The names of the modalities I use can make them sound more intimidating than they are. Let me translate.
TRE stands for Trauma Release Exercises. It's a sequence of simple exercises that activate the body's natural tremoring mechanism. Animals shake after a threatening experience to discharge stress. Humans do too, naturally, but we've been taught to suppress it. TRE is a way of letting that happen again on purpose.
If that sounds strange, it is worth knowing that you have almost certainly done it already. The shaking after a near miss in the car. The legs that go after you have carried something heavy and frightening. The teeth that chatter when you are not actually cold. The body has always had this. What it has not had, for most of us, is permission and a quiet room.
Brainspotting works on the principle that where you look affects how you feel, and that particular eye positions bring up particular material. It reaches places that talking doesn't always reach.
That sounds unlikely until you notice how much of it you do without thinking. People look away to remember and look down to admit something. You will have watched somebody's eyes go to a particular spot on the wall just before they say the true thing. Brainspotting takes that and slows it down, and instead of looking away from the difficult place, you stay with it for a while.
Flash EMDR is a newer protocol, EMDR adapted to be gentler and faster. It works by holding a positive focus alongside the difficult memory, so the charge on it can settle without you having to go back through the whole thing.
That last clause is the part that matters most to people, and it is usually the reason they ask about it. A lot of what stops someone starting this work is the belief that they will have to describe the worst thing in detail to a stranger before anything can change.
All 3 work at the level of the body rather than the level of the story. All 3 are gentle. And all 3 work at the level where the pattern actually sits.
Which raises the obvious question: why would the body level do anything that 10 years of thinking about it has not done.
The short answer is that understanding and settling are 2 different jobs. Most people arrive at this work already able to explain themselves extremely well. They know which year it started, they know who did what, they can describe the pattern in a paragraph. And it is all still happening. Insight is genuinely valuable and it is not the same as the thing being over.
The pattern is held in the body as a readiness. A readiness does not respond to an argument. It responds to being allowed to finish.
What people expect, before they begin, is something dramatic. They have usually seen something on the internet and arrived braced for a catharsis.
What actually happens is quieter than that, and the most common thing people say afterwards is some version of is that it. A bit of shaking, or a long stretch of looking at a point on the wall, or 40 minutes of lying still. Nothing cinematic. Then they drive home and sleep for 9 hours.
The second most common thing people say is that they feel slightly odd for a day or 2 afterwards. Tired, or unusually hungry, or oddly flat, or lighter in a way they cannot place. That settling takes its own time and it is not a sign that something has gone wrong.
It is also worth saying what these are not.
They are not a replacement for therapy, and plenty of people do both. They are not a method for extracting a story out of you. And they are not something anyone does to you while you lie there passively. You stay in charge of how far anything goes, and stopping is always available, which is the thing that makes it possible to go anywhere at all.
As for which one suits which problem, that is less of a decision than people think. In practice it is rarely a matter of picking a technique off a list in advance. It depends on what is actually in the room on the day, and it changes between one session and the next.
If you want a rough shape, though: when the problem is mostly in the body and hard to put into words, a tight chest, a jaw, a stomach that knows before you do, the tremoring work tends to be the way in. When there is a specific thing and looking at it is unbearable, the gentler protocols are there for exactly that. And when something is clearly there but you cannot find the edges of it, the eye position work has a way of locating it.
What I would say to anyone weighing this up is that the deciding is usually the hardest part. The work itself is dull in the best way. You will spend most of it lying on a floor, breathing, with somebody keeping an eye on you, and nothing will be asked of you that you have not agreed to.
More like this
Trauma Release Exercises, what they are, what they cost, and why I trained in them.
Nervous system 101, everything you weren't taught that explains everything.
If you want to know which one might suit you, write to me at anna@annalouoflondon.com or message me on https://wa.me/447738470156. We start with whatever is going on for you.