Episode 51: Overcoming Trauma with Accelerated Resolution Therapy: Brooke Bralove, LCSW-C

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SPEAKERS: Elizabeth Baer, Brooke Bralove, LCSW-C

Brooke:

When the brain is so high functioning and when we are go go go and we get things done and we’re on top of things, I think the body is the only place the trauma can go. It’s the only place where it will allow it to go because we’re so high functioning. We’re not going to slow down, we’re gonna go to work, we’re gonna feed the kids, we’re gonna do what we need to do but the body keeps reminding us that there’s a cost to all of that and that there’s a cost to trauma.

Dr. Wong:

Today, we are bringing you a very special episode with a guest host, Liz Baer, acupuncturist and co-founder of Capital Integrative Health. I am Dr. Andrew Wong, the host of this podcast and co-founder of capital Integrative Health. This podcast is dedicated to transforming the consciousness around what it means to be healthy and understanding the root causes of both disease and wellness. We are expanding our podcast to include conversations that explore into all facets of the mind, body, and spirit. Here is Liz Baer to tell you more about today’s episode with Brooke Bralove on trauma and Accelerated Resolution Therapy.

Liz:

Hi everyone. I’m Liz Baer and I’m excited to bring to you this conversation with my friend and colleague, Brooke Bralove. Brooke is a local psychotherapist with over 18 years of experience, helping her patients to better understand themselves and cultivate the authentic life they’ve always dreamed about. She’s a certified Daring Way facilitator based on the research of Dr. Brene Brown and AASECT sex therapist and an Accelerated Resolution Therapy practitioner. This is an insightful conversation about trauma and how Brooke uses Accelerated Resolution Therapy also known as ART with her patients to see them transform the trauma in powerful efficient and enduring ways. We talk about why ART is different from other common therapies and why it’s an excellent option for those looking to rapidly transform their traumatic experiences. Before we jump in, a note about our content, this podcast includes general discussion around topics such as sexual abuse, eating disorders, and gun violence. This content may be difficult and we encourage you to take care of your safety and well-being. With that in mind, please enjoy our conversation.

Hi everyone. I’m excited to be here with Brooke today to share how she’s helping patients heal from trauma and other difficult-to-treat disorders but also because it’s a conversation between two old friends who’ve known each other since third grade.

Brooke:

Yes. Hi, Liz. I’m so happy to be here.

Liz:

I’m happy to be here with you, too, Brooke.

Brooke:

We’ve been friends for literally 40 years.

Liz:

Wow, that’s really hard to believe.

Brooke:

Yeah, I know. And we reconnect. We were close at different points and growing up.

Liz:

Yeah.

Brooke:

And then we reconnected when we were both pregnant with our firsts.

Liz:

Yeah. It makes me think about how we’ve been through a lot of pretty big life transitions together and, you know, our kids are exactly the same age and we got married almost around the same time.

Brooke:

Yeah.

Liz:

And then we found ourselves in the world of taking, well, taking care of people, supporting people really.

Brooke:

Yeah.

Liz:

On their pathway to feeling more whole and integrated as they walk through the world.

Brooke:

Yeah. Absolutely. It’s been really fun to see your journey and to have it, you know, kind of be parallel to mine in some ways, a little overlap.

Liz:

Yeah.

Brooke:

But obviously, both of us just focused on helping people heal emotionally and physically

Liz:

Yeah. And I think, too, you know, knowing you for so long, part of what’s been really beautiful about our relationship is that we do that with each other. And think we also really learn from one another about how to, you know, we get to apply what we’ve learned in the treatment room, and then also what we learn with being good friends to the work that we do, and then to our families and our other friends.

Brooke:

Yeah. I mean I absolutely adore you and our friendship and, you know, how intimate it can be and rewarding and we may not be in contact all the time or necessarily even completely regularly but when we connect, it is such a beautiful deep connection right away and I really love you for that.

Liz:

I love you too, Brooke. So thank you and thanks for being here and making time. I know you are really busy right now. You’ve got a lot going on and you’re learning a lot and you’re teaching a lot these days and I hope that at some point, we can have you back to talk about the other work that you’re doing. She’s doing work with some of Brene Brown’s trainings. There’s something called ‘The Daring Way’ or ‘Daring Greatly’, I think.

Brooke:

Yep. My two Daring Greatly women’s weekend intensives which is Brene Brown’s shame resilience curriculum which is super powerful work.

Liz:

Yeah, so at some point, it’ll be fun to have you come back and talk about that because that’s another topic that I think we can all relate to which is what it feels like to feel shame.

Brooke:

Yeah.

Liz:

And vulnerability.

Brooke:

And vulnerability and how hard those emotions can be for everyone.

Liz:

Yeah, for everybody. But today, we’re going to talk a little bit about trauma and before we get into that, Brooke, would you tell us a little bit about how you got into the world of Psychology and what led you here?

Brooke:

Sure, so I was always a sensitive kid, felt a lot of feelings, felt pretty deeply and I, you know, went to college and thought I would be doing something a little bit different and I was out for a couple of years. I worked in low-income housing, some race relations type of work, and then I decided that the way I really wanted to have an impact is on individuals. And so, I went to social work school, and then I came out of social work school and I did domestic violence work for two years which was really challenging and obviously introduced me to trauma in a big way and that complicated work, and then I’ve been in private practice for 18 years.

Liz:

Wow. So, you know, we talk about trauma. Trauma is such a popular word these days and people talk about, I mean, even just like the use of the word trigger. It’s like everywhere. It’s almost like slang at this point.

Brooke:

Yes.

Liz:

But for you, when you are sort of describing or helping patients understand what trauma is, how do you do that?

Brooke:

Yeah so I think trauma as you said is-and I hate using the word ‘overused’, so I don’t feel that that’s true but it is certainly everywhere, right? It is everywhere but I don’t actually think it’s overused. In fact,I think it’s been underused clinically in a lot of ways. So when I think about trauma, I think about people going through experiences in which they find that they are extremely overwhelme, fearful, feelings of helplessness and that can be anything, so I like to think about trauma in two ways which is there’s Big T trauma which most of us are familiar with—combat, sexual abuse, childhood abuse, car accident, death of a loved one— those big type of of things and we can usually spot those pretty quickly, but then the majority of the people I work with have little T trauma and that they can minimize, “Oh well, you know, I was neglected a little bit. My parents were a little bit out to lunch. I was picked up late every day from school”, things like that or “I had to listen to my parents fighting a lot but no no no I wasn’t scared that they would ever hurt me”, so they minimize that kind of trauma but trauma has lasting impact on the body and the brain and I really think that if we expand our definition we’re actually going to help more people so a traumatic response is any response that is overwhelming and feels like too much for the person to handle.

Liz:

That’s really helpful. I’ve thought in the past about trauma as being something where you really feel like your whole world is at risk. Is that part of it or does it not even have to be sort of that extreme?

Brooke:

Well, I think that’s a great point but I don’t think it has to be conscious.

Liz:

Okay.

Brooke:

So I am really interested in, you know, the body and the brain and that connection but I think it’s so important to ask people what is going on in your body or when you heard your parents fight, what did you notice in your body, so that, you know, the body keeps the score, right?

Liz:

Yeah.

Brooke:

It’s a really great trauma book.

Liz:

Yeah.

Brooke:

But it does. it holds onto memories inside ourselves, and so we need to actually work at the brain level and the body level to create healing change for people.

Liz:

Wow, yeah. And, you know, you think that that’s part of why sometimes it surprises people when they have reactions to things?

Brooke:

Absolutely.

Liz:

Right.

Brooke:

I mean a great thing is, “Oh my God. Why did I respond that way? I feel like I overreacted to that”. I think people often can get at their traumas by looking at whether their response fits with, you know, the incident that just occurred and oftentimes, if it’s, you know, a huge response, we can find a history there.

Liz:

Yeah.Is there a way you could tell us about what you see clinically in terms of the kinds of responses that people have in their body when they are encountering either like a traumatic memory or it’s hitting one of these like deep spots in them that sort of is encompassed by the little tea dramas.

Brooke:

Sure, so of course, we’ve all heard about fight, flight, or freeze.

Liz:

Yeah.

Brooke:

We’ve also added now ‘fawn’ which is kind of people-pleasing behavior and really trying to make everything better. I think what a lot of women can relate to unfortunately in our society, so we are talking about that fight, flight, or freeze, okay, response in simple terms but I also see it show up in terms of body aches, headaches, chronic fatigue. It can show up in terms of hypervigilant behavior, always feeling on guard, being kind of at an agitation. It definitely shows up as post-traumatic stress disorder–having flashbacks, having sensations, you know, hearing loud noises, and really responding in a fearful way if you had some trauma that involved a loud noise– those kinds of things but definitely OCD behaviors as well. It kind of runs the whole gamut. It’s a lot of different things.

Liz:

Yeah. I think it’s really relevant to our patients here at CIH because, you know, and I don’t think that we’ve ever done any kind of poll but I think at some point, you know, Jen and I were talking about doing some sort of poll, whether it’s like an ACEs poll or some other kind of thing to get a real sense of what our population looks like in terms of their childhood experiences and their, you know, little T and Big T trauma experiences because so many folks who come here are coming in with mysterious illness.

Brooke:

Yes.

Liz:

And everybody is pretty high functioning. I mean we live in DC and DC is a very high-functioning city. We’re really good at compartmentalizing and, you know, just keep going, and so, you know, it may be too that even because of that, it’s showing this stuff is leaking out into our body in ways that, you know, could be even like particular to this area. I have no idea but. you know, I wonder about that.

Brooke:

Yeah. I don’t know if it’s particular to DC but I definitely definitely think that when the brain is so high functioning and when we are go go go and we get things done and we’re on top of things, I think the body is the only place the trauma can go. It’s the only place where we’ll allow it to go because we’re so high functioning. We’re not going to slow down, we’re going to go to work, we’re gonna feed the kids, we’re gonna do what we need to do but the body keeps reminding us that there’s a cost to all of that and that there’s a cost to trauma.

Liz:

Yeah. And our mind, you know, again high functioning people, we’re pretty good at putting things in the box and rationalizing our way out of like, “Oh, that wasn’t. I can see the big picture. That wasn’t really that big of a deal”, or whatever.

Brooke:

Yeah and that’s what again, that’s what I see so much of is minimization of difficult childhood experiences and a lot of people do this comparative suffering.

Liz:

Exactly.

Brooke:

“Oh well. That wasn’t that bad.”

Liz:

Yeah.

Brooke:

And, you know, comparison is the thief of happiness and I often try to help people look at trying to hold both things. I can both be upset and not minimize what happened to me as a child and I can hold space that there are worse things in the world but I can hold both. I don’t need to leave myself to say, “That was nothing. I have nothing to complain about. I have a blessed life”. That actually gets in the way of your getting the help you need. I see so many people who “have it all”.

Liz:

Yeah.

Brooke:

But something is missing, something nags at them, and they should not minimize what they feel inside, right?

Liz:

Yep.

Brooke:

Trauma, depression, and anxiety happen to all of us no matter whether you have one dollar in your bank account or 1 million or whether you were blessed with kids or not blessed with kids. It all matters, we matter, our stories matter.

Liz:

Thank you for that. Thank you and that means a lot to me personally and also just for all of the folks that we see, you know, just as a reminder that, you know, what we are experiencing is true and also to empower us to not gaslight ourselves actually, you know? Even out of what we’re really feeling because there is this culture too. We live in this culture where there’s a whole lot of talk about trauma and like you were saying, you know, it’s almost like we need to be talking about it because it’s been minimized but we also have this culture of toxic positivity too which is like, you know. I mean you hear someone come in they’re like, “Well, you know, I just know that like I’m not gonna let it get me down and I’m gonna just, you know, like do some gratitude prayers and that’s gonna help me deal with this situation”. Of course, that’s really useful but like you’re saying, if your body is breaking down and it’s hard to kind of move through the day, gratitude is not quite enough, you know? That’s something maybe that we do in conjunction with actually going into what’s really happening.

Brooke:

Yeah. I mean toxic positivity is really frustrating and can be hard to work with. And again, I think it’s really different than like optimism. I do not think those things are the same and I think what can be important to remember is you have to be with yourself first. You have to feel your feelings in order to move through them. That is unbelievably painful, unbelievably hard, and it’s the only way.

Liz:

Yeah. Well, that’s a good segue to talk about sort of how we have traditionally dealt with trauma and even difficult things like OCD, and then what we’re seeing in the field now. What are you noticing?

Brooke:

Yeah, so I think the field of trauma is changing. Many of the approaches involved extensive talk therapy. There was a lot of exposure therapy where the client had to relive the experience over and over and over again which actually can be re-traumatized.

Liz:

Right.

Brooke:

And, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy–the CBT–, lots of things about changing your thoughts about the trauma, and what we are really seeing now is that all of those approaches have limitations. And again, now, we’re much more focused on the body and the brain rather than the thoughts and the feelings necessarily, so someone with a traumatic, you know, event can talk about it ad nauseam and they will not necessarily feel better. It’s not that it’s not helpful and for some people that will be enough but for many people, especially with complex PTSD, multiple occasions of trauma over and over again throughout their lifespan, we got to get at it another way to move it through.

Liz:

Yeah. So I know I have some other therapist friends who do sensory-motor processing, some who do somatic experiencing, I know there’s EMDR. Some of the listeners know that I’ve delved into the world of Psychedelic Medicine as a way of working with trauma. What brought you to ART particularly and can you tell us what it stands for?

Brooke:

Yes. Okay, so ART stands for Accelerated Resolution Therapy and I have been practicing ART since I was trained in 2018. ART is an evidence-based treatment modality that uses rapid eye movement and voluntary image replacement to change the way the brain stores traumatic images and sensations. It is the most exciting thing I have done in my entire career. I light up when I talk about this because I have never been more hopeful about a modality in my life. It is absolutely extraordinary what I see in front of my eyes within 60 minutes. So art basically is a brief treatment. That’s one of the wonderful things about it. It usually only requires one to five sessions that are usually about 60 to 75 minutes. What differentiates ART from other treatment modalities is you do not have to talk about your trauma at all if you don’t want to.

Liz:

Wow.

Brooke:

So I can literally get a phone call from someone, assess a few things which I can talk about later, you know, and they can tell me a little bit about the problem they want to address using Accelerated Resolution Therapy. I can see them, hear no real details about what actually occurred to them, and I can help them find lasting radical relief from their symptoms.

Liz:

That is amazing.

Brooke:

Yeah. I mean, look, people describe it as magic for a reason and the common thing I hear is life-changing, life-altering. I get people who are super skeptical. I welcome you if you’re skeptical.

Yeah.

I would be skeptical too.

Yeah.

But they really do feel better within a very short amount of time. In fact, I have to say that I have never needed to see anyone for five sessions. I think the most I’ve ever worked with someone on a sort of particular traumatic incident or a particular mental health issue is about four sessions.

Wow. I mean that sounds remarkable. I mean truly remarkable.

Yeah. It is. it’s really exciting and again I think what we’re looking at is using negative images that we have in our brain.

Okay.

And the sensations that then come up along with those negative image-

Okay.

And the bilateral brain stimulation replicates REM sleep okay and during REM sleep that is when our memories move

into the sort of more you know permanent side of our brain the long-term memory and so what we do is we replicate that

REM sleep with the calming eye movements many people find them extremely calming

and relaxing to do and we change those images the client is completely in control of

the session they make up a new story a new way they

want to imagine it that it had happened and then we process negative Sensations

out using eye movements they find themselves feeling positive by imagining

their more positive scene wow and then those get stored in the brain so where

you are literally changing your brain every hour you do wow okay this is totally making my brain

light up also because I’m thinking about how and we won’t go too far off although

I could talk about this kind of stuff for like hours upon hours but when we think about like the nature of reality

you know there there there may be multiple realities that are happening at

the same time and what I what I’m hearing when I hear that is that this

allows you to almost go into a dream state where you can in a way like lucid

dream yourself into a better outcome from your experience absolutely so you

can write on you can go from like the being like a victim to

to being completely empowered to what would you say like to be imagining

yourself running away or escaping or fighting off or yeah I mean let’s take something like

you know a physical assault okay worked with someone recently who

had been held up at gunpoint gun was pointed at their head in the three

weeks since the incident they had flashbacks intrusive thoughts chronic

anxiety could barely sleep at all couldn’t go to work couldn’t walk around

their neighborhood had trouble eating I mean just really shutting down and I

only needed to see him for two sessions and his symptoms completely went away

and it’s exactly right he changed his scene so that when he walked by the person who

the the people who were robbing him was a group of people instead of them robbing him they had a

wonderful Pleasant greeting conversation and then he walked past them enjoyed

his walk with his wife went back to his house and watched you know a TV program

so in his case he basically used the interaction but instead of it being

being held up at gunpoint it was a positive interaction some people will change their scene where it you know

nothing ever happened and that’s totally fine I often encourage especially women

around sexual assault I I wait and see what they want to do

what they’re seeing because again they’re in charge of what images and how they want to change it I really always say trust yourself trust what comes up

is the right thing but occasionally someone will do something and then I can see that the

sensations aren’t changing enough okay because usually when they’re imagining what we call the good director scene

where they change it literally they begin to smile it’s so beautiful I can see it in front of my eyes but when

that’s not happening I know they haven’t quite changed their scene in a way that’s going to be really healing for

them so I will often have women stand up to the person who is assaulting

them fight back flee set a really clear

boundary and take back their power and that usually really changes the scene in

a way that empowers them moving forward in their lives completely wow

yeah and you know I know one of the conversations that often happens with trauma is like what if I hadn’t gone

down that alley what if I had worn something different you know like you

know all of these things and and it’s and it ends up like you feel so responsible yeah even and that’s one of

the main things for instance a woman who had been had a sexual assault at a fraternity

party where she believes she drank too much right she started to change her

scene by just not drinking as much yeah and I didn’t think that was necessarily

going to be healing for her so because she hadn’t done anything wrong right and so I felt that that was actually just

gonna keep the guilt inside her body sure so instead again she set a boundary

she said no in a forceful loud way she ran away yeah but I didn’t want it to be

that she needed to change her basic Behavior sure because she did nothing

wrong right right yeah I’ve seen in psychedelic therapy

memories come up for you know recovered trauma show up and

what can happen in that kind of situation where you see like a real big resolution of things is when that person

is back in that place with autonomy and are able to almost

complete the body responses that they couldn’t do in that moment so you know

oftentimes like we say like we freeze there’s a couple of different things like either we fight and the fight didn’t complete and we didn’t get to get

away or the freeze shuts down and you kind of dissociate from your body or all different kinds of things and they’ll go

back and they’re able to complete the action and as they’ve completed the action the body feels complete is that

sort of what you’re seeing too that’s absolutely what I’m seeing and I think again what’s really important about art

is that the last word or the second word is resolution okay so art differs from

some other brief treatments especially trauma treatments because there’s literally resolution at the end

of every session there’s nothing left untied and again I think it’s also

important so the so the founder of Accelerated Resolution Therapy is leaning Rosen swag and in 2007 she took

a training in EMDR and really liked it but just felt she could improve on it there were just some things that she

didn’t feel really needed to be there and so art differs from EMDR in in

several ways first of all it is much more time limited so again one to five

sessions EMDR although certainly can have amazing results usually takes longer more sessions the other thing is

that again in art you don’t really need to talk very much the third thing that is how it in a

way that it’s different is that we don’t work as much with thoughts and feelings

as much as images and Sensations okay uh

the other part EMDR is sort of free-floating you kind of let the

session unfold and let the client kind of take you where you need to go

art is actually quite of a specific protocol which I think allows it to move

through and again toward that resolution in a more concrete way and really allows

especially once you’ve already had one session of art you know exactly what to expect you know the exact process and

it’s a little bit more specific and I think again has that resolution which is

really important we don’t want to open open people up to their trauma and then say see you next week and there was no

resolution that can actually be extremely destabilizing for clients absolutely absolutely the one thing I

haven’t mentioned is what does art treat and so okay do you want to say that yeah

so again clearly trauma right that’s the obvious one and the obvious mental

health condition resulting from that is ptsc post-traumatic stress disorder

complex PTSD again where they’re mold multiple traumas but it can also work

for depression anxiety insomnia addiction OCD eating disorders and so we

can find relief because we often if someone is clinically depressed we do

what’s called like a typical day script where they imagine a typical day living

with depression and then sometimes we ask them when have you felt this way before and we can find that the

depression may have roots in childhood and something may just come to them in the moment and then we use that also to

again just out process these negative images and Sensations that are

associated with the depression yeah and I mean I’ve I’ve lived with

depression I think about it differently now so I almost don’t even want to Define it that

way but that’s been a part of my experience for a long time and it has

such a physical sensation it’s amazing like when that physical sensation shows

up it sets off on whole a whole series of of thought patterns

that come with it right and even sometimes I think and I noticed this actually I’m bringing this up also

because I noticed this with with my clients and patients here which is there’s even a fear like you feel a

sensation that could actually not be the onset of depression but it’s so similar

that it sets off a sense of Panic or dread

and it almost can like even like kick it into gear yeah absolutely and people come people talk about that a lot in

in the treatment room which is like the fear of of it yeah you know yeah I mean the fear

of oh my gosh there’s my my depression’s coming back right right can be huge and

so we just work with any feelings that come up using these calming eye movements and I think the more open a

client can be the better more open to their own mind more curious about their

own mind and you know there are actually very few people who don’t qualify for art so in order to to do Accelerated

Resolution Therapy you need three things okay one you need to be able to hold a thought or an image in your mind okay

two is you need to be able to do rapid eye movements so it doesn’t necessarily

bode well specifically for people with major seizure disorders or recent concussions something like that we

probably wouldn’t want to do and then the third is they have to be motivated to change if they are not motivated if

they they came in Kicking and Screaming it won’t work because this is all about

your brain creating a different story so sometimes we need to also look for are

there secondary gains by someone staying stuck with this depression or staying

stuck with their eating disorder yes and we need to sometimes they’ll say oh yeah I really want to change but then you’ll

see that actually it’s working for them in some way and this is of course all unconscious right secondary Gardens are

totally unconscious most people say of course they want to feel better of course they don’t want to binge and

Purge you know for instance but what do they get out of it how does how do they unconsciously think it keeps them safer

or in control that kind of thing so we also have to assess for that but honestly it can work for a lot of people

and a couple things that are super cool is that art can be done virtually or in

person I actually worked with someone recently and she had come in for a few sessions in person doing art felt great

and then one day she was sick and so she said I’d you know rather not come in and

so she did it virtually and then I said you know what do you think and she said

I prefer coming in person but it worked equally well and that was really

exciting to me because I can help so many more people if it’s done virtually wow that’s incredible and also children

can do it again not super young children but I

have worked with people who are 12 and 13. and again as long as they can you know hold a thought or an image they can

do art wow I know there’s like a very very unique subset of people who aren’t

able to to visualize yes yeah yeah I haven’t really come across that yet I have had

people who you know have trouble sort of grasping a scene okay like where they

only can see like sporadic images instead of like a start to finish scene

but we say grab any images you can and also I think what’s extremely important

right is people say how could I do art I I don’t remember my trial right right

and that’s okay okay again you just grab on to any images that are there and any

Sensations that are there so a lot of people have kind of a vague sense of something or they will were told they

experienced a trauma sure at a very young age where there really isn’t memory sure they can still work on that

yeah and it sounds like too you know again since

each individual has a way of denying or accepting their life

experiences right that if there’s patterns of behavior that end

up causing distress right that that could be enough to work with because a

lot of times it’s like the same character in a different costume absolutely you know what I mean

throughout time and then through a lot of work whether it’s you know different type of

psychological techniques or psychedelic medicine you start to be like oh my gosh that’s this that’s

that’s the same thing that showed up this way and that way that way and that way it’s all the same thing

it just shows itself differently so it distracts me yeah so it sounds like this is one of those ways that you can

even work with like just a pattern of behavior absolutely that causes distress totally I mean I love working with

people who say why do I always do exactly why do I always choose women who

are unavailable or why do I always take jobs that are you know beneath me

and not live up to my potential we can work with all of that has Tracy

Trace that is totally empowering for people

well this is so exciting is there I’m wondering if there’s anything else that we haven’t touched on that we want to

talk about I mean one one thing I was wondering is I know you’ve been working in the world of of Shame as well and so

I have a feeling that you can apply art to shame which can be just those

feelings can be so difficult to work with yes and as brene Brown says shame is a full body immersion has a posture

it has it’s all of these things absolutely so yeah shame is a great thing we can work through as well

and I guess I just want to say you know again pay attention to your little traumas not just your Big T’s but your

little T’s because you’re qualified for art as well wonderful and so it doesn’t have to

be some huge trauma it can be you know a mental health issue that you’re just really struggling with and feels stuck

so again I love talk therapy I’ve been doing talk therapy you know in private practice for eight 18 years I love it I

love being with my patients I love hearing their stories but sometimes they really get stuck sure and so this is

just a totally different way of approaching so what’s really cool is I

I’ve worked with people you know for 10 years but they’re stuck in sort of one particular way and we do art and they

have relief that again lasts they feel better in the moment wow

we do something we use something called an artometer at the beginning of the session where we rate their level of intensity of

difficult feelings okay so someone could come in with being at a 10 of you know

10 out of 10 these are the most intense feelings that I cannot handle and within

60 Minutes they can go down to a two okay which is you know almost at least

feelings and then that lasts that works that changes them forever wow

wow so you don’t need like maintenance art not necessarily now one thing that can happen is when

you deal with one incident the brain may make space now for other memories to

come forward so I look at it as their layers but not necessarily maintenance no

okay wonderful the last question I had I wanted to ask you is it’s sort of like a

practical question and it’s in regards to you know there’s been times I haven’t

done EMDR before however I’ve sent my my patients out to different folks and uh

from what I understand and maybe just particular to the practitioner but

EMDR isn’t something that you like jump into right away what I have seen with folks is that you

know they need a few like they work towards it can you jump into art absolutely okay you can jump in

if you are actively in a dissociative State okay not so much okay right so

that is someone who we don’t want people to dissociate so much that you know it

sends them into you know an incredibly difficult episode other than major

dissociation absolutely so there was I did some pro bono work for a

community in the DC area that was recently impacted by a school shooting and I worked with about 15 members from

the community I worked with parents teachers and students I worked with some

of them the day after the shooting and we could work right away to address

those difficult difficult flashbacks images lots and lots of hyper vigilance general

anxiety and literally I again saw them get better right away wow wow so that

was a really really powerful experience and again 12 year olds to 70 year olds I

worked with wow well thanks for doing that too thanks

for yeah my honor honestly really really

well I think we’re going to wrap up and I just wanted to know if listeners are

interested in art how do they get in touch with you or find out more information sure so obviously they can

go to my website which is brookebralove.com I have a link to Laney

rosen’s wide Ted Talk on Art and some just basic information about it what to

expect that kind of thing they can also follow me on Instagram or Twitter at

Brooke bralove Psychotherapy and they can definitely go to accelerated

resolutiontherapy.com if you’re in different states we have a wonderful

directory in there they can you can search by state to find Accelerated

Resolution therapists in your area I I looked actually yesterday because I was really curious sort of in the DC Metro

area it looks like they’re about 15 practitioners but that you know it’s extends in all in the state throughout

the state so we’re not a lot but I feel really excited about how this is going

to grow and grow and grow and even to therapists this is such a great way to

differentiate your practice and also what’s really cool about art is it really can decrease compassion fatigue

so there’s no doubt we are all pretty saturated right now in the mental health field and all the helping professionals

because of covid and this can really bring amazing satisfaction to you in the

session and also it’s not as draining because you’re not hearing traumatic

stories over and over and over again throughout the day so it’s really wonderful again art says keep the

knowledge lose the pain and it really does wow thank you so much for being

here Brooke you’re so wonderful it’s so fun to spend time with you and hear what you’re up to yeah thanks Liz okay

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