top of page
Search

Can DBR Help with Dissociation?

nathanaelschlecht2
Sep 7
3 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

Bobcat walking through snowy ground with tall grass in the background
A bobcat walks through snow-dusted ground and tall grass, paw raised mid-step.


Dissociation is often the reason talk-based approaches get stuck. If a memory or pattern is stored in a way that pulls you out of your body or out of the present moment before you can process it, narrating the story rarely reaches the part that’s holding it. Deep Brain Reorienting was designed with this exact problem in mind, and for a lot of people who dissociate, it reaches material that other approaches struggle to access.


The reason has to do with how DBR is structured. Rather than asking you to describe what happened, it tracks the orienting response, the body’s earliest, most automatic reaction to threat: where the eyes were pulled, what the neck and shoulders did, the initial physical bracing that occurred before any conscious appraisal of danger. This response is largely nonverbal and often predates the moment someone would typically dissociate. Working at that level can access material that stays out of reach when the approach depends on staying present enough to narrate a story, which dissociation specifically interrupts.


For people whose dissociation shows up as leaving the body or losing time around difficult material, this distinction matters. Many trauma-processing approaches implicitly require enough presence to describe or relive an event, and dissociation is precisely what makes that presence hard to sustain. DBR’s slower, sensation-based pace tends to be more tolerable for a dissociative nervous system, since it doesn’t ask for the kind of narrative engagement that so often triggers the dissociation in the first place.


This doesn’t mean dissociation disappears from the session. It’s common for some degree of dissociation to show up during a DBR session too, a moment of distance or fogginess as the process gets close to something significant. The difference is how that’s handled. DBR sessions are built to move at a pace the nervous system can tolerate, and the process includes ways to slow down, orient back to the present, or step back from something if it starts to feel like too much, rather than pushing through the dissociation to get to content underneath it.


Chronic dissociation, the kind that shows up as a general baseline rather than only around specific memories, often responds well to DBR precisely because the approach isn’t dependent on identifying a specific story to work on. Since it tracks orientation and sensation rather than narrative, it can work with patterns that don’t have a clear, nameable event attached to them, which is often the case with dissociation rooted in early or repeated experience rather than a single incident.


DBR isn’t typically used in isolation for complex dissociative presentations. It’s often integrated with other approaches that address dissociation directly, including Ego State Therapy, which works with the different internal states that can develop around dissociative patterns, and Brainspotting, which shares DBR’s emphasis on sensation and physical orientation over narrative.





Nathanael "Nando" Schlecht is the founder of Nando Therapy, a Licensed Associate Counselor and trauma therapist based in Tucson, AZ, specializing in complex trauma, dissociation, and nervous system regulation. He is trained in DBR, Brainspotting, Ego State Therapy, EMDR, and ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention). Offering in-person sessions in Tucson and online therapy throughout Arizona.

For more reflections on nervous system patterns and relational dynamics, subscribe to The Regulated Mind on Substack.






Related Reading:




Comments

bottom of page