OEI Therapy | Observed Experiential Integration
Putting Trauma into the Past
Observed & Experiential Integration (OEI) Therapy Research
Observed Experiential Integration Therapy (OEI) is a trauma-focused therapy designed to help individuals process and resolve difficult or traumatic experiences. Developed by Audrey Cook and my mentor, Dr. Rick Bradshaw in the 1990s, OEI evolved from EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and utilizes the neuroscience of visual pathways to integrate both hemispheres of the brain, which can significantly reduce anxiety and trauma symptoms.
Note to readers: Descriptions of the research may be triggering if you have experienced trauma.
For the neuroscience of OEI therapy, click here.
OEI Therapy Research
OEI is an effective intervention for clients with PTSD. 90% of the participants in the study experienced significant relief from PTSD symptoms, as indicated by CAPS and IES-R scores
Randomized Clinical Trials (RCTs) have investigated the effectiveness of Observed & Experiential Integration (OEI) in treating PTSD.
Bradshaw, R. A., McDonald, M. J., Grace, R., Detwiler, L., & Austin, K. (2014). A randomized clinical trial of Observed & Experiential Integration (OEI): A simple, innovative intervention for affect regulation in clients with PTSD. Traumatology, 20(3), 161-171.
This study focused on a diverse group of trauma survivors, randomly assigned to either an immediate treatment group or a delayed-treatment control group. The participants had experienced severe traumas, including:
- Holding a spouse after a suicide
- Finding a known individual who had died by suicide
- Experiencing a violent rape
- Surviving an attempted homicide
- Waking to find a close friend dead from a drug overdose
- Motor vehicle accidents
The OEI treatment consisted of three one-hour sessions using a single technique known as ‘switching.’
Sustained Benefits of OEI Therapy
Results indicated that OEI outperformed the delayed-treatment control condition in reducing PTSD symptoms on both measures. After the delayed treatment group received the same intervention, all but one participant no longer met the criteria for PTSD. A qualitative two-year follow-up suggested sustained benefits from the OEI treatment.
Download article here
New Trauma Therapy Techniques
Bradshaw, R. A., Cook, A., & McDonald, M. J. (2011). Observed & experiential integration (OEI): Discovery and development of a new set of trauma therapy techniques. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 21(2), 104–171.
A mixed-method, comparative experimental treatment outcome study. Conducted over 18 months, it included 25 women with PTSD following sexual assaults. This study incorporated qEEG assessments with script-driven symptom provocation across four assessment points.
OEI techniques are designed for:
Titration of Affective and Somatic Intensity: Gradually adjusting emotional and physical responses to prevent overwhelming the client.
Reduction of Negative Transference: Minimizing adverse projections onto the therapist to enhance the therapeutic relationship.
Deepening of Social Connection: Enhancing interpersonal relationships and social engagement.
OEI emphasizes neuro-activation and micro-attunement (NAMA), focusing on precise neural activations and therapist-client attunement. It has been applied in conjunction with body therapies and neurotherapy and utilized with children, couples, and families. Additionally, OEI has been employed to address
- Addictions
- Self-destructive urges
- Panic attacks
- Eating disorders
- Skin issues
Download article here
Comparative Experiment with Female Sexual Assault Survivors with PTSD
75% of participants found OEI therapy most effective for reducing the severity of their PTSD symptoms and many also found CPT helpful for reducing guilt, shame, and self-blame. At the 3-month follow-up, OEI was more effective than calming and grounding techniques.
Download the abstract here
Ready to put the past into the past?
Trauma perpetuates itself with intrusive thoughts that lead to rumination and feelings in your body as if you are right in the middle of your trauma. This is why you feel hopeless because the trauma is taking up all the space in your future by experiencing the past in the present moment.
I know how to apply the research to integrate your experience and put it into the past where it belongs. When this happens you can begin to create a whole new future for yourself and your life, even if you’ve been in therapy for years and nothing really seems to be able to get you out of the woods.
Book a free Clarity Session to learn more about how you can treat your trauma safely and effectively with OEI Therapy.
Let’s connect.
OEI Therapy for Trauma
Create Safety in Your Mind and Body,
Reduce Anxiety, and Reclaim Your Future.
How OEI Therapy Can Help Trauma
Trauma can have lasting effects on your nervous system, emotions, and overall view of the world. It’s more than just an event; it’s how your brain and body process and store the experience.
While talk therapy can be helpful, OEI is a trauma-informed therapy that research has shown to resolve trauma and help people move forward from feeling stuck in their past.
What is Trauma?
Trauma can be defined as any experience that overwhelms your capacity to cope. Trauma can result from a single incident or a series of experiences, affecting a person’s mental, physical, social, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Understanding Trauma
Trauma can arise from various situations, including:
Acute Trauma: The response to a traumatic event:
- Physical Trauma: Events like car accidents, medical crises, or physical injuries.
- Relational Trauma: Negative, unexpected events involving relationships with people, such as parents, teachers, or peers.
Trauma of Omission: Neglect can be a primary cause of Complex PTSD and needs to be considered an “event”
Transgenerational Trauma: Trauma passed down through generations.
Complex Trauma: Repeated, prolonged exposure to traumatic events, often with childhood onset, such as childhood abuse or neglect, disrupted attachment, domestic violence, ongoing social threats (discrimination, systemic racism, threat of deportation), community and political violence, refugee situations, or prolonged captivity.
Trauma can include:
- Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse
- Betrayal
- Criticism/rejection
- Embarrassment/humiliation
Intentional harm - Childhood neglect and abandonment
- Living with a family member with mental health or substance use disorders
- Sudden separation from a loved one
- Experiencing or witnessing violence
- Natural disasters or accidents
- Poverty, racism, discrimination, or oppression
Signs You May Be Experiencing Trauma
If you’ve experienced a traumatic event, you might notice:
- Intrusive memories, flashbacks, or nightmares
- Anxiety, panic attacks, or heightened fear
- Avoidance of reminders related to the trauma
- Mood changes, irritability, or sudden emotional shifts
- Difficulty concentrating or memory problems
- Sleep disturbances or insomnia
- Physical symptoms like headaches, aches, or nausea
- Feelings of detachment or emotional numbness
Long-Term Effects of Unresolved Trauma
When left unaddressed, trauma can lead to:
- Chronic anxiety or depression
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
- Substance abuse or addiction
- Difficulties in relationships
- Physical health issues
- Cognitive challenges affecting work or school performance
OEI Therapy for Common Symptoms of Trauma
Some of the common symptoms of dissociation are:
- Panic, rage/conflict, anxiety, shame, confusion, or agitated depression
- Headaches, visual distortions, dizziness
- Physical symptoms such as chest compression/hyperventilation, nausea, & throat constriction
- Cognitive distortions
- Relationship difficulties
- Negative self-talk, shame, and low self-esteem
- Emotional dysregulation and urges to self-harm
- Transference reactions that interfere with therapy (fear, anger, avoidance, distrust)
What Can OEI Help With?
OEI has been used to address a wide range of psychological and emotional issues:
- Psychological trauma
- PTSD
- Anxiety
- Phobias
- Depression
- Sexual assault
- Childhood abuse and trauma
- Eating disorders
- Negative self-talk
- Relationship conflicts
- Self-esteem problems
- Compulsions
- Agitated depression
- Body dysmorphia
- Dissociation
- Substance use
- Anything that makes you feel “stuck” or “stirred up” will usually benefit from OEI treatment
How Trauma Affects the Brain and Body
Psychological trauma gets trapped in the primitive brain and continues to affect you physically, emotionally, and relationally. In order to resolve traumas, they need to be processed through the emotional center of the brain and up through the memory processor to the front surfaces of the brain. This changes memories of trauma feeling like you’re experiencing them in the present tense to “past tense” experiences.
Trauma can impact various brain structures and functions:
Emotional Center: Traumatic memories need to be processed through the emotional center of the brain to be resolved.
Memory Processor: Trauma processing involves the memory processor to integrate experiences
Higher-Level Brain Functioning: Trauma can bypass higher-level brain functions, making it difficult to heal through talking and listening alone.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Numbing Responses: Trauma can trigger these responses, hindering higher-level brain functioning.
OEI: Trauma-Informed OEI Therapy
OEI is especially helpful for those who find talk therapy overwhelming or ineffective because it focuses on observing and experiencing sensations in the body rather than verbal processing of traumatic memories. This enables individuals to finally access healing in a gentle and more effective way.
OEI therapy creates a safe and nurturing space for individuals to work through their traumas and distressing experiences at their own pace.
Why is Observed and Experiential Integration Therapy Effective?
OEI is grounded in neuroscience and works directly with how trauma is stored in the brain. It addresses trauma responses like fight, flight, freeze or faint by helping individuals integrate fragmented memories and emotions. This approach results in a sense of relief, reduced triggers, and improved emotional balance.
Benefits of OEI Therapy
Observed and Experiential Integration (OEI) therapy can provide faster symptom relief compared to traditional talk therapies because talking about the past necessitates revivification, which creates more trauma by recalling and re-experiencing the negative emotions of traumatic memories.
OEI provides safe, gentle, non-verbal processing for those who don’t want to talk about their trauma (and rightly so). Holistic healing that addresses both emotional and physical symptoms can take place safely and effectively without revivifying the past and causing the client to have to relive the trauma by talking about it.
Observed and Experiential Integration (OEI) can help, even if you’ve tried everything but nothing seems to be working. OEI is effective because it is based in neuroscience and allows trauma to be integrated and put into the past, where it belongs.
When the past is in the past, you’re free to create a whole new future.
Heal the Past
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
– C. Jung
Key Benefits of OEI Therapy
✅ Reduced Trauma Symptoms: “OEI helps resolve PTSD, anxiety, and panic symptoms.
✅ Improved Emotional Regulation: “Enhance your ability to manage and regulate intense emotions.
✅ Increased Self-Awareness: “Promotes self-awareness, emotional regulation, and integration of fragmented experiences.
✅ Resolution of “Stuck” States: “OEI addresses anything that makes you feel ‘stuck’ or ‘stirred up,’ including relationship conflicts and unusual emotional intensity.
✅ Enhanced Cognitive Function: “OEI reduces fight, flight, freeze, and numbing responses to enable higher-level brain functioning.
✅ Addresses a range of conditions: Effective in addressing other conditions such as self-esteem problems, compulsions, agitated depression, body dysmorphia, substance use, and conflicts in interpersonal relationships
Additional Benefits of OEI
✅ OEI helps to access awareness regarding human experience
✅OEI helps to resolve physical pains and paresthesias, speech impairments, disturbing (posttraumatic) inner voices, and visual distortions
✅OEI helps to address and resolve shame, guilt, self-loathing
Why is Integration Important for Healing?
Integration is important because when traumatic memories aren’t integrated we feel stuck, triggered, and unable to move forward with our lives. We are in avoidance and dissociated, which interferes with the brains ability to engage higher-level brain functioning.
When the past is not integrated, we experience symptoms of dissociation and panic symptoms such as a racing heartbeat, tight chest, difficulty breathing, nausea, or “butterflies” in the stomach.
We might even experience headaches, visual distortions (ranging from blockage of vision to blurring), tingling or numbness in hands, face, or feet, and drowsiness or light-headedness.
Research on OEI Therapy
OEI is an evidence-based practice, as research supports its effectiveness in reducing PTSD symptoms. Studies show that OEI can lead to significantly lower CAPS scores for PTSD compared to control groups.
- OEI has been rated highly for reduction of PTSD symptoms [1]
- A randomized clinical trial showed that OEI outperformed a delayed treatment control condition for reduction of PTSD symptoms
- OEI has been shown to reduce headaches and migraines in minutes
OEI offers a gentle yet effective path to recovery, allowing individuals to move past their trauma and reclaim their sense of safety and well-being.
OEI the First Step to Gentle, Effective Healing
Let’s connect.
OEI Therapy for Trauma
Create Safety in Your Mind and Body,
Reduce Anxiety, and Reclaim Your Future.
OEI can help, even if you’ve tried everything but nothing seems to be working…
Transformation doesn’t have to take years…
If it does, you’re probably trying to use your logical, conscious mind to solve trauma that need to be resolved at the subconscious level.
If you have tried everything but nothing seems to be working…
You probably would have figured it out by now.
Some problems can be fixed with your conscious mind. You apply logic and intention to the problem and it goes away because these problems don’t have any underlying emotion or trauma memories attached to them.
Sometimes, despite our best efforts and logical solutions provided by traditional therapy, we still feel stuck, wondering why we can’t move forward.
Years of therapy might not be able to fully address deeper, unresolved, deep-rooted trauma that is working against you, in the background, just below the surface. You feel stuck and triggered in the present because of your past experiences and feel like your future is being blocked by your past.
Trauma can create an invisible barrier that’s limiting, restricting, and preventing you from living the life you want to live now.
Accelerated OEI uses principles from neurophysiology to efficiently address nervous system dysregulation, such as psychological trauma, dissociation, and preverbal body-based trauma. OEI integrates visual pathways and both brain hemispheres to reduce anxiety and trauma symptoms that are holding you back from living your life.. Your best life. Ever.
“Unstuck” Your Future with Accelerated OEI
There are different types of problems, there are obstacles standing the way of you living your best life but first, you need to resolve the past so you can get out of your own way.
That’s when you the path to your success becomes easier.Accelerated OEI specializes in helping you achieve rapid transformation and finally break free from past trauma that keeps us feeling stuck, overwhelmed and triggered.
OEI is an evidence-based approach is designed to address and gently resolve traumatic memories that have kept you from experiencing healing.
Pure Possibility.
Transform Your Trauma.
Transform Your Life.
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