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 (meanwhile thousands) 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 benefitted from medication and a little bit of therapy many, many years later, but without him, none of that would’ve even felt like an option.
I want more options to come available to others who, like me, would otherwise boycott or be hurt by a system that doesn’t recognize the wisdom in skepticism, distrust, and conscientious objection.
Sincerely, 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 facts.
Nothing judgy or hard-ass,
but it gets the job done.
And fast.
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 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.
I’m teaching other practitioners — including some therapists — my modality, because it’s an injustice to not make it widely available ASAP. To this end, I’m looking for opportunities to help shape double-blind research studies.
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 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 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 in.
His marketing consistantly explicitly calls his graduates ‘an elite group’ — my list of peeves goes on.
Besides the elitism, 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 humans. Therapy ‘patients’ can sense this.
My modality has documented far more complexity in each and every client. I expect it, and respect it.
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.
Since I was 10, I’ve been keenly aware of the way the same messages might (and often do) affect boys very differently than me as a girl. It was as if boys were expected not to enjoy or believe in feelings — at least, not their own.
Me, I only got that message at home, not at school as well. But I know the effect it had first-hand. 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 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 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, and
- temporary foster mom to teenage boys. And…
- I’m no programmer, but I built this site myself, hiring less than 3 hours of troubleshooting help quite recently.
Though the heartache from being medically incapable of sticking with the kids will never leave me, each endeavor was a success in its own way.
I moved on to steeper learning curves, usually by my own choice, because…
I knew I was preparing for this phase of my life, when the gray hairs arrived.
I was gaining real life experience, including heartache and humility, so I would be a well-rounded support person, instead of a starry-eyed 20-something who went straight from being a client to facilitating others.
And I’ve done stereotypically women’s work
I’ve been a
- Lead Teacher in an otherwise Montessori certified school,
- Nanny to boy-girl twins and, later, to a newborn infant,
- professional neighborhood community builder whose wedding was a parade + block party consisting of 50% neighbors.
We — kids, parents, society — we need men in these professions. BADLY.
But all too often, male brilliance, talent, and enthusiasm is contorted to fit elsewhere.
I can’t tell you how many men have told me: “I’m envious you get to be with kids all day” and then, in more of a whisper, “I LOVE kids, but just saying that out loud… it feels like people will think I’m some kind of creep!”
The men I’ve worked with in these jobs were amazing people. It’s not easy work, to have to always be stronger and wiser and kind, all at once. Each and every one did it extremely well.
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’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-healing attitude.
We prioritize grassroots spreading of experience-based wisdom, where clients are the only practitioners, rather than creating some certification-crazed status-seeking fad. Ask any wanna-be coach what kinds of ads they get on social media (and then help them block them). 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! Either by becoming a client yourself, or by introducing me to research psychologists or neurologists!
I’m not studying Freud myself. Plenty of good people already have.
I want (my teacher or me) to provide alternative treatments 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 and I would refuse to do even if prescribed, and have to live without because ‘help’ feels like a rigged, potentially blameful status game — if not because of our trauma, then because it so often actually is.
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-- and What You Can Do About It.
Pastimes: meaningful moments with my spouse,
singing/dancing/talking with friends,
laughing out loud at Discworld novels.
