Attachment Trauma, Shock, and Deep Pain: DBR Healing Explained

A lot of people wonder why certain patterns in relationships, thoughts, or emotions feel impossible to shift, even when they’ve tried everything.

Sometimes the answer goes right back to the very beginning - how our nervous system firsts detects and responds to safety and connection.

A 2025 paper by Dr. Frank Corrigan and Hannah Young shows that attachment trauma doesn’t start with our thoughts or even our feelings. It starts deeper - in the oldest parts of the brain - the brain stem. (This is the part of the brain that begins developing during the second trimester - it plays important functions in reflexes, sleep, and attention and concentration, like detecting novel stimuli and assessing safety and danger.)

When a child reaches for comfort and no one responds, the brain stem registers this as danger and the body experiences shock first. It’s quick and automatic - before feelings and thoughts. The child might feel a jolt in the body, a dropping sensation, or sudden coldness.

These experiences of “no response” usually occur in contexts of parental neglect, inconsistency, or emotional distance. It can be subtle: a parent staring past a crying child, a blank face where a warm smile should be, a long wait for someone to pick you up or hold you. It can also mean long periods without touch, comfort, or predictable care. Nothing obvious on the outside—but inside, the nervous system is registering disconnection and threat to survival.

When the shock fades, a deep pain of abandonment or rejection starts to show up. Over time, repeated experience of this kind leave lasting imprints that can follow people into adulthood, even if they don’t have clear memories of where it started.

These early patterns can turn into:

• trouble calming down or regulating emotions

• pushing people away but wanting connection at the same time

• feeling unworthy, ashamed, or “too hard to love”

  
  

Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) works right at this level. Compared to therapies that focus on challenging problematic thoughts or aiming to change behaviours, developing insight, or problem solving, DBR works at a lower level - and it gets at the root of problems. DBR slows down the body’s survival responses - the shock, the pain, the emotion - so they can finally move through the system instead of getting stuck there. People often describe deep, lasting change. They say they feel more energetic and freed up. They feel more settled and present, they feel more resilient, and old, problem patterns begin to change.

It’s a reminder that healing isn’t just about talking through problems, changing thoughts and behaviours, or understanding our past.

It’s about helping the brain and body heal deeply so that it can rediscover what safety and connection truly feel like.

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Reference

Corrigan, F. M. & Young, H. (2025). The Psychopathological Domains of Attachment Trauma: A Commentary. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 22(5), 387-391.