Right Brain Psychotherapy is grounded in Schore’s regulation theory, an interpersonal neurobiological model of emotional and social development from early human beginnings and across the lifespan. Drawing upon various scientific and clinical disciplines the theory describes how the structure and function of the right mind and brain are indelibly shaped by experiences, especially those embedded in emotional relationships, and how communicating right brains align and synchronize their neural activities with other right brains. These experiences of interpersonal synchrony are a central focus of Right Brain Psychotherapy.

Consonant with the clinical principle that the right brain is dominant in psychotherapy my work demonstrates that the core clinical skills that optimize effective psychotherapy are right (and not left) brain implicit functions.

With clinical experience this expertise includes an enhanced ability:

to co-create an interpersonally synchronized right brain-to-right brain emotional dialogue beneath the words with a variety of patients

to empathically receive the patient’s rapid implicit (unconscious) nonverbal communications in synchronized mutual regressions

to sensitively monitor very slight changes in the other’s emotional expressions

to intuitively track physiological variations in the patient’s emotional prosody, facial expressions, and gestures

to interoceptively read one’s own physiological autonomic responses to the patient’s emotional communications

The art of psychotherapy also includes an adaptive capacity:

to transiently shift from the verbal left into the nonverbal right brain and the deeper core of the personality

to co-create a relational context of implicit safety and trust with the patient

to be able to work with strong, traumatic affect and relational trauma, typically found in personality and psychiatric disorders

to engage in stressful dyadic transference-countertransference and rupture and repair transactions

to be intuitively aware of one’s own spontaneous bodily-based subjective and intersubjective experience

to offer well-timed interventions and interpretations that can impact the patient’s unconscious levels

to interactively regulate the patient’s dysregulated affective states, across a spectrum of psychopathologies

Furthermore, all therapeutic techniques sit atop these implicit relational and emotional skills.

Right Brain Psychotherapy focuses on how to work more directly and effectively with bodily-based emotions within the therapeutic relationship, especially in “heightened affective moments” of the session. Attention is also placed upon working with the defenses of right brain dissociation and left brain repression that blot out strong emotions from consciousness. This central focus on right (and not left) brain affect regulation in the co-created psychotherapy relationship shifts the clinical focus from a reasoned, coherent cognitive narrative to a spontaneous emotion-laden conversation. In this manner the clinical emphasis moves from objective cognitive insight to the subjective change mechanisms embedded in the emotional attachment bond of the therapeutic relationship itself.

For more on right brain-to-right brain psychotherapy see the clinical descriptions under each of Dr. Schore’s books.