Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) and EMDR often appear on the same list of trauma treatments, including the clinical therapies at Redefine Wellness & Treatment. Both work with traumatic memories, and both pay close attention to what the body does when a memory is stirred up. They start from different ideas about what has gone wrong, and the overlap ends sooner than the shared vocabulary suggests.
Two different starting points
EMDR, developed by Francine Shapiro, rests on a model called adaptive information processing. A traumatic memory that was stored without being fully processed keeps firing with its original charge, and the therapy aims to help the brain file it like other memories. The reprocessing sets most people picture are one of EMDR's eight phases, not the whole of it.
DBR, developed by Frank Corrigan, aims at an earlier moment. His model proposes that a traumatic moment unfolds in order: a quick tensing of the muscles that turn the eyes, head and neck toward or away from what grabbed attention, sometimes a jolt of shock, and only then emotion. Corrigan links each step to structures deep in the midbrain and brainstem. Whether that brainstem model behind DBR is right has not been confirmed.
So DBR is not EMDR with the eye movements taken out. It grew from a different model, it aims at a different point in the response, and its researchers describe it as a nonverbal, somatic method: the working material is the body's first reaction, not the story of what happened.
What each asks of you in a session
The difference is easiest to see in what a person is actually asked to do.
The two also differ in how much is said aloud. EMDR invites some discussion between sets. In the DBR trial, memories that surfaced were allowed to play out in the mind, and the step-by-step account of what happens in a DBR session shows how little talking that involved.
The evidence is far from equal
EMDR has a large research base. A 2024 review in the Journal of Traumatic Stress counts more than 30 published randomized trials. Guideline panels weigh that evidence differently.
The 2023 VA and Department of Defense guideline gives EMDR its top grade, “Strong for,” together with cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure. It also recommends those individual trauma-focused psychotherapies ahead of medication.
The American Psychological Association's guideline, updated in February 2025, is more reserved. It recommends cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy as first-line treatments. EMDR sits on its second line: the panel “suggests” it, a conditional recommendation the guideline uses where the evidence is less extensive or weaker.
DBR has one randomized trial with published results. In 2023, Kearney and colleagues, Corrigan among them, reported on 54 adults with PTSD: 29 had eight weekly 90-minute DBR sessions by video, and 25 waited. The DBR group improved substantially more than the waitlist group. The paper is an interim analysis of a trial that is still running, and the authors list its limits: they compared DBR only with a waitlist, the sample was small, and the analysis could not confirm the mechanism. Neither guideline mentions DBR.
The authors also wrote that their results suggest DBR's effectiveness “may be comparable” to established PTSD treatments. In the same paper they say comparison studies are needed to find out.
Has anyone tested DBR against EMDR?
Not yet. As of October 21, 2026, there are three DBR studies on the ClinicalTrials.gov registry, and none compares DBR with EMDR or any other established therapy. The trial behind the published results compares DBR with a waitlist. A 10-person study in complex dissociative disorders has no comparison group. The newest, recruiting current and former military members in Alberta, Canada, compares DBR with eight weeks of usual care.
EMDR's research shows it helps many people with PTSD. It does not show that EMDR would outperform DBR for you.
Choosing between them with a clinician
The choice rests on your history and a clinician's judgment. These questions make that conversation more useful:
- Have I had EMDR before, and what happened: no change, change that faded, or sessions that felt like too much?
- When a memory is stirred up, do I tend to flood with feeling, or go numb and far away?
- What does the research for each option look like for someone with my history?
- How will we tell whether it is helping, and when would we change course?
- Would I have been excluded from the DBR trial, given its exclusions and safety record?
Redefine offers both therapies, along with Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing and Internal Family Systems. Which of them belongs in a plan is decided after an assessment, not before it.
The name refers to the orienting response, the reflex that turns your eyes, head and neck toward something unexpected before you know what it is. In Corrigan's model, DBR works with what is left of that reflex. In the published trial, participants were encouraged to close their eyes or lower their gaze, so the eyes come into it only as a place where tension can be felt.
It can be, but no study has tested DBR in people EMDR did not help, so nobody can predict the result. The published trial's entry criteria did not mention past treatment, and it excluded people already in more intensive therapy, such as exposure therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy. What “did not help” looked like for you is the most useful thing to bring to that conversation.
Some people work with more than one trauma therapy during treatment, but no published study has looked at DBR and EMDR together. The DBR trial's authors name DBR as an add-on to other therapies as a question for future research. Whether to combine them, and in what order, is a clinical decision made with your treatment team as you go.
No. In the APA guideline, second-line still means the panel suggests offering EMDR over no treatment or usual care. The tier describes how strong the panel judged the evidence to be. It is not a finding that EMDR fails or causes harm, and both guidelines come down in favor of using it.
The word comes up often, and it comes from the model: DBR aims at the first physical reaction in a traumatic moment, which the model places in the brainstem, earlier than the memory and emotion EMDR works with. Earlier in a proposed sequence is not the same as more effective, so “deeper” describes the theory behind DBR, not a result anyone has measured.
