About Briana Jacoba
I’m an autodidactic polymath with healthy distrust of both dogma and pseudo-science.
As a (mad) scientist in my 20’s, I lucked out by meeting a fellow pre-med dropout twice my age, whose seminal work changed my life for the best in just a few short months.
His was not a model to compare myself to, but a series of logical blanks to fill in without opinion, without shame or praise, without labels. I loved it.
As a trained scientist with a fear of being labeled (like one of my lab specimens) or mislabeled and over-medicated, I loved the fact that his appraoch met my need for psychoanalysis-free, reproducible, verifiable assessment of the nature of feeling itself, through my own first-hand, scientific observations and those of hundreds of others he’d helped.
Using only scientific observation skills, it allowed me to change patterns that had plagued me my whole life. Overnight. As if by magic. It sounds so cheesy and untrue, I know.
I still benefited from medication and a little bit of therapy 20 years later, but without my teacher’s discovery, none of that would’ve even felt like an option for me.
(And in the end, my therapist consistently ended up using this modality because everything else we’d tried had been painfully slow-going and intangible by comparison.)
My teacher is retiring.
My therapist can only help so many people.
We shouldn’t be the only practitioners!!!
I know too many people who, like me, might boycott or be hurt by a system that doesn’t respect the wisdom inherent in skepticism.
Grateful for your company
on this inter-generational quest,
Bree
I don’t do
‘behavioral change.’
I’m no therapist or social worker.
No toxic positivity coach.
No guru with affirmations.
I’m not a trainer, either:
no rehearsing in front of the mirror.
No ‘tips and tricks’ from me!
My approach is highly effective because it requires zero faith.
It’s neither cognitive-behavioral, nor hypnotic.
It’s about your first-hand, empirical data.
Nothing judgy or hard-ass,
but it gets the job done.
And fast.
I’ve had almost 100% “difficult cases” for whom nothing else had worked
Fritz Pearls described one of my oldest clients as an extremely difficult case (‘Albert’ in Gestalt Therapy Verbatim). Richard Schwartz agreed I was doing well by ‘Albert’ and his “exiled protectors” (to use IFS language — which I don’t.)
Shared with permission:
That client is thriving now, thanks to our work, of which both he and I enjoyed every single session.
He told me others often remark on the tremendous improvement in his anxiety, neediness, and general countenance since working with me, and that he, himself benefits on a day-to-day basis.
That’s the rule, rather than the exception:
Most of my clients feel like nothing else has worked for them, and that they’re somehow beyond help. Which is true, in a way: nothing else has respected (and healed) the internalized disrespect that has previously sabotaged their progress.
I don’t give myself a title
like ‘coach’ or ‘counselor’
That would fail to recognize how empowering my modality is to you, the client.
You’re your own healer. I just ask you questions that invite each and every part of you into the mindset of the best scientists: those who need not know the results in advance to be willing to do great science, one microliter at a time.
That’s also how I teach new practitioners — including therapists — my modality: by inviting them to experience it themselves.
(Because of my love of scientific rigor, I’m simultaneously looking for opportunities to do double-blind research studies focused on any number of populations, especially complex post-traumatic stress, demand avoidance, mutism, and autistic burnout. I hope you’ll forgive me for adding a few extra forms, towards proving reproducibility.)
I reject borrowed credibility / status
from famous modalities I also know
What follows is a rant:
I’ve seen how the famous ‘inventor’ of a completely different modality fail to credit parallel or preceding contributors. That ‘inventor’ does ‘spontaneous’ so-called ‘sessions’ with people who host their own talk shows (a.k.a. extroverts) to demo and make his modality even more famous… even though it already is.
These demo ‘sessions’ are often complete in 20 minutes flat. This causes all who seek that modality out — and many practitioners — to expect such results with equal simplicity and speed.
Therapy as a parlor trick.
And he keeps advertising for his own reasons, even though his training programs are so full, it’s a lottery system to get in and it took my classmates an average of 5 years to get into Level 1 training.
His marketing constantly explicitly calls his graduates ‘an elite group’ — my list of peeves goes on.
Besides the ways that elitism dehumanizes everyone (even those being lauded), why does this bug me?
Fame backfires on clients.
Practitioners with an over-simplified idea of what they’re doing show bafflement and frustration at the actual complexity of real humans. Their ‘patients’ sense this and feel like they’re doing it ‘wrong.’
That’s harmful.
My modality expects and accounts for far more nuance and complexity. I expect it, and respect it, in each and every client.
Why I work with men, specifically.
When I was young, my mom put the Atlantic Ocean between me and all the men in my family. I got to visit them once a year.
Ever since that day, I longed for my Dad and brother’s perspectives — especially on everyday, little things. I imagined what they would say or think in any given moment.
As a result, I became keenly aware of the way many societal messages might (and often do) affect boys very differently than they’d affect me as a girl.
My hypothesis?
It was as if boys were expected not to enjoy or believe in feelings — at least, not their own.
I was reared that way, too, but only at home — not at school as well — so I know first-hand the effect it had on me, and I can guess how my personality would’ve developed if I’d been socialized as male.
I wrote you a freebie about it:
Why Smarts Make It Hard to Connect from the Heart.
That’s why my rally call is almost…
Skeptics, Unite!
I embrace the attitude of “I’ll believe it when I see it” in my service to fellow technicians, scientists, and other skeptics
- who feel dead inside…
- who get existential dread from relational stress…
- who don’t know how “just be yourself” could possibly go well, moment-to-moment.
You make perfect sense. It just takes sorting out.
With my support, you have all the brilliant insights yourself.
And guaranteed tangible, measurable results.
I have actual life experience
working jobs like yours
In the years between learning my modality by being in the client seat, and offering it to others, I purposefully lived a life away from “healing” as such.
This was my way of not becoming evangelical about a single modality, and instead, gaining the life-experience necessary both to test whether it had indeed liberated me as much as I’d felt it had, and to have contextual knowledge of real world work outside the controlled environments of lab and classroom.
In my worldly endeavors, I’ve been a medical lab scientist, but also an
- open-source software advocate taking risks for democracy, privacy, and transparency,
- graveyard shift busdriver in a huge metropolitan city,
- traffic director/flagger,
- respite parent to 5 teenage boys and their siblings, and…
- I’m no programmer, but I built this site myself, hiring less than 3 hours of troubleshooting help quite recently.
I keep taking on ever-steeper learning curves and being humbled into a more chill, well-rounded version of myself.
I’m not the starry-eyed 20-something I might have been, without any idea how it is to be the breadwinner in a safety-sensitive, highly technical job 50+ hours a week where mistakes can –directly or indirectly– cost many lives… and doing things well can save lives, your job, and your reputation.
I respect that the risk analysis of taking on ‘fluffy’ inner work is unfavorable.
I’m anti-fluff.
And I’ve done stereotypically women’s work
I’ve been a
- Lead Teacher in an otherwise Montessori Certified school,
- community builder (whose wedding was attended by 50 neighbors from within a 2-block radius,)
- Nanny to boy-girl twins and, later, to a newborn infant,
I can’t tell you how many men have confided conspiratorially how envious they were of people in my line of work, followed in more of a whisper by:
“I LOVE kids, but if I say that out loud… people might think I’m some kind of creep!”
I get it. Each and every one of my male colleagues has been at least as capable as the rest, and we (the kids, the adults, and society) need more men in this work, but no pressure:
I totally get how real stigma, poor pay, and implied shoulds/shame can contort one into applying one’s talents elsewhere.
I work with men of science
who want better chemistry.
Most of the feeling-healing stuff out there isn’t explicitly reassuring to men — especially if your degree is in the hard sciences:
- Capitalistm steers men down addictive, illegal, or legal avenues of exploitation and into jail or psych wards.
- Meditation and self-help can compound numbness if it unwittingly habituates you to bypassing or suppressing stuff.
- Paths that require “talking about feelings” with an expert or in a group might not match your self-image or preferred method of communication.
I get why many men want to improve chemistry using science.
I used to be in the 10% of the adult population with no inclination or ability to talk about feelings. (10% of the population is a LOT of people! And they’re not all men!)
I couldn’t settle on words for my feelings, and Nonviolent Communication vocabulary lists stressed me out and stilted my speech, making me feel inauthentic — which, ironically, was not a feeling on the NVC vocabulary list. Go figure.
I would be a complete mess today if I hadn’t found the approach I now offer others.
I loved it because it’s
- much more long-lasting than sex, exercise, or solace,
- much faster and more logical than therapy, and
- much more respectful than coaching or healing that requires faith/deference.
I’m committed to supporting guys who are unsure anything will work, and are anxious for results ASAP, because I know that kind of anxiety first-hand.
I’m a rebel with a cause — and I need your help
I just want science to help people thrive. To continue my teacher’s anti-stigma, establishment-truthing, groundbreaking work.
There’s a billion-dollar bubble in meaningless certifications. Ask any wanna-be coach what kinds of ads they get on social media (and then help them block them, LOL!)
Rather than going that route, he and his students prioritize the grassroots spreading of experience-based wisdom, where clients are the only practitioners. Feels more in integrity than creating some status-crazed, certification-seeking ‘fad.’
I Heart Science — Please Help!
…by becoming a client yourself, and/or by introducing me to research psychologists or -neurologists!
I’m not gonna study Freud myself. Plenty of good people already have.
I’m eager for any leads on how to get my modality validated with human studies like the Rheumatoid Arthritis study that validated something much more “fluffy” called Internal Family Systems (IFS).
I want a proper double-blind study where the teacher of my modality (or someone else he’s taught) provides an alternative with comparable or better impact than, say, ABA (an evidence-based Autism ‘treatment’), so it can replace ABA in cases where ABA Technicians were just training people to mask actual distress with fake neurotypical responses.
Or help stop C-PTSD, like it did for me.
Or chronic physical illness getting the upper-hand anymore, like it has for the only 2 clients I’ve had who had any.
Or to any number of approaches that you and I would refuse to do even (or especially) if prescribed.
I’m not claiming it can replace evidence-based approaches… I’m claiming it is an excellent candidate for human clinical trials.
I’m Anti-Elitist
Too many of us have to live without ‘help’ because it feels like a rigged, potentially blameful status game — because it so often is.
My currently-still-secret modality is similar enough to other scientifically proven stuff for me to conscience applying it, but I want it to become required reading for all therapists and social workers, so they can make it available to people of all walks of life.
If I unveiled it and started teaching it under its name, it could become a brand, which could sabotage its purity as an evidence-based treatment down the road.
That goal is far too important for me to risk it for personal gain.
Can you believe you don’t have to undergo any real, meaningful therapy in order to become a therapist in the States?!?
I get that colleges can’t force psych students to have life-changing experiences before they can legally help others, but I see it like this:
my extensive experience receiving what I offer makes me a much better facilitator than if I’d gone to school, learned it, and tried doing it TO people.
In the same vein, I’m open to certifying practitioners who have an earnest intention to benefit as experiential scientists, not badge-wearing graduates.
I know I was only open to it because it’s pure science; I needed something completely unlike manipulation or gaslighting.
There’s an Eastern saying about the teacher appearing only once the student is ready… with all the distractions and disincentives in Western culture, I think it can take many additional years for teachers to become truly apparent.
want my take on
Why Smarts Make it Hard to Connect from the Heart
…and What You Can Do About It?