There are many who claim that “their” therapy is fresh, new, and totally unlike anything that has gone before it. A brief investigation, though, usually reveals it to be an evident derivative of one of the many existing therapy models. It might be wearing a different hat and coat, but the underwear is still the same.
BWRT (BrainWorking Recursive Therapy), though, is different. For a start, it doesn’t rely on the practitioner’s intuitive or imaginative abilities, therefore removing one of the most wildly variable components of most other therapies. It also doesn’t rely on the client “baring their soul” to the practitioner, rooting around in childhood memories, “reliving” some trauma or other, or doing anything remotely similar. It works to a specific scientific structure that gets directly into the part of the psyche from where the problem originates and uses the client’s own individual thought processes to resolve the issue from the inside out, rather than from the outside in as most therapies do. This is what makes BWRT so speedy and efficient.
So, what’s the secret? It all comes down to a part of the brain called the “lizard brain”. It’s at the base of the skull and is the oldest part of the brain, going back some 600 million years or so to the earliest sentient creatures. It had to do everything for those early animals, including controlling eating, sleeping, moving, breathing, breeding – and just surviving. That part of the brain still exists in us today and remains the first responder to every single stimulus that life presents, learning patterns of behaviour that become automatic if they’re repeated often enough. If somebody throws something at you, you instinctively try to dodge it or catch it, depending on what it is and how hard it was thrown. You don’t think about it and decide – you just do it. You could perhaps resist the urge to dodge or catch but you couldn’t stop the urge from occurring in the first place.
And now we’re getting to where BWRT comes into all this. That lizard brain is invisible to your conscious mind and might even be what is often referred to as “the subconscious”. And because it’s invisible, by the time you know what it’s up to, it’s a done deal; it’s already happened and can’t be “unhappened”. The thing is, it never forgets a single event that was in any way important. If you learned that spiders were scary things because they made mum scream blue murder, then spiders might very well be scary things for ever as far as your mind is concerned. Or at least until something happens – therapy perhaps – that proves otherwise. Once that part of the brain has taken an idea on board, it will hang on to it like mad until something better comes along.
Only, you won’t know why it’s doing that. So you might be terrified of spiders, without the remotest idea why, because you probably wouldn’t connect mum’s screaming fits with it. You might even decide it just “runs in the family”. Perhaps you are uneasy in social gatherings or hate driving on a motorway. Maybe the thought of complaining gives you palpitations or you feel as if you might die if you have to give a talk in public. Or it might even be that you just find yourself almost crippled with anxiety sometimes. You have no idea why you feel like that – but that lizard brain does.
And this is “BWRT Country”. BWRT is the only therapy in the world that seeks to work directly with that “early responder”, disarming those neural pathways that would normally fire up panic, anxiety, nausea, or whatever. Spiders can become boring, driving a pleasure, complaining easy, and giving a talk in public an exciting opportunity. And anxiety just melts away. As to how that happens, BWRT exploits the discovery that we can access that gap between the lizard brain starting to do its thing and you realising it’s done it. It creates a kind of pause in the proceedings while the brain waits for the new information, and that new information is how you would prefer to feel about any situation, instead of how you feel already.
It works, it’s safe, it’s reliable, and you can find out more about it.
Terence Watts is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.
