About Bree - Rational Hearts

About Briana Jacoba

You make perfect sense. It just takes sorting out.

With my support, you have all the brilliant insights yourself.

And guaranteed tangible, measurable results.

Being a Dutch graduate of Laboratory Sciences whose thesis project was published in Nucleic Acids Research might sound impressive, but I haven’t touched a PCR machine or Northern blot since 2006.

My true passion is scientific inquiry itself.

I have immense empathy for abandoned boys and betrayed men.

When I was 10, my mom put the entire Atlantic Ocean between me and my brother. Between me and my dad. I got to visit once a year.

Ever since, I’ve been keenly aware of the way the same familial or greater cultural influences send boys and men very different messages, and had very different effects on them, than what I got as a girl.

I embrace the attitude of “I’ll believe it when I see it” in my service to fellow 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.

I have actual life experience
working jobs like yours

In the years between learning my modality by being in the client seat, and becoming an expert, 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 my life was indeed more liberated than it had been before, and to avoid becoming anything like a religious leader or MLM!

In my unrelated endeavors, I’ve been
a lab scientist,
an advocate for proxy voting and privacy-honoring, open-source software,
a preschool teacher in otherwise Montessori certified schools,
a nanny,
a professional neighborhood community builder,
a Transit Operator busdriving graveyard shifts in a huge city,
and
a foster mom to multiple teens at once.

Everywhere I went, I had special needs, but I stuck up for them and navigated life in ways that stood out to others as sensitive and authentic without being overly vulnerable. Every career I tried my hand at, could have been a success, and was, but I moved on to steeper learning curves, usually by my own volition.

I knew I was preparing for this one. I was gaining life experience, including heartache and humility, so I wouldn’t become some egomaniacal one-trick pony out to change the world with my modality.

I don’t give myself a title
like ‘coach’ or ‘counselor’

It wouldn’t do justice to how empowering my modality is to the client. You’re your own healer. I just ask you questions that make your unique path clear one step at a time, moment-to-moment.

I’ll teach you my modality before offering to do it with you, so you have full autonomy to choose who you work with.

Sadly, my modality is still so unknown, I’m not even mentioning it. But it’s also so earth-moving that I am now, in my 40’s teaching other practitioners, including some therapists, because it’s a crime to not make it widely available.

I reject borrowing 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 fails 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 famous… even though all his graduates have full practices and waiting lists.

These demo ‘sessions’ are often complete in 20 minutes flat. This causes all who seek that modality out, and many who practice it, to expect equal results with equal simplicity and speed. It’s like a parlor trick.

And he keeps advertising, even though his training programs are full. And his marketing calls his graduates ‘an elite group’ — my list of peeves goes on.

Besides being anti-elitism, why does this bug me?

Fame backfires on clients.

I’m a rebel with a cause

I just want science, and to continue my teacher’s anti-establishment / establishment-healing attitude. He prioritizes grassroots spreading of experience-based wisdom, where clients are the only practitioners, rather than creating some certification-crazed status-seeking fad.

(Lots of coaches etc. call themselves ‘addicted to continuing education’ — there’s a whole meaningless-certification bubble going on.)

For me? Science, please!

I’m eager for any leads on how to get my modality validated with fMRIs and double-blind studies like the Rheumatoid Arthritis study validating something much more “fluffy” called Internal Family Systems (IFS).

But please help!

I’m not studying Freud myself. Plenty of good people already have.

I want to be in their study, where they compare what I do to, say, ABA (an Autism ‘treatment’) so ABA can stop hurting people. Or to guided meditation for people who hate guided meditation but keep getting it prescribed.

Or to any number of things that you or I would refuse to do and have to live without, because ‘help’ feels like a rigged, potentiall blameful status game — if not because of our trauma, then because it so often is.

I work with men of science,
who want better chemistry.

The way boys and men are affected differently by cultural and other expectations stood out to me throughout.

Another part of my specializing in men is because most of the feeling-healing stuff out there isn’t explicitly reassuring to men — especially if your degree is in the hard sciences:

Capitalism lures men down addictive, illegal, or otherwise exploitative avenues and into jail or psych wards.
Meditation can compound numbness if it unwittingly habituates you to bypassing or suppressing stuff.
Other paths require “talking about feelings” with an expert or in a group, but for many men, that’s not an option.

I was part 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.

I would be a complete mess today if I hadn’t found the approach I now offer others.

It is

much more long-lasting than sex or solace,
much more logical and immediate than therapy, and
much more empowering than coaching, advice, or stuff that requires faith you don’t have.

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.

Life on this planet can’t improve without your participation. You are essential.

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 facts.

Nothing judgy or hard-ass,
but it gets the job done.
And fast.

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