,

Brooke Bralove  26:30

and her toe pain went away 100% in the session and didn’t come back. I think that was three years ago. She’s having a little foot pain, but still, it’s the toes, not the problem, and something like that was great, but I’ve had, you know, what I really love is being able to help people connect to something they thought was unrelated.

Manon Bolliger  26:58

Yeah, you

Brooke Bralove  26:59

know. And so look, I mean, spoiler alert, it’s often a very early message in a very early, you know, incident. It can often be though, you know, just sort of complex PTSD where maybe you felt criticized all the time by your, you know, father or mother or whatever, or you were bullied. And if you find pain, or you find something that’s usually bothering the person currently,

Manon Bolliger  27:30

you

Brooke Bralove  27:30

just keep asking the brain, kind of very open ended, you know, show me an earlier time where you had those sensations. So you’re not asking about a memory. You’re asking the body to remember the sensations, and that’s the link. And again, it’s profound,

Manon Bolliger  27:50

yeah. And does that work the same sensations, which I can totally get, because that’s the somatic imprint, right? But could it be the same emotion like in other words, let’s say circumstantially, okay, the feeling in the moment where this appeared

Brooke Bralove  28:12

Yes,

Manon Bolliger  28:13

was like not being hurt, and then

Brooke Bralove  28:16

yes. So let’s say yeah. So let’s say someone is feeling very helpless currently, something’s going on, and, you know, they just feel very helpless, like they, you know, can’t help their son who’s having trouble in college. And they’re just really stuck in this feeling of helplessness. They bring up the sensations, you know, tight chest, nauseated stomach, whatever it is. And then again, you have the brain show you a time where you felt those sensations, and it usually is around an incident that made them feel helpless. So yes, it does the often the feelings are the same,

Manon Bolliger  28:58

right?

Brooke Bralove  28:58

But they just can’t connect them when they’re just sitting around, you know, talking ad nauseum about them in long term psychotherapy.

Manon Bolliger  29:06

No, that I’ve noticed. I mean, when I started bone therapy, like 35 years ago, I guess a long time ago, that’s the people I impacted the most, because it’s like, and many of the therapists were asking me, like, what do you what do you do exactly? Because, like, they’re not needing to talk about their stuff anymore, and it’s like, was that good or is that bad? No, no, it’s good because they’re fine. It’s very interesting how it really has evolved even our way in psychology to think about all this. It was quite amazing. Oh,

Brooke Bralove  29:48

yeah. I mean, I, you know, I did my training, you know, 2223 years ago, and I’ve been a long term, you know, psychotherapist. I. Good, dynamic psychotherapist. I believe in it 100% but not for things that are inherently stuck. So I believe in the relationship of, you know, a therapist and a client and all I mean, I believe in a lot of it, but what I find is when something, when talk Therapy or CBT or, you know, ERP, are not touching something, then you don’t need to talk about it. You need to get it out of your body and out of your brain and change it. Change it so you can live with that

Manon Bolliger  30:33

exactly.

Brooke Bralove  30:34

And people will not be able to see what happened. They only see the new scene they’ve created, and you ask them, and they’ll say, wait, I I can’t find it. Or, you know, I was working with someone once, and again, it was someone who had been raped and she was processing. And literally, a minute later, she goes, I can’t see him. He’s not even in the room. Where did he go? And I said, your brain just got rid of him. You don’t need him there anymore. He can’t hurt you. And it was amazing. She was just blown away.

Manon Bolliger  31:09

Yeah, and it’s interesting, because that’s like, that’s the reality, you know, right now in the present, he is not there, right? But it’s, it’s amazing how much one can get attached to the stories, right?

Brooke Bralove  31:23

Well, and I really do. I do believe that the body is always trying to protect us, and so we do have to do a lot of work around safety, you know, to reassure the body. Thank you so much for warning me all these years to keep I’m good now you can get, you know, that’s ifs work art is trying to keep you safe. You can just ask it to just move to the back seat. It can’t drive anymore. It’s lost that privilege,

Manon Bolliger  31:53

yeah,

Brooke Bralove  31:54

because it doesn’t

Manon Bolliger  31:54

need to. No, exactly. Okay. Well anyway, this was great. This is very informative and very detailed for you know, the people that I know are listening to this, so it’s been wonderful. So thank you very much. How do people get in touch with you? And

Brooke Bralove  32:12

yeah, they can find me at Brooke braylove.com and I’m on Instagram and Facebook at Brooke Bray love psychotherapy.

ENDING: 

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