BRAINsmART Blog

The humble beginnings of a trauma informed BRAINsmART psychotherapy is grounded in the creative process. It is a process that enables people to re-experience their overwhelming feelings and sensations as biological links to memories and events of their past.

We do not have to ‘dig’ for traumatic memories that have hurt us and we have forgotten. They ‘surface’ on their own and with the help of Cross Modal Creative Arts approaches. The Cross Modal Therapy is a BrainsmART approach because it allows the nonverbal language of the Brain to access and work with the suppressed sensations and emotions of traumatic material safely through the creative arts.

SELF is the organizing principle around which the cross modal creative arts strategies revolve. In the Trauma-informed Certification program, the four domains of SELF (Safety – Emotion regulation – Loss – Future) are explored in depth, using Cross Modal ‘BrainsmART’ exercises.

Trauma-informed therapy is becoming a new standard of efficacy for mental health clinicians, but it has taken the last twenty-five years to establish the legitimacy of the trauma spectrum that runs beyond the boundaries of the battlefield crossing into the war within the family. Evidence based research is just beginning to explore and describe the complex constellation of psychiatric symptoms arising from acute and chronic trauma. Practitioners in the mental health field have to be educated in the way the brain and mind work together in order to grasp attachment issues and relational styles that repeat through the lifespan of one individual.