101 | How To Find Your Way Back To Pleasure: Healing Trauma With Brooke Bralove

Have you ever wondered why intimacy feels harder than it should? Why desire feels distant, or why being fully present in your body during sex feels just out of reach — even when everything else in your life seems fine? Most women in midlife assume it is hormones. And sometimes it is. But sometimes the story runs deeper, back through experiences the body absorbed and quietly held onto.

In this episode of Pleasure in the Pause, Gabriella sits down with licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and AASECT certified sex therapist Brooke Bralove for one of the most important conversations this show has ever had. They go deep into what trauma actually is, how it lives in the nervous system, and how it shapes desire, arousal, and the ability to feel safe in intimacy in ways most women never connect. They also explore a remarkable and fast-working therapy called Accelerated Resolution Therapy, or ART, and how it is helping women finally feel present and safe in their bodies again.

This is a tender topic. If anything in this episode stirs something up for you, please give yourself permission to pause and take whatever space you need.

Brooke Bralove is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and AASECT certified sex therapist with over 20 years in private practice. She specializes in trauma, sexual health, and emotional healing, helping individuals and couples move through anxiety, trauma, and relationship challenges so they can feel more connected, confident, and fully themselves. A trained Accelerated Resolution Therapy practitioner and sought after speaker, Brooke is known for her warmth, her insight, and her gift for making complex emotional and neurological processes feel accessible and real. She practices in Bethesda, Maryland just outside Washington DC. 

Key Insights

• Trauma is broader than most women realize.
• The body holds onto experiences long after the mind has moved on.
• Low libido is not always hormonal. 
• Accelerated Resolution Therapy works fast.
• You are more than your past sexual experiences.

This conversation is for every woman who has ever wondered why pleasure feels so far away — and never thought to look at her history for the answer. The body is not broken. It is protecting itself the only way it knows how. And with the right support, it can learn that it is safe to open again. 

If you're seeking to reclaim your pleasure and vitality, join Gabriella at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.pleasureinthepause.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for this enlightening journey into the heart of female pleasure and empowerment.

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The information shared on Pleasure in the Pause is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host or Pleasure in the Pause.

Transcript

Introduction and episode overview

Gabriella Espinosa 0:00

Welcome to Pleasure in the Pause, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife women to connect with their bodies, pleasure, and power in Perimenopause, Menopause, and beyond. I am your host, Gabriela Espinoza. Each week I sit down with leading medical experts, thought leaders, and trailblazers for bold, thought-provoking conversations that educate, inspire, and challenge the myths we've been taught about our bodies, aging, and sexuality. I also share solo episodes with evidence-based insights and real talk to help you feel informed, supported, and in charge of your health and pleasure in this season of life. Because your pleasure matters in and out of the bedroom. So take a deep breath, settle into your body, and let's begin. Hello, beautiful listeners. Welcome back to Pleasure in the Pause. Have you ever wondered why intimacy feels harder than it should? Why desire can feel distant, or why being fully present in your body during sex feels just out of reach, even when everything else in your life seems fine? So many women in midlife assume it's hormones, and sometimes it is, but sometimes the story runs deeper, back through experiences we were never given language for, moments the body absorbed and quietly held on to. Today we are going somewhere I have been meaning to go on this show for a while. We are talking about trauma, what it really means, how it lives in the body, and how it shapes our experience of pleasure and intimacy in ways most of us never connected. And today I have the perfect person to walk us through all of it. Brooke Braylov is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, ASEC certified sex therapist, an expert in trauma, sexual health, and emotional healing. With over 20 years in private practice, she helps individuals and couples move through anxiety, trauma, and relationship challenges so they can feel more connected, confident, and fully themselves. She is a trained, accelerated resolution therapy practitioner, a sought-after speaker known for her warmth, her insight, and her gift for making complex emotional and neurological processes feel accessible and real. In this conversation, we cover a lot of ground. We talk about what trauma actually is and why so many women don't recognize it in themselves. We explore the different forms it can take, from sexual and medical trauma to the more subtle relational and developmental experiences that quietly shape us. We get into how those experiences live in the nervous system and show up years later in our desire, our arousal, and our ability to feel safe in intimacy. And then we talk about healing, specifically a unique approach to psychotherapy called accelerated resolution therapy or art. What it is, how it works, and how it can help women finally feel safe and present in their bodies again. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that this is a tender topic. If anything in our conversation stirs something up for you, please give yourself permission to pause, breathe, and take whatever space you need. You know yourself best. I know this conversation is going to open something for a lot of you. So let's get started and welcome Brooke

What drew Brooke to trauma and sexual healing

Gabriella Espinosa 3:47

Bray Love to the show. Welcome, Brooke, to Pleasure in the Pause. Thank you so much, Gabriella, for having me. I'm very excited about this conversation. It's a topic that I haven't addressed yet on the show. So I'm so grateful for you coming here and lending all of your expertise and experience. You are a psychotherapist with over 20 years of experience, an asex certified sex therapist and an expert in trauma and sexual healing. What drew you to this beautiful and powerful body of work?

SPEAKER_01 4:24

I became a psychotherapist mostly because I was introduced to therapy at a very young age. And it was an extremely positive experience in my life. My parents got divorced when I was six, and I managed pretty well for a few years, but around age nine, I started showing a lot of anxiety. And my parents were pretty progressive. This is early 80s, and they put me in therapy with a wonderful woman who, in many ways, changed my life personally and then ultimately professionally. Wow. From the age of eight. Yep.

Gabriella Espinosa 5:04

And do you continue with therapy?

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yes. I often tell people I would not trust a psychotherapist who has not done psychotherapy themselves. And I feel extremely strongly about that. There's just no way you can be in the mental health field and not have a full awareness of what you bring to each encounter with a client or a patient. And I actually plan on being in some kind of therapy for the rest of my life to some extent. And I know that's quite radical, as of course, most people go into therapy to get out as quickly as they can. And in fact, as a therapist, that is my goal for my patients. But as a patient myself, I love it. And I love having that space. And I am blessed enough to be able to afford it.

Gabriella Espinosa 6:00

We were talking about before we joined the live stream here, that I'm a lifelong therapy junkie myself. I love exploring different modalities. It's just that feeling of exploring and rediscovering different parts of yourself. And so when I learned that you specialized in this modality called art, which we are going to talk about in a little bit, I was so excited because I hadn't heard about it before. And so I'm here to learn from you. But let's start from the very beginning because as I mentioned, trauma is not something I've addressed on the show

How Brooke defines trauma — and why most women don't recognize it in themselves

Gabriella Espinosa 6:38

yet. And I knew you were the perfect person to talk to about this. A lot of women carry experiences that they've never identified as trauma. How do you define it in your practice?

SPEAKER_01 6:51

So we define trauma in a pretty broad way. And we really define it as anything that happens that occurs outside of yourself that is overwhelming to your nervous system. And not just overwhelming, but too overwhelming. So that it causes a fight, flight, free or fun response. And we often differentiate between big T trauma and little T trauma. Again, some people don't like that. I find that it works well with patients because patients come in and the first thing they say is, I mean, I don't have any real trauma. And what they mean is they haven't been in a war, they haven't been in a school shooting, they haven't been through a hurricane or big things like that. And they believe that because they haven't, they have not experienced trauma. But trauma can be a lot of things. It can be bullying, it can be never having your needs met as a child because your parents had to work all the time. That's not their fault, but it could have caused trauma inside of you because you were home frightened every day when you developed an anxiety disorder because you were always scared being home alone. It can be medical trauma, it can be persistent attachment wounds over an entire childhood. It really shows up in so many different contexts. And frankly, what really matters is how did your nervous system do when that occurred? That thing occurred. Were you able to regulate yourself, or did you go into that traumatic reaction, which again is this fight, flight, freezer, fawn?

Gabriella Espinosa 8:54

That's such a great explanation. Those nervous system responses that you mentioned, I've talked about it here on the show a little bit, nervous system regulation and how to recognize those and how to recognize the sensations that come up. That's part of our day-to-day experience, I feel, in this modern world that we're living in. I think when the word trauma came more into normal kind of parlance after COVID, right? Because we all recognize that was a traumatic experience that we all lived in. Now I hear it, even with my own kids, the word trauma thrown around. Oh my God, that was so traumatic. And honey, what was it? And fortunately for my kids, they recognize those feelings of flight, freeze, flight. And it's those nervous system responses. Maybe the experience wasn't fortunately a school shooting or a war. Although, given this current situation that we're living in, just receiving news of those things through the airwaves can cause those nervous system responses. So when you see someone, are they coming to you with those lived experiences? They're not hearing it through the news, they're not hearing a story. They have actually lived through traumatic experiences.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Yes, many of the people I work with have, they do have these kind of big T traumas. I've worked with combat veterans, I've worked with people who witnessed friends dying in a car bomb, kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, school shooting. I did unfortunately, there was a school shooting several years ago in the DC area, and I provided this accelerated resolution therapy to many of the teachers, parents, and students. So we really do see that. You do also make an important point, which is we are all living these little micro traumas every day by what we are exposed to on the internet and on the news. And some people find it traumatic. And again, some people don't. And that's where you look at their response. Are you too overwhelmed? Does your brain go offline after watching this? Or can you regain your composure, say, that was terrible? I wish I hadn't seen that, but I'm okay. Nervous system tells you we're not okay, we're at risk right now, often based on previous trauma, then that is a traumatic experience for you.

Gabriella Espinosa 11:38

And so what does it look like when it walks into your therapy room? What are you noticing in a client that tells you this is something I've experienced and that you begin working with?

SPEAKER_01 11:49

I see a lot of chronic illness,

How trauma lives in the body and shows up as chronic pain and low libido

SPEAKER_01 11:52

a lot of chronic pain. So the body keeps the score, as we know, and the body does hold on to things long after the memory has left us. So people will often not have any memory of something occurring that could be causing current pain. For instance, I had a woman with six years of severe pelvic pain, literally only able to get her pinky fingernail inside her vagina because it was so tight for so long and she was in constant pain. She kept saying, I didn't have any trauma, I wasn't sexually assaulted, I wasn't raped. And when we did accelerated resolution therapy, she was able to find an experience when she was eight years old, in which her mother was beating her. And her body remembered that is when we started to grip and shield ourselves. And when you're trying to shield yourself, you're very likely holding your pelvic floor very tight to get as small as possible. That was not going on anymore. She was not being beaten by her mother anymore. She was in her 30s, but her body had not learned that it was safe to relax. And so we did accelerated resolution therapy, two sessions only. And she went on and really had no pelvic pain and was actually able to get pregnant with a turkey baster, but that was a lot larger than her pinky.

Gabriella Espinosa 13:24

Oh, wow. And this also applies to medical trauma that you talked about earlier, right? Painful gynecological exams, difficult births, procedures women are just expected to go through, like cervical smears. Does the body store those experiences in the same way? A hundred percent, yes.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

The body stores that type of thing. And often it's usually the first time. And so when you find someone who always hates going to the gynecologist or something and they avoid it, we all have there's a mom or an aunt who's, I never go, I never go. I bet if you ask that person a little more, they either would have had some abuse, sexual abuse in their background or assault, or simply a really crappily done first pap smear in which they were in pain, they were in distress, and they were not listened to, and the person did not stop. And that then gets imprinted in the body so that the body is gonna clench those pelvic floor muscles, and that vagina is not opening for a speculum, and so they don't go back.

Gabriella Espinosa 14:36

And what about low libido? We often connect low libido to hormones, and you're pointing to something that probably runs underneath that. How perhaps experiences from years ago, even ones we never label as traumatic, quietly can shape desire and arousal. How do you see that in your practice?

SPEAKER_01 15:00

We definitely see early trauma showing up with low libido. And again, not necessarily big tea trauma, but little tea trauma. So maybe your first sexual experience just wasn't great. Maybe all you recall is pain. And maybe you've been having intercourse with a partner for 20 years that has mostly been painful. Again, how is the body going to adjust to that? The body is gonna say, we know this is painful, so let's shut it down. Let's shut down lubrication, let's shut down the vaginal opening. And so that person is going to avoid sex. Why would you want to have painful sex? If it's painful, then libido is going to go down with the pain rising. And so it makes perfect sense when you actually deconstruct it, why these two things go together. The other thing I see a lot of, and this really saddens me, is that still women in their 40s and 50s that I work with low libido or sexual pain still minimize experiences that were non-consensual. And they constantly come in and say, I wasn't raped. I want to be really clear, it wasn't violent, as if rape has to be violent to be considered rape or non-consensual sexual assault. That really destroys me each time I hear it. And so I do try to do a little psychoeducation and just try to validate their experience of it. It's less about what we label it, but actually validating that sounds really hard. That sounds like it was hard to get out of your mind and specifically maybe out of your body. Do you think that when your partner touches you and you win, that there might be some little elements of that still lurking? And when you ask the brain through accelerated resolution therapy, it will almost always point back to an earlier traumatic experience, whether it was painful, non-consensual, violent or not. That is not important. If something is non-consensual or even coerced, how many women have had sex that they've been coerced into? It's not that they didn't quite consent, but they were coerced. And there's not a woman on this planet who can say they haven't had sex or been coerced in some way, in my opinion. And that breaks my heart.

Gabriella Espinosa 17:49

Yeah, this whole conversation about consent and having those consensual conversations definitely wasn't part of my generation Gen X growing up. And so we didn't know we had that agency, that power. And I'm so glad that's finally coming into modern parlance in terms of our relationships. I know my kids know about that. They talk about it all the time. And they even put up their boundaries. You're not allowed to ask me about this or that, right? We can't talk about that. I'm like, okay, okay. But I think we feel, especially if we've been in long-term relationships and we've been accustomed to maybe some women may call it having mercy sex or just obligation. Yes. And yeah, they do it out of obligation, not really because it's something they want to do. And it and I think that definitely requires a conversation of consent, a conversation of how you'd like to be touched. And I'm so grateful for therapists like you who teach us that, who teach their clients that, and start to have those conversations with them. Is that a big part of your practice, coaching and to have those consensual conversations?

The sexual health history Brooke takes every client through

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Yeah, it's not as much about consent, usually, because a lot of these women are in loving marriages. But what I do spend a lot of time helping women do is to figure out what the heck they even like sexually, or what brings them pleasure, or what even is pleasure? Women feel so unentitled to pleasure that when you ask them what brings you pleasure outside of sex, they often have no idea. That pisses me off. We start with what about the sun on your face? How does that feel? What about when you cuddle with your dog? Is that pleasurable? What about when you're dancing? And so I'm often asking people, what lights you up from the inside out? Do more of that. And sex is a wonderful way that can light people up from the inside out and the outside in.

Gabriella Espinosa 20:08

Absolutely. So, how do we get there? Obviously, couples, women come to you because they're experiencing some challenge in their sexual relationships and they're feeling lit up from the inside out. How do you begin to understand what's really at the root of it if they don't understand it themselves or have an answer to that question? What gives me pleasure?

SPEAKER_01 20:30

We start with simple basic exercises. I'll give an example just in terms of if I were working with an individual woman who came in and said, I have low libido, I have some pain, I don't enjoy sex, I never have. That's very common to hear women say they've never enjoyed it. Well, again, when you probe, it's painful, she's not orgasming. So yeah, it's not fun. It's not pleasurable. It does feel like a duty. And so I do a whole sexual sort of health inventory. And we go as far back as what did your parents call genitals in the home? If your parents were saying wee wee and pee pee and all these little pet names, that sends a message, a, that it's cutesy, but b, that we don't even use the proper anatomical name. It's a body part. We can just name it like anything else. And of course, now we know we've been saying vagina when we really mean vulva. And so even that, even starting to teach a woman, did you know that's actually the whole area is actually your vulva? They have no idea. We start simple. We start with when did you first start masturbating? Some women have never masturbated, others started when they were one or two, and it's all normal and okay. So it's a lot of psychoeducation, a lot of understanding what they're Childhood messages were from parents. And I always tell people people say, Oh, my parents never said anything negative about sex. And then I'll say, Did they say anything at all? You know, nothing, absolutely not a word. That's a very loud message to not say a word. That means sex is secret, it's silent, and it's shameful. And then you throw in potential religious upbringing and religious messaging. And again, some of it is quite harsh, depending on how you grew up. But if you learn you're going to hell for masturbating, what is that going to do to your development of a healthy sexual relationship with yourself, even? And so there are all these different factors, and they do look different in each person, but they do often follow a theme. And my job is to create a timeline of their lives to really understand at what point things may have gotten a little bit just it didn't go the way we would hope. It weren't optimal, let's say.

Gabriella Espinosa 23:07

So, so important to start with those narratives that we carry in our minds and what we

What Accelerated Resolution Therapy is and how it works

Gabriella Espinosa 23:13

grew up with. And you're talking mindset too, right? So, do you typically start with talk therapy and then move into accelerated resolution therapy, art as you call it? Take us through that journey and please explain to us what is accelerated resolution therapy.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

Yeah, well, I'll start with that because it's hard to talk about without really understanding what we're talking about. ART, you can call it art or ART. ART is an evidence-based treatment modality that uses rapid eye movement and something called voluntary image replacement to change the way the brain stores distressing images, memories, experiences, and then the negative physical sensations that occur when you're triggered. It's really like rewriting and creating a new movie to an experience that you've had in the past. And in ART, we say keep the knowledge, lose the pain. You're never going to forget the facts of what happened to you, but your brain, your body, your soul, your heart has no need to hold on to the images or the words that were said or the beliefs that you developed from a particular experience. It is unbelievably fast. Often we can cure things in one or two sessions. The average is usually between one and five sessions for a specific thing you're coming in with. And what I find, which I kind of love, is that when someone realizes how well art works, they're like, let's work on my OCD and let's work on my insomnia. And I really want to start exercising every day. And oh yeah, I was bullied. I never thought about that. And then they just, I literally think of it like one of those shooting games at a carnival where that thing just go, you do the water pistol, and it just goes right down. We're just knocking those things out. We're doing it fast and we're doing it efficiently. And it's so important to remember that with trauma, you do not need to talk about it over and over again. That is actually re-traumatizing. And in ART, there's very little talking and very little re-traumatization. And that is what makes it quite different than many other modalities.

Gabriella Espinosa 25:48

And so is a client looking at a computer screen. I'm what comes to mind is EMDR, which is another modality. Maybe you can compare art and EMDR, which both use eye movement, but you've described art as more kind of structured and predictable.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

Yes. So we do use eye movements like EMDR, and we're trained to actually use our hand just going back and forth. I uh would prefer to save my shoulder for the rest of my life. And so I do use a light bar. It's actually in the corner back there. I do use a light bar when I see people in person. And then ART works equally well virtually or in person, which still shocks me, but it's 100% the truth, especially as I've had clients who really do both, depending whether they're in town or whether they feel like getting to my office or not. And it works equally well. And in that case, we we have a program that is just a blue dot on a gray background, and you just follow it with your eyes. So there are several differences between EMDR and ART. And I think this is a very common question. So it's important to understand. Can you explain to the audience what EMDR is? So I'm not an expert in EMDR. So I really just want to say that it is another treatment modality that also uses eye movements or bilateral stimulation, but it works with memories and cognitions, whereas in ART, we work with images and sensations. So you really are attacking the problem from different areas. The other main difference is that EMDR does not follow a very clear scripted protocol. It doesn't mean you don't need training for it, you do, but it meanders. Whereas ART opens something up, closes it down before you leave the office. There is an actual resolution at the end of every session. So almost never does somebody leave feeling worse. And I have heard from people that in EMDR is sometimes it opens up this big kind of Pandora's box, and then the person can feel uncontained in between sessions. And we don't find that with ART. Another difference is that ART uses a specific number of eye movements, whereas EMDR, they vary that. Sometimes even before they've learned the next step. The brain wants to heal and it sometimes goes ahead and just does the next step. And I'm like, your brain just moved on to the next step, and I didn't even have to prompt you. Really cool things that the brain does to heal itself.

Gabriella Espinosa 29:16

And so you mentioned that art focuses on images and sensations rather than narrative. What are we doing with those sensations? I just actually recorded a solo podcast episode on how sensations are the language of the body and how we were never taught to speak this language. We were born with the innate ability to identify sensations, probably as little kids, right? But then we lose that ability as we are conditioned to produce, you know, strive, optimize, and then stress, overwhelm, shifting hormones take over, and then forget it. We lose sense of sensations. So how are you getting people to get in touch with sensations? Are you having them identify them, name them? I'm so curious.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

In ART, we go back and forth between two tasks. One, we're usually imagining or seeing something in our mind, like let's use a robbery. So someone comes in, they are having trouble. This did happen, of course. A man came in three weeks before he had been held up at gunpoint, walking around his neighborhood. He was unable to sleep, unable to function at work, crying a lot, depressed, highly anxious, a lot of difficulty just leaving his apartment or even coming back. And what we had him do is alternate between seeing that incident in his mind. And then the second task is scanning your body for sensations. And this is all done while doing eye movements. And during the eye movements, there's actually no talking. He's not reporting to me what happened verbally, he's seeing it like a movie in his head, which frankly is probably the way he is experiencing it through nightmares and flashbacks. He's seeing it. And that's what's very traumatizing is getting rid of those images. And so we have them do that. And then I ask him to scan his body and ask him what sensations he's having. Now, some people know exactly what they're having. They'll immediately say, My heart is beating out of my chest. Some people will say, I feel numb. Whatever they're feeling, that's what we work with. You basically try to use the eye movements, which are inherently calming, literally, just doing them will calm you down. And we begin to have those negative sensations decrease throughout the session. And then we desensitize the person to that so that maybe when they see that scene again in their mind, maybe it feels a little less acute or it's a little less vivid. And then we have them remember it the way they wish it had happened. It could be that to feel strong and capable, he wants to see himself kicking that guy's butt and calling the police, and the police come and take the guy to jail. Maybe all he needs to do is have that never have happened, and he went out and had a wonderful time with his friends, and it was a beautiful night, and they sat on a rooftop and had cocktails. I don't know what the man needs to heal himself, but his brain does, and his brain will show him what he needs. When you're imagining kicking a robber's ass or whatever, you're gonna probably feel really good and strong. Might feel excitement in your chest or a tingly sensation. And we store that in the body so that the person leaves, they can report exactly what happened to them. Three weeks ago, I was robbed at gunpoint. But they will have no attachment, no emotional attachment to the experience, the memory, and most importantly, they will not be triggered in the moment. They just talk about it as if it's just neutral. That person was back to work in I think two or three days. I don't even know. I think I saw that person twice. I never needed to see them again.

Gabriella Espinosa 33:42

That is fascinating. So that replacing the image of what actually happened, that's the voluntary image replacement aspect of art. That's right. Okay, so they're just what it's coming up with. They're voluntary, they're coming up with those images. And so, what's happening neurologically? Is this kind of a neuro replastization? What do you call it? What does moving the eyes and then changing that distressing image actually doing to the way the memory is stored?

What is actually happening in the brain during ART

SPEAKER_01 34:14

First of all, I always say I'm not a brain expert, but I will do my best. So, what is happening with rapid eye movement that replicates REM sleep? What we know about REM sleep is that's when memories are reconsolidated. And so the way I think about it is we are taking a process that usually goes on when you're unconscious. And basically, we're doing it while you're conscious, but we're doing something in a structured way so that you end up with a good movie to store. And so we're taking that window of opportunity, and that's exactly what we are doing. We are creating new neural pathways that are positive, and we're cementing it by seeing it in our minds, storing it in our brain, and feeling it in our body. And so that's really what's happening. You're taking control of how memory gets reconsolidated with accelerated resolution therapy.

Gabriella Espinosa 35:13

That is so powerful. I feel that is an excellent example of how the body is so intelligent and able to reprocess such a traumatizing event and really create new neural pathways so that you can experience and live differently in your body. You say it works really fast. For a traumatizing event like a sexual assault, how many sessions does it typically take?

SPEAKER_01 35:41

So, for single incident trauma, literally one incident that you come in for, I rarely see someone for more than two sessions. And I mean extreme cases. I had an older gentleman, a man in his 70s, who unfortunately found his son dead in a bathtub. No matter what he did, it was months later, he could not get rid of the image. It just would not leave him. And he was really haunted. He needed one session to get rid of it. And he replaced it with something that his brain chose. And so now when he thinks about his son, he doesn't see that one image. He sees the image that he decided he wanted to see. And his whole life has changed. And to be able to give somebody that gift is really an unbelievable experience as a therapist, which is why I really do encourage therapists to get trained in something, you know, like ART, because it's so satisfying to be able to help people so quickly. When, you know, I'm a long-term talk therapist. I see people for many years sometimes, and progress can be just it's certainly difficult to measure. And in ART, it's not difficult at all. You find out how distressed they are about something at the beginning of the session on a scale of one to 10, and then you pull them again at the end. And you can have someone who's at a 10 and they're down to a zero, no problem. So single incident trauma actually is the easiest thing to treat. I know that sounds strange, but it's really true.

Gabriella Espinosa 37:26

And as I'm hearing you speak, what's coming up for me is okay, I get how you can replace the distressing image and how that can work very quickly. But what do you do with the emotional burden, say, of a death of a loved one, like you just explained? Okay, you can get rid of the image, the physical image, but you're still left with the grief, the loss. How do you deal with that?

SPEAKER_01 37:51

I'm so glad you bring up grief. Grief is actually one of my favorite things to work on, not because it's the easiest thing in the world, but because, again, the gift you give to your patients in changing how they relate to someone's death. And that's really what happened. So I'll give you a great example. I had a woman, and her brother had died five years earlier. And every time she thought about him, the only thing she could think of is I didn't get to the hospital in time. I didn't get on an airplane and go see him before he died. Not only could she not even grieve properly, she certainly couldn't celebrate his life because it was so associated with guilt and shame. And so you never change facts. There's no way to change the fact that someone died. But what you can change is everything surrounding it. So I invited her to have the type of ending, see in her mind, the type of ending she wished she had. So she saw herself getting on a plane and being by his bedside. And I said, tell him all the things you wish you had been able to tell him. And so the first time she did that voluntary image replacement, she did it. But I could tell the sensations in her body weren't quite positive. They were a little bit more neutral. And I don't go for neutral. I go for positive. I go all the way and I keep going until I usually get that desired result because I don't want to be a perfectionist anywhere else. But in ART, I like being a perfectionist. So what I then realized is she needed to hear from him. And so I said, What does he want you to know before he dies? And so she was able, and I get goosebumps, she was able to hear these beautiful words that she had always wished she had heard from him. And so her grief drastically changed. Every time she thought of him, she smiled now because she had that kind of last experience that was now in her brain. It radically changed, not the facts, but the way she thought about herself and the way she thought about him in his passing.

Gabriella Espinosa 40:13

That's so beautiful. And I think that's the thing about grief and losing someone, right? We're never or very rarely given those opportunities to relive or re-experience that person as we wish we would have. And I think we live with that, that remorse, that regret eats away at us. And so I love the way you explained that and how art can help address that. Are there presentations art is particularly well suited for that might surprise people, things we wouldn't automatically think of as trauma-related?

SPEAKER_01 40:51

First of all, I want to be very clear. ART is not just for trauma. It is actually for anything you would go to regular talk therapy for. And I didn't believe that when I first got trained in 2018, but I believe that wholeheartedly now. So some common things that it works on are insomnia, OCD, phobias, ADHD, attachment wounds, developing patterns that you want to in your relationship, interacting differently, being less bothered by something, parenting. You don't want to be angry as much, then we can work on that. So it literally works on anything. You have a terrible belief, I'm not enough. You walk around the world with that. It can change that type of thing because usually that started somewhere. And so you ask your brain to show you when was the first time you remember having the sensations associated with I'm not enough. And sometimes the person is absolutely shocked. They'll be like, I don't know. I just thought of this spelling being fourth grade where I got it wrong and my mom yelled at me. And that's where it's from. So you clear that up and then you work to make sure it's good in the present, and you kind of update the brain to where you are now, and then that shifts or changes quickly. So it's well suited for lots of different things. And I did have one kind of fun one recently, and I say fun because it was used for good reason, positive things. I had not one, but two patients getting married in the same month, and both came in back-to-back weeks to say they were super anxious and they were really worried they weren't going to enjoy their wedding. We practiced that wedding. We saw that wedding going absolutely haywire, berserk, their parents are mad, the wedding cake falls, you name it. But then I had them replace it the way they wish it goes. And that wasn't just about a perfect wedding cake or perfect makeup. I asked them to focus on how they wanted to feel surrounded by their loved ones so that they could refocus their attention on things that really mattered. And they both reported absolutely enjoying their weddings and really felt that they were well prepared because of the ART session.

Gabriella Espinosa 43:30

I love that application of it because again, going back to this idea of connecting with sensations, right? You usually do it to tap in or tune in to how you're feeling in the moment, but using it as a way of calling in or manifesting, for lack of a better word, to how you want to feel in a particular instance or event in your life. I guess you can also apply that. I often ask women in my coaching work, how is it that you want to feel in this next stage of life in midlife? And you know, we all conjure up these images: powerful, sexy, vibrant. And it could sometimes be hard to hold on to those things. We're stretched so thinly. And I find myself sometimes letting go of those images. I'm like, what happened to that woman I wanted to become? But I love that you can use this as a way to really call forth how you want to live, how you want to experience yourself, how you want to be in relationship with other people. So beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

Well, and here's, you know, I what I really want to say is it's not hard to hold on to a future vision of yourself when you pair it with eye movements. The magic is the eye movements. The eye movements are what change the way the brain is storing it and match calm with positive things. People have been doing this for centuries. What's a guided meditation? Next time you're doing a guided meditation, move your eyes back and forth. I bet it'll stick better inside your brain. And so I do eye movements constantly. I do eye movements when I'm at the dentist and it's very unpleasant. I usually just close my eyes and I move my eyes back and forth. It calms me down. It works great for pain. It works great to fall asleep. And you can often get away with it. I'll say to my daughter before a big test, if she's anxious, I always say, go in a bathroom stall and just do some eye movements for a little bit. And it changes things. It just does. And it's science, but it's also magic at the same time.

Gabriella Espinosa 45:50

I love it so much. I'm finding this so fascinating,

How ART helps couples rebuild desire and intimacy

Gabriella Espinosa 45:54

Brooke. I want to come back to the topic of intimacy and ask you how does this modality play out in a relationship situation when a couple comes to see you and they're having issues with desire, bringing back the spark into their marriage, things have gone downhill and with their sex lives. How does this help?

SPEAKER_01 46:20

Let's give an example. Let's say, because this is mostly what I see. I do work with mostly heterosexual cis couples. So let's say the woman comes in and we're doing couples therapy ongoing, and we've talked about ways they can spice things up, and yet nothing seems to be shifting. I might suggest ART for the woman. And what I would do is I would have her see in her mind all the scenes of either unpleasant sex, boring sex, painful sex, sex she wasn't really interested in having. And if she does a montage of all of those times, again, you're gonna come up with negative sensations. And I will, this is really true. When you're working with sexual components in ART, there are sensations in the genitals, positive and negative. So I have a woman who has difficulty orgasming, and she can actually experience some pulsing in her vulva during the positive scene that she's imagining. So it really is incredible the way it literally works in the moment. But in this case, I would have her go through all those things. Then we'd again have desensitize her to that scene. So she thinks about it, sees it a little differently. And then I'd have her replace it with every sexual fantasy, 8,000 orgasms on a beach in Tahiti, and then we store that in the brain. And it helps. And then how does that play out in her relationship? She will find greater desire. Her libido will improve. I once did a script with a woman who was annoyed with her husband, and she had not had sex with him in any real way in six years. We got rid of those annoyances using ART. She went home and had sex with him and said it was unbelievable. That took one session. And she loved him more.

Gabriella Espinosa 48:39

Oh, I love that. I love that. Because yeah, I understand that. I understand. Okay, you're holding on to a lot of this resentment of the way things are and things are just boring and meh, and that's you just think that's the way things are gonna be, right? So you help replace those images, that mindset with more positive, sexier images, and women believe them so they can really it kind of almost enliven their whole system with those sensations that they experience in your office, so that they can then just move forward with that. Is that how it works?

SPEAKER_01 49:17

Here's what I would say the brain is changing. So the brain knows that it's more turned on. That's what you need with libido. We all know the brain is the biggest sexual organ there is, and specifically for women. If women are not there in their brain, it ain't happening. And so their brains say it's not that they necessarily believe the scene. If they were to talk about it, they might not even believe it, but they gave their brain the experience of seeing it. And the brain knows so that when you're in a sexual situation again, the brain's like, oh, we know, we predict this is gonna be good. And their libido goes up. It's just a fact.

Gabriella Espinosa 50:06

That's amazing. And then that gets stored in the body as sensations, and so they can recall those sensations again when they're in an intimate experience.

SPEAKER_01 50:16

Yes, you're looking to break the pattern. And once you break the pattern and you help a woman believe that there's something that can help her, all the other stuff will, all the other sex therapy homework I had given them will work better because now there's the willingness because they've had their libidos back, and they probably had more pleasure because they'd imagined it.

Gabriella Espinosa 50:41

Oh my gosh. I love the way that you explain it because yeah, you really connect that brain experience with that bodyfelt experience. And it's both, I feel like you need both, right? But you need that brain to switch on and believe that for the body to then come online. I love exactly for someone who's listening to this and thin, I want to explore art. How do they find a trained therapist?

SPEAKER_01 51:06

There's a directory of ART trained therapists at accelerated resolution therapy.com. You can look by state, by country. I was just at a virtual conference on ART, and I think there are 13,000 practitioners in the US.

Gabriella Espinosa 51:27

I was looking at the directory too before we hopped on. And I was just looking in my area. There were quite a few. I was really surprised that there are so many really employing this incredible modality. And beyond art specifically, what should someone look for in a trauma-informed sex therapist? Should they combine those two together, make sure to try to find someone who's doing art, but also someone who's trauma-informed?

SPEAKER_01 51:54

Absolutely. If you know you have big T trauma, little T trauma, you should never see a therapist of any kind who is not trauma-informed. And people self-identify and often have the experience in the background, but you really have to have someone who understands the difficulties with trauma, how they show up, how people get triggered in session or not, and someone who's quite skilled. And most ART therapists, they are dealing with a lot of trauma. Now, with ART, do I know that they do a lot of talk therapy with trauma? I don't know, but I certainly would hope that most of us are trauma-informed.

Gabriella Espinosa 52:46

Yeah, it would seem like it has to be a very important component of working with art. And what about you, Brooke? How can people find you? Are you taking new clients?

SPEAKER_01 52:57

Yeah, people can find me on my website, brookbraylove.com. I'm also on Instagram and Facebook at Brookbray Love Psychotherapy. And I'm really proud of what we're building here in Bethesda, Maryland, right outside DC. I have two associates who are ART trained, and a third who's about to get trained. And we're really trying to show up in this area as the premier place to do brief trauma work that's effective and frankly life-changing.

Gabriella Espinosa 53:30

I'll make sure to include all the links in the show notes. Before we end, what's one thing you wish every midlife woman knew about her own history and its relationship to pleasure today?

SPEAKER_01 53:44

I think I wish midlife women knew that they are more than their past sexual experiences, that they can heal from crappy sexual experiences, sexual assault, childhood molestation, anything, painful sex, and that they absolutely have the power to create a healthier sexual relationship with themselves and anyone else they choose to share it with.

Gabriella Espinosa 54:18

That's so beautiful. Thank you so much for that message of hope and posity. It's so uplifting. Thank you, Brooke. You've been so informative. I have loved learning about art today. And yeah, you've given me a new modality I am so curious to explore. So thank you so much for being on the show today. And thank you so much for having me. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Pleasure in the Pause. Want to help me spread more pleasure in the world? Please hit subscribe to the podcast and share this episode with a friend, a sister, or any woman you care about. Because when we share these conversations, we remind each other we are not alone. Together, we create ripples of empowerment and support that reach far beyond ourselves. Your support means the world to me. Thank you. Remember, your pleasure matters. The information shared on this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only, and it's not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host or pleasure in the pause.