FAQs

Terence Watts, the creator of BWRT, wrote the following short article to explain the difference between BWRT and other styles of therapy. I hope you find it helpful, and don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions at all.

These are not full descriptions of each therapy, just the crux of how they work.

CBT – Cognitive behavioural Therapy. This works by getting you to rationalise and reorganise your conscious thoughts and usually to journal them daily. Those thoughts arrive in consciousness after a journey through hundreds of thousand neural connections – by some estimates, a journey of fifty metres – in the unconscious parts of the brain, getting involved with many unconnected processes. It's based on research from 90+ years ago. Can be effective but does not have a good record overall.

EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. This one works at desensitising your reactions to trauma by holding them in your mind while accessing the different parts of the brain where elements of the traumatic memory are triggered. It works well but is often extremely uncomfortable while the trauma is being held in more vivid focus than usual. It’s based on research from around 40 years ago.

Hypnotherapy. There are many forms of hypnotherapy, including investigative, analytical, suggestion based and solution-focused. It can be effective if the best method for the presenting problem is used and is not usually uncomfortable during the sessions. It works most of the time by seeking to make changes to the conscious processes which are the result of a fifty-metre journey in the brain before reaching conscious thought. Modern hypnotherapy originates mainly from the 19th Century.

All the above rely on working with ‘the subconscious’, which is a concept used to describe unexplained behaviour. It originates from a time before aeroplanes flew and before females had the vote.

BWRT - BrainWorking Recursive Therapy. This works in an entirely different way from any of the above by directly accessing the early part of the brain, the brainstem and cerebellum. This is known collectively as the ‘Reptilian Complex’ or ‘Lizard Brain’ and it is almost certainly where the ‘subconscious' resides. So, it works to stop the problem before it even gets to those fifty metres of neurones, before it gets to the conscious mind, and does it quickly and easily – you don’t have to think of the problem for more than a few seconds. It originates from 2011, based on the latest neurological research.

Many people avoid therapy because they believe it means getting “stuck” for months or years, with high costs and slow progress. That can be true for some traditional approaches. But it is not the case with modern therapeutic methods.

Older schools of therapy often quote timelines of 15 to 20 sessions before meaningful improvement. By today’s standards, that is a long therapy process. Modern approaches work very differently. They are faster, kinder, and designed to create lasting change rather than teaching people how to cope indefinitely. They do not simply paper over the problem, nor do they require years of revisiting the past. Many modern methods can fully resolve an issue in a fraction of the time sometimes even in a single session.

One example of a modern approach is BrainWorking Recursive Therapy (BWRT), developed by Terence Watts. Since its introduction in 2013, it has been used worldwide and is now integrated by many therapists, including myself, because of its efficiency and lasting impact. Even complex presentations such as PTSD can often be resolved far more quickly than traditional models suggest.

So no, nobody needs to be stuck in therapy for years.

Both options are available, and you’re welcome to choose what feels most convenient for you.

Online sessions are held via Doxy.me, a secure, GDPR-compliant video platform used by healthcare professionals. There’s nothing to download, you can simply join via a private link.

In-person sessions are available at my offices in Belfast and Lisburn.