Falling off

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AlwaysFallingOff

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Yes this is something I do a lot while jumping! Only jumping, I'm otherwise competent. I'm really starting to wonder if I should stop. I have the skills and a lovely horse, but if I don't commit to an oxer it can result in me jumping it without him. He's naturally cautious, and I guess the truth is so am I. In the show ring we're ok as I ride more positively and we're rarely out of the ribbons. We jump 70cm to 90cm. I can fire myself up to ride at 100% like I do in the ring but it takes so much mental determination. I'm not sure if it's fun. It's a strange place to be in as if I announce I'm giving up people will wonder why on earth I'd say that when outwardly we're successful. But four falls from silly stops in three months is giving me pause for thought. I'm 52. I know that falls come in clusters as one leads to the next through lack of confidence and commitment, but will it ever end and have I got the strength to get to the other side? Can anyone offer any reassurance. I do ride in a racesafe body protector and jockey skull and have had hypnotherapy and NLP.
 
Well, there are plenty of other things you can do with horses than jump over obstacles!
And there are plenty of other ways to get injured with horses, than jumping.
If you aren’t enjoying it, do something else, at least for a time to see whether you actually miss it. If you genuinely believe that you require hypnotherapy and NLP in order to continue your jumping, that seems excessive, and personally I’d reconsider.
 
AnitaStreet said:
if I announce I'm giving up people will wonder why on earth I'd say that when outwardly we're successful.
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Who cares what people wonder. Quit if you want. There's nobody holding a gun to your head!

if reading that made you a bit defensive, then you probably don't want to and should look into a sports psychologist!!!
 
The day I quit jumping was also the day I won a. 1 day event. Came over xc finish line just thinking I’m glad that’s done rather woo-hoo. We’d had a good round I just didn’t get the enjoyment from it. It had been brewing for a while but when a cracking clear xc didn’t give me any form of buzz I knew I was done. Switched to dressage and loved it and then switched to western when I stopped loving dressage. There’s a lot of options out there.

ETA the mare I had at time was super capable but would stop if you didn’t place her right, or ditch you for it. So I can relate 😂
 
Quit jumping if you want to, plenty other things to do BUT a BP will give you some protection but not as much as an air vest so if you’re worried about falling off maybe see if you can borrowed one?
 
if you only enjoy it & feel confident competing, don’t bother jumping at home! stick to a level you’re happy with competing, or just take the pressure off and play over little jumps at home.

or, if it’s what you want to do, sod what anyone thinks and quit!

you don’t have to go all in on your decision, you’re allowed to simply take a break from it!
 
I love @Alibear 's answer, as similar happened to me. I wish I'd had the same sense to stop wanting to do it, as I now kind of want to, yet no longer have the drive to make it happen. So, I'm left with a little itch to want to scratch, yet when I had the horse and was actually doing it, I had started to feel deflated even when placed with a DC at BE.

If you think you do still want to, I would have a long hard look at your position. When things are going well, you can get away with having a position that is incorrectly aligned. When there are difficulties, the slight misalignment leads to falls.

As a test, when I was teaching, I would have riders set a canter and then either stand bolt upright, or crouch forward (arse out but shoulders low, legs firm underneath you), or sit, and be able to move between those positions, in any order, without losing balance and sitting involuntarily. Surprisingly few riders can do that, even when the horse is running smoothly and consistently. Stands to reason that if, under those conditions, you can't decide whether to sit, stand or crouch, if the horse slams on, you will tumble.

I would request, say, 5 strides in each, so 5 strides upright, 5 strides crouched, 5 strides upright again, 5 strides sitting, 5 strides upright etc etc. The most difficult is crouched to upright with no sitting.

The other one is over fences. So many people are told to fold at the hips and then they give away their security just as they need it. Jumping position is not going forward in your balance, it is compressing the joints to take the shocks. It is more arse back than shoulders forward. Again, so many people do that incorrectly. Your lower leg and feet stay forward, not back.
 
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I never liked jumping, i have not the right brain for it, despite having horses that are capable, one in particular, who won comps but jumped big but i was always glad it was over.

I have always trained on the flat, i love the slow relaxed process of going from unbroken to advanced movements, the time to feel and connect with the horse the neverending discoverery of new ways to understand what the horse is feeling and what it will respond to, the building up of the horse and the realizing how far you have come

So look at yourself honestly, deeply and dont worry about others opinion, you mqy discover something else that suits you better

Agree with red about the arxh sticking out thing , top showjumpers often do this, have a look at some stills
 
I came to terms a while ago that the more you do with your horse the more you will fall off! I know that sounds quite obvious but it actually took a while for the penny to drop with me 🤣 I looked at my trainers who were brilliant, talented riders and falling off their horses often and realised it's kind of inevitable when you're riding young, sharp horses and jumping regularly that the odds of you getting decked are quite high regardless of how good a rider you are. I think we sometimes fall into the trap of thinking when you get 'good enough' you stop falling off, but you don't!

My trainer even said to me in a lesson once "if you're scared of falling off, you need to get over it because if you want to jump your horse - news flash - you're going to fall off".... he's quite blunt but I understood the sentiment, you do kind of have to accept that you'll take the odd tumble and you have to decide if your self-preservation of stopping that happening is greater than your will to be doing what you're doing.

I think for me it was a psychological shift from 'falling off' being the worst thing that could happen and meaning I'd failed or was doing something wrong, to just being something that happened sometimes as part of the process.

Of course none of us want to get hurt and if each fall is knocking you physically or mentally then maybe step it down a level to more within your comfort zone so you're actually enjoying it. But if deep down you want to carry on and are just beating yourself up for falling off too often, it might just need a mental shift and some support from a good trainer for a confidence boost.
 
I just don't enjoy jumping, I persevered in my teens and early 20s as that's what you did and that's also where i got jobs but i dont think I ever enjoyed it. Now I just do the things I enjoy hacking and flat work/ dressage on my little hairy pony.

It is weird how certain instructors don't seem to take you seriously, the last time I got talked into it I ended up falling on my face 😅
 
I love jumping and I also ride much better in competition than at home. And I ride worst of all in warm ups! I then had an accident and after that got scared. For a while I gave up and told myself that this was a genuine preference when it was a fear based avoidance. I'd feel relief at ending a lesson instead of but happiness to be doing it. But only because I was scared. Once I worked through the confidence issues and could jump without fear then the love came back.

That is very different to what @Alibear and @Red-1 are describing when they jumped a fab round or track and still think 'meh'. I always finished SJ or XC tracks on top of the world and excited for the next one. If you simply don't feel the jumping bug then there's 1000 other ways of enjoying with your horse. And what others might think is totally irrelevant. Who cares! It's your horse, your efforts, your money, your time, your enjoyment and your safety that is on the line, not theirs. 'Success' to me means getting off my horse with a huge smile on my fave. Ribbons are - at best - a nice bonus. They are not the reason to do anything.

So you need to figure out what your genuine intrinsic motivation is, what lights you up.
 
AlwaysFallingOff said:
Yes this is something I do a lot while jumping! Only jumping, I'm otherwise competent. I'm really starting to wonder if I should stop. I have the skills and a lovely horse, but if I don't commit to an oxer it can result in me jumping it without him. He's naturally cautious, and I guess the truth is so am I. In the show ring we're ok as I ride more positively and we're rarely out of the ribbons. We jump 70cm to 90cm. I can fire myself up to ride at 100% like I do in the ring but it takes so much mental determination. I'm not sure if it's fun. It's a strange place to be in as if I announce I'm giving up people will wonder why on earth I'd say that when outwardly we're successful. But four falls from silly stops in three months is giving me pause for thought. I'm 52. I know that falls come in clusters as one leads to the next through lack of confidence and commitment, but will it ever end and have I got the strength to get to the other side? Can anyone offer any reassurance. I do ride in a racesafe body protector and jockey skull and have had hypnotherapy and NLP.
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I'm a bit late to the party but hopeful this will help.

What you focus on you'll get.

Therapy (apart from BWRT) tries to address the feelings rather than address whatever it is that's triggering them, and that's why its been such an effort.

The caution feels like you're protecting yourself, but, as you've found, it does the opposite.

Make the decision to only focus on what you want, not what you want to avoid.
 
Kate Osmaston said:
I'm a bit late to the party but hopeful this will help.

What you focus on you'll get.

Therapy (apart from BWRT) tries to address the feelings rather than address whatever it is that's triggering them, and that's why its been such an effort.

The caution feels like you're protecting yourself, but, as you've found, it does the opposite.

Make the decision to only focus on what you want, not what you want to avoid.
Click to expand...

Hypnotherapy absolutely should focus on what you want not what you are avoiding. It is an extremely powerful way of directly experiencing riding feeling fun and fantastic through the playful imagining of positive possibilities, the use of empowering and positive hypnotic suggestions and the retraining of habitual brain pathways or behavioural patterns.

BUT it's an unregulated field and you get anyone from people who have done a weekend course, people who just use a generic script instead of individualised approaches, people who use approaches with no evidence base, people who use pseudo-science, people who actually use harmful approaches like those aimed at eliciting trauma memories, and people who are just a bit rubbish because no-one is checking!

So I would not write off hypnotherapy, but choose the hypnotherapist wisely!

It's also a bit misleading to use the word 'therapy' to mean all therapies apart from BWRT. There are plenty of approaches that are strengths focused and that address triggers. Including those with a far more robust evidence base than BWRT, which appears promising but lacks empirical support as it's an emerging approach.
 
Ambers Echo said:
Hypnotherapy absolutely should focus on what you want not what you are avoiding. It is an extremely powerful way of directly experiencing riding feeling fun and fantastic through the playful imagining of positive possibilities, the use of empowering and positive hypnotic suggestions and the retraining of habitual brain pathways or behavioural patterns.

BUT it's an unregulated field and you get anyone from people who have done a weekend course, people who just use a generic script instead of individualised approaches, people who use approaches with no evidence base, people who use pseudo-science, people who actually use harmful approaches like those aimed at eliciting trauma memories, and people who are just a bit rubbish because no-one is checking!

So I would not write off hypnotherapy, but choose the hypnotherapist wisely!

It's also a bit misleading to use the word 'therapy' to mean all therapies apart from BWRT. There are plenty of approaches that are strengths focused and that address triggers. Including those with a far more robust evidence base than BWRT, which appears promising but lacks empirical support as it's an emerging is live to know which other therapies
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Please share which other therapies work directly with the reptilian complex.

There are thousands of hours of evidence about BWRT effectiveness. It is used by the police and armed forces in some countries such as South Africa, in preference to anything else because of its extraordinary effectiveness of working so quickly and completely.

Clinicians, Professors of psychology as well as non Clinicians continually expound on its incredible work.

Unlike other therapies, such as hypnotherapy, to be a Registered BWRT Practitioner you can only be trained by the International BWRT Institute. I have been trained by Terence Watts, the developer and Principal of BWRT.

We are subject to rigorous ongoing CPD and supervision by Terence Watts himself as well as continually monitoring not only of our work with clients but anything we put out such as articles etc.

BWRT is probably more regulated than any other modality.
 
Ok, this is going to go massively off topic and may well be very boring to others. I also don’t normally comment when people want to share their personal experiences of approaches such as EFT, NLP, BWRT or anything else they have found helpful. Personal experience is valid.

However, when someone makes sweeping statements such as “therapy (apart from BWRT)…” then I do feel it is important to challenge that. It is both inaccurate and potentially misleading.

It is irresponsible to dismiss the entire field of psychological therapies, and it is equally unhelpful to overstate the case for any single therapy.

So I will respond in a bit more detail.

For context: I am a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with over 30 years’ experience. I have held roles as Psychological Therapies Lead across multiple NHS trusts and within NHS England, where part of my role was specifically to evaluate the evidence base for psychological therapies, including new and emerging approaches. I currently work as research lead and lecturer for a postgraduate college, where I design and teach modules on how clinicians critically evaluate evidence and sources of evidence for new therapeutic approaches. Assessing the credibility of therapies and the quality of evidence supporting them has literally been part of my professional role for many years.

In your reply, the sources you cite relate primarily to professional endorsement and internal regulation, rather than the strength of the independent scientific evidence base.

Claims that a therapy is effective because clinicians report positive outcomes, because it is used by certain organisations, or because practitioners must train through a particular institute do not in themselves constitute scientific validation. In clinical psychology and any psychological therapy, the credibility of a treatment approach rests primarily on independent, peer-reviewed empirical research conducted by multiple research groups and replicated across settings.

At present, the independent published evidence base for BWRT is extremely limited/non existent. The material supporting its effectiveness comes from practitioner reports, training materials, or publications associated with the originating organisation. Such sources can provide useful preliminary observations, but they do not substitute for rigorous external evaluation, randomised controlled trials, and systematic reviews. The fact that training and accreditation are restricted to a single institute can also create an “in-house validation loop”, where training, evidence generation, and claims of effectiveness all sit within the same network. This does not automatically invalidate an approach, but it does make independent scrutiny particularly important.

Internal Family Systems (IFS), for example, has long had a passionate practitioner community and a very successful training organisation. However, despite many years of promotion, the independent evidence base has remained extremely limited compared with established therapies. Concerns have been raised about some practices within IFS encouraging the interpretation of internal experiences as dissociated “parts”, which may contribute to controversial diagnostic narratives around dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder). And the founder is on record claiming some ‘parts’ are demons who need to be exorcised. Yet the training programmes remain extremely popular and claims of efficacy are still made. Strong practitioner enthusiasm and internal regulation are not the same as robust external evidence.

BWRT may well develop a stronger evidence base over time, but at present it has not yet done so. For BWRT at the moment in terms of peer review, all there is is a single small clinical research trial registered with Pubmed in 2021, that never published. This either means the study was abandoned (ie it did not happen) or the results were poor (so they decided not to publish).

There are also questions about mechanisms of change.

In evidence-based practice, therapies must demonstrate not only replicable clinical outcomes, but also either a plausible mechanism of change grounded in contemporary science, or at least a cautious stance regarding the mechanism. Some therapies clearly work even though the mechanism is debated. EMDR, for example, has good outcome evidence but ongoing debate about how it works. EFT also has outcome evidence, even though the mechanisms around energy meridians are disputed.

New therapies often promote simplified explanations of how they work because this creates the impression of a novel breakthrough, even when the underlying processes overlap with existing psychological principles. The “reptilian brain” explanation in BWRT is a good example of this.

This concept originates from Paul MacLean’s triune brain model (1960s) which divided the brain into reptilian, limbic, and neocortical layers, and Libet’s work in the 1980s showing that neural activity related to an action (the readiness potential) can be detected a few hundred milliseconds before people report conscious awareness of deciding to act.

While historically influential, the triune model is now viewed as an oversimplified metaphor rather than an accurate description of brain function. Modern neuroscience shows that emotional processing, threat detection, and behavioural responses arise from distributed neural networks involving the amygdala, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and other interacting systems. There is no discrete evolutionary “reptilian brain” operating independently.

Libet’s work highlights that some processing occurs before conscious awareness, but that insight is not new and it is not unique to BWRT. Psychology has recognised for decades that much mental processing occurs outside conscious awareness. Dual-process models of cognition, for example, distinguish between fast automatic processes and slower reflective ones. These ideas underpin many established therapies that work with automatic emotional responses, conditioned fear reactions, and rapid threat processing.

There is also considerable conceptual overlap between BWRT and existing therapies.

Many of the mechanisms BWRT claims to address - rapid threat responses, conditioned emotional reactions, and interruption of maladaptive response patterns - are already central to established psychological approaches.

For example:

• Exposure and behavioural therapies target conditioned fear responses.
• CBT addresses automatic thoughts and emotional reactions.
• EMDR and trauma-focused therapies work with rapid processing of distressing memories.
• Memory reconsolidation research explores how emotional responses can be updated or modified.
• Experiential and third-wave therapies often focus on interrupting entrenched emotional and behavioural patterns.

Given this, it is not yet clear what genuinely novel mechanism or technique BWRT introduces beyond reframing existing psychological principles under new terminology.

That may change as research develops. But at present, the key issue remains the absence of a strong, independent evidence base alongside disputed mechanisms of change.

TL;DR: BWRT may prove helpful, but at present the independent scientific evidence base is very limited. Claims about effectiveness based on practitioner reports, internal training structures, or organisational use are not the same as replicated peer-reviewed research. The neuroscience explanation often cited (the “reptilian brain”) is an outdated metaphor, and many of the processes BWRT targets are already addressed within established therapies.
 
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SEL said:
Fascinating AE!! Thank you for such a comprehensive response - I enjoyed reading that.
Click to expand...

Well perhaps it needed a nerd-alert warning! But I also find outcomes research fascinating. The therapeutic and research communities actively want new approaches to be developed so genuine break-throughs are very exciting and eagerly embraced. We don't dismiss new approaches - we evaluate them. And if they are good, they will eventually become established/mainstream. Plenty of therapies started by individuals have moved beyond their own founding organisations: Dan Hughes - DDP, Marsha Linehan - DBT, Jon Kabat-Zinn - MBSR etc have become mainstream, NICE recommend, funded etc.

As far as I can tell BWRT has been doing the right things in trying to establish the evidence base, but it's not there yet. My personal gut instinct is that it's been around long enough now for that evidence to be building up now.

With something like BWRT compelling evidence would have to be BWRT vs.... X therapy not BWRT vs no treatment. Because there are already evidenced approaches for what it treats. So it's not enough to say it 'works'. It has to work better than or equal to something else. Or have some other benefit. Eg EMDR is not better than Trauma focused CBT but it's less distressing to go through. So that makes it preferable.

Some approaches are equallly effective but faster.

The trial I mentioned was BWRT vs TAU (treatment as usual). I suspect that when BWRT was compared wth TAU, a comparable benefit was not seen which is why the trial was not published. This is a common problem called bottom-drawer syndrome. 'Good' results are published. 'Bad' ones aren't. So you get a distorted view: If 10 trials are done and only 1 shows a positive result, that is the one we know about! So an approach is only reall accepted when a positive trial is repeatedly replicated.

A lot of researchers want the rules changing so that if you register a trial you HAVE to publish what happened.
 
Ambers Echo said:
Ok, this is going to go massively off topic and may well be very boring to others. I also don’t normally comment when people want to share their personal experiences of approaches such as EFT, NLP, BWRT or anything else they have found helpful. Personal experience is valid.

However, when someone makes sweeping statements such as “therapy (apart from BWRT)…” then I do feel it is important to challenge that. It is both inaccurate and potentially misleading.

It is irresponsible to dismiss the entire field of psychological therapies, and it is equally unhelpful to overstate the case for any single therapy.

So I will respond in a bit more detail.

For context: I am a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with over 30 years’ experience. I have held roles as Psychological Therapies Lead across multiple NHS trusts and within NHS England, where part of my role was specifically to evaluate the evidence base for psychological therapies, including new and emerging approaches. I currently work as research lead and lecturer for a postgraduate college, where I design and teach modules on how clinicians critically evaluate evidence and sources of evidence for new therapeutic approaches. Assessing the credibility of therapies and the quality of evidence supporting them has literally been part of my professional role for many years.

In your reply, the sources you cite relate primarily to professional endorsement and internal regulation, rather than the strength of the independent scientific evidence base.

Claims that a therapy is effective because clinicians report positive outcomes, because it is used by certain organisations, or because practitioners must train through a particular institute do not in themselves constitute scientific validation. In clinical psychology and any psychological therapy, the credibility of a treatment approach rests primarily on independent, peer-reviewed empirical research conducted by multiple research groups and replicated across settings.

At present, the independent published evidence base for BWRT is extremely limited/non existent. The material supporting its effectiveness comes from practitioner reports, training materials, or publications associated with the originating organisation. Such sources can provide useful preliminary observations, but they do not substitute for rigorous external evaluation, randomised controlled trials, and systematic reviews. The fact that training and accreditation are restricted to a single institute can also create an “in-house validation loop”, where training, evidence generation, and claims of effectiveness all sit within the same network. This does not automatically invalidate an approach, but it does make independent scrutiny particularly important.

Internal Family Systems (IFS), for example, has long had a passionate practitioner community and a very successful training organisation. However, despite many years of promotion, the independent evidence base has remained extremely limited compared with established therapies. Concerns have been raised about some practices within IFS encouraging the interpretation of internal experiences as dissociated “parts”, which may contribute to controversial diagnostic narratives around dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder). And the founder is on record claiming some ‘parts’ are demons who need to be exorcised. Yet the training programmes remain extremely popular and claims of efficacy are still made. Strong practitioner enthusiasm and internal regulation are not the same as robust external evidence.

BWRT may well develop a stronger evidence base over time, but at present it has not yet done so. For BWRT at the moment in terms of peer review, all there is is a single small clinical research trial registered with Pubmed in 2021, that never published. This either means the study was abandoned (ie it did not happen) or the results were poor (so they decided not to publish).

There are also questions about mechanisms of change.

In evidence-based practice, therapies must demonstrate not only replicable clinical outcomes, but also either a plausible mechanism of change grounded in contemporary science, or at least a cautious stance regarding the mechanism. Some therapies clearly work even though the mechanism is debated. EMDR, for example, has good outcome evidence but ongoing debate about how it works. EFT also has outcome evidence, even though the mechanisms around energy meridians are disputed.

New therapies often promote simplified explanations of how they work because this creates the impression of a novel breakthrough, even when the underlying processes overlap with existing psychological principles. The “reptilian brain” explanation in BWRT is a good example of this.

This concept originates from Paul MacLean’s triune brain model (1960s) which divided the brain into reptilian, limbic, and neocortical layers, and Libet’s work in the 1980s showing that neural activity related to an action (the readiness potential) can be detected a few hundred milliseconds before people report conscious awareness of deciding to act.

While historically influential, the triune model is now viewed as an oversimplified metaphor rather than an accurate description of brain function. Modern neuroscience shows that emotional processing, threat detection, and behavioural responses arise from distributed neural networks involving the amygdala, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and other interacting systems. There is no discrete evolutionary “reptilian brain” operating independently.

Libet’s work highlights that some processing occurs before conscious awareness, but that insight is not new and it is not unique to BWRT. Psychology has recognised for decades that much mental processing occurs outside conscious awareness. Dual-process models of cognition, for example, distinguish between fast automatic processes and slower reflective ones. These ideas underpin many established therapies that work with automatic emotional responses, conditioned fear reactions, and rapid threat processing.

There is also considerable conceptual overlap between BWRT and existing therapies.

Many of the mechanisms BWRT claims to address - rapid threat responses, conditioned emotional reactions, and interruption of maladaptive response patterns - are already central to established psychological approaches.

For example:

• Exposure and behavioural therapies target conditioned fear responses.
• CBT addresses automatic thoughts and emotional reactions.
• EMDR and trauma-focused therapies work with rapid processing of distressing memories.
• Memory reconsolidation research explores how emotional responses can be updated or modified.
• Experiential and third-wave therapies often focus on interrupting entrenched emotional and behavioural patterns.

Given this, it is not yet clear what genuinely novel mechanism or technique BWRT introduces beyond reframing existing psychological principles under new terminology.

That may change as research develops. But at present, the key issue remains the absence of a strong, independent evidence base alongside disputed mechanisms of change.

TL;DR: BWRT may prove helpful, but at present the independent scientific evidence base is very limited. Claims about effectiveness based on practitioner reports, internal training structures, or organisational use are not the same as replicated peer-reviewed research. The neuroscience explanation often cited (the “reptilian brain”) is an outdated metaphor, and many of the processes BWRT targets are already addressed within established therapies.
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God I love this.

Signed, non-consultant CP 😂
 
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Ambers Echo said:
Ok, this is going to go massively off topic and may well be very boring to others. I also don’t normally comment when people want to share their personal experiences of approaches such as EFT, NLP, BWRT or anything else they have found helpful. Personal experience is valid.

However, when someone makes sweeping statements such as “therapy (apart from BWRT)…” then I do feel it is important to challenge that. It is both inaccurate and potentially misleading.

It is irresponsible to dismiss the entire field of psychological therapies, and it is equally unhelpful to overstate the case for any single therapy.

So I will respond in a bit more detail.

For context: I am a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with over 30 years’ experience. I have held roles as Psychological Therapies Lead across multiple NHS trusts and within NHS England, where part of my role was specifically to evaluate the evidence base for psychological therapies, including new and emerging approaches. I currently work as research lead and lecturer for a postgraduate college, where I design and teach modules on how clinicians critically evaluate evidence and sources of evidence for new therapeutic approaches. Assessing the credibility of therapies and the quality of evidence supporting them has literally been part of my professional role for many years.

In your reply, the sources you cite relate primarily to professional endorsement and internal regulation, rather than the strength of the independent scientific evidence base.

Claims that a therapy is effective because clinicians report positive outcomes, because it is used by certain organisations, or because practitioners must train through a particular institute do not in themselves constitute scientific validation. In clinical psychology and any psychological therapy, the credibility of a treatment approach rests primarily on independent, peer-reviewed empirical research conducted by multiple research groups and replicated across settings.

At present, the independent published evidence base for BWRT is extremely limited/non existent. The material supporting its effectiveness comes from practitioner reports, training materials, or publications associated with the originating organisation. Such sources can provide useful preliminary observations, but they do not substitute for rigorous external evaluation, randomised controlled trials, and systematic reviews. The fact that training and accreditation are restricted to a single institute can also create an “in-house validation loop”, where training, evidence generation, and claims of effectiveness all sit within the same network. This does not automatically invalidate an approach, but it does make independent scrutiny particularly important.

Internal Family Systems (IFS), for example, has long had a passionate practitioner community and a very successful training organisation. However, despite many years of promotion, the independent evidence base has remained extremely limited compared with established therapies. Concerns have been raised about some practices within IFS encouraging the interpretation of internal experiences as dissociated “parts”, which may contribute to controversial diagnostic narratives around dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder). And the founder is on record claiming some ‘parts’ are demons who need to be exorcised. Yet the training programmes remain extremely popular and claims of efficacy are still made. Strong practitioner enthusiasm and internal regulation are not the same as robust external evidence.

BWRT may well develop a stronger evidence base over time, but at present it has not yet done so. For BWRT at the moment in terms of peer review, all there is is a single small clinical research trial registered with Pubmed in 2021, that never published. This either means the study was abandoned (ie it did not happen) or the results were poor (so they decided not to publish).

There are also questions about mechanisms of change.

In evidence-based practice, therapies must demonstrate not only replicable clinical outcomes, but also either a plausible mechanism of change grounded in contemporary science, or at least a cautious stance regarding the mechanism. Some therapies clearly work even though the mechanism is debated. EMDR, for example, has good outcome evidence but ongoing debate about how it works. EFT also has outcome evidence, even though the mechanisms around energy meridians are disputed.

New therapies often promote simplified explanations of how they work because this creates the impression of a novel breakthrough, even when the underlying processes overlap with existing psychological principles. The “reptilian brain” explanation in BWRT is a good example of this.

This concept originates from Paul MacLean’s triune brain model (1960s) which divided the brain into reptilian, limbic, and neocortical layers, and Libet’s work in the 1980s showing that neural activity related to an action (the readiness potential) can be detected a few hundred milliseconds before people report conscious awareness of deciding to act.

While historically influential, the triune model is now viewed as an oversimplified metaphor rather than an accurate description of brain function. Modern neuroscience shows that emotional processing, threat detection, and behavioural responses arise from distributed neural networks involving the amygdala, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and other interacting systems. There is no discrete evolutionary “reptilian brain” operating independently.

Libet’s work highlights that some processing occurs before conscious awareness, but that insight is not new and it is not unique to BWRT. Psychology has recognised for decades that much mental processing occurs outside conscious awareness. Dual-process models of cognition, for example, distinguish between fast automatic processes and slower reflective ones. These ideas underpin many established therapies that work with automatic emotional responses, conditioned fear reactions, and rapid threat processing.

There is also considerable conceptual overlap between BWRT and existing therapies.

Many of the mechanisms BWRT claims to address - rapid threat responses, conditioned emotional reactions, and interruption of maladaptive response patterns - are already central to established psychological approaches.

For example:

• Exposure and behavioural therapies target conditioned fear responses.
• CBT addresses automatic thoughts and emotional reactions.
• EMDR and trauma-focused therapies work with rapid processing of distressing memories.
• Memory reconsolidation research explores how emotional responses can be updated or modified.
• Experiential and third-wave therapies often focus on interrupting entrenched emotional and behavioural patterns.

Given this, it is not yet clear what genuinely novel mechanism or technique BWRT introduces beyond reframing existing psychological principles under new terminology.

That may change as research develops. But at present, the key issue remains the absence of a strong, independent evidence base alongside disputed mechanisms of change.

TL;DR: BWRT may prove helpful, but at present the independent scientific evidence base is very limited. Claims about effectiveness based on practitioner reports, internal training structures, or organisational use are not the same as replicated peer-reviewed research. The neuroscience explanation often cited (the “reptilian brain”) is an outdated metaphor, and many of the processes BWRT targets are already addressed within established therapies.
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You've made some suppositions that aren't accurate. BWRT is not based on the triune brain or indeed Libet's experiement. The triune brain is a useful vehicle to explain that our conscious awareness occurs before automatic reactions and the reptilian complex is useful for explaining the concept and process of BWRT to clients. As you say, the triune brain is a useful metaphor. Libet's experiement inspired BWRT, nothing more.

None of the therapies you list work directly with the reptilian complex. They all require the client to be aware of their feelings and thoughts in order to address them at the time they're having them.

You are strongly connected to traditional methods of psychotherapy, obviously with your profession. And thus of course you will look for ways to defend what you are invested in. Its uncomfortable to admit you may be wrong or there may be something better. And that's human nature. However, you have done very little research into BWRT, and that's clear. If you searched a little further you'd see that psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists all over the world are cottoning on to how ground-breaking it is.

I'm going to mute you now as I'm aware that nothing will encourage you to look into it further, and I won't waste your or my time further.

Oh, and you may want to disregard my recommendations to you on the other thread - they, as they openly say, have both been clients of mine. And, of course, as is the nature of BWRT, their treatment was hugely successful.

Go well.
 
Kate Osmaston said:
You are strongly connected to traditional methods of psychotherapy, obviously with your profession. And thus of course you will look for ways to defend what you are invested in. Its uncomfortable to admit you may be wrong or there may be something better. And that's human nature. However, you have done very little research into BWRT, and that's clear. If you searched a little further you'd see that psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists all over the world are cottoning on to how ground-breaking it is.

I'm going to mute you now as I'm aware that nothing will encourage you to look into it further, and I won't waste your or my time further.
Click to expand...

Ok well you can mute me but other people are reading this so I am not not leaving this unchalleneged either....

By 'traditional' you appear to mean evidence based. Which simply means that the approach can be proven to be effective. And it should not be hard for a robust evidence base to rapidly be developed for a single session super effective approach. It happens all the time with new and emerging treatments continually being developed. There is a deep irony in the fact that it is the evidence based practitioner who is being the one told I may have a vested interest, and can't accept I might be wrong. The whole point of science is to try and build new and better evidence and fully accept all the time that current models are all incomplete and may be wrong. That's why an evidence base matters. And I have no skin in the game. Why on earth would I not want an effective single-session protocol achieving rapid and lasting change to be more widely avaibale?

It's those who are wedded to a specific approach who are far less interested in that side of things!

But if "psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists all over the world are cottoning on to how ground-breaking it is" then no doubt the research will be done and if it works better than existing approaches, that will become clear.

At no point have my replies criticised or dismissed the approach. I’ve just said there is no peer reviewed evidence for it. That’s not an opinion it’s just a fact.
 
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Kate Osmaston said:
I'm going to mute you now as I'm aware that nothing will encourage you to look into it further, and I won't waste your or my time further.
Click to expand...
Just a heads up. You won’t be getting a smooth ride on this forum as a new poster with that attitude. Ambers Echo is a highly regarded long term poster.

You might find responses to be more to your liking on other platforms.
 
Tiddlypom said:
Just a heads up. You won’t be getting a smooth ride on this forum as a new poster with that attitude. Ambers Echo is a highly regarded long term poster.

You might find responses to be more to your liking on other platforms.
Click to expand...

There we are then!
…. Now this will either go straight over some people’s heads, but if you know you know 😉
(Completely not aimed at TP btw)
 
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