What is BWRT?                           

(an excerpt from BWRT.org)

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            BrainWorking Recursive Therapy® was created in 2011 by Terence Watts, a therapist, author of many books and training courses and principal of the Essex Institute in Essex, UK. Like many great ideas it was born out of a moment of inspiration while reading about some experiments carried out in 1983 which appeared to show that we don't actually have free will in the way we usually think of it. More than that, it showed that decisions were made and acted upon by our mental processes before we become consciously aware of them.

It was immediately evident that this process accounted for a huge number of the psychological difficulties which so many people have to put up with, and obvious, too, that with some research it could provide the basis for a profound therapeutic intervention, something more powerful and effective than anything that existed to date. Terence had for some time been working on an idea to work with several complicated issues:

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• Why we sometimes can't stop ourselves doing things.

• Why we sometimes feel that we just cannot do something we would really like to.

• Why we so often limit ourselves from getting on with life.

• Why we sometimes give up on something without even trying properly to do it.

• Why we sometimes fear something when there's no real reason to do so.

• Why some situations 'trigger' uncomfortable feelings, even though we have no idea why.

• Why therapy doesn't always work as we want it to.

 

BWRT® works with a different part of the brain from that which any other therapy does; where many neuroscience-based therapies mention how they work directly with the amygdala and the limbic system, BWRT® works with a part of the brain that 'fires up' long before the limbic system even gets started.

            In fact, by the time the limbic system is involved, the physical body has already started to react, already commenced whatever action or psychological process that past experience has indicated is needed... even if that experience is out of date and no longer relevant. It's a kind of 'blind obedience'.

BWRT® does it's work in that 'cognitive gap' between an action starting and conscious recognition of that action. We actually work directly with that reptilian complex, to change the response to patterns of input and we do this by using the same automatic processes by which it learns the patterns it responds to in the first place - but we get it to wait for further information instead of responding immediately. All we have to do then is ensure that the new information is instantaneously preferable and therefore instantaneously accepted.

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