Bridge Back Project: Our Origin Story
In 2016, at a small clinic in a small town on the Kitsap Peninsula of Washington State, a naturopathic physician was treating a patient using an osteopathic physical medicine called ‘counterstrain’.
This patient had severely injured his back and was bent over with pain, unable to stand up straight. He’d tried several kinds of treatments, from physical therapy to acupuncture, but nothing was working. With a referral from his doctor, he sought out Dr. Holly Christy. Six sessions later, she had him standing upright again. Pain free. The treatments had saved him from what his doctors back home thought could only be treated with epidural blocks and likely back surgery.
After seeing the profound improvement in his body and how he felt, the patient asked Dr. Christy why more people didn’t know about this seemingly precise, healing, non-invasive technique.
“It’s because we are all artists. We’re all healers,” she explained. Each practitioner finds themself siloed from one another in their individual practices. “We work individually with one person at a time. We don’t have a pool of money or even the time to put together a big research base, fund imaging studies, or anything of that scale. All we have is empirical and anecdotal evidence to support what we know to be true. The demand keeps us all too busy. We can’t take time away from our livelihoods — the thing that feeds our families — or our patients…”
They both agreed this needed to change.
“We need to start a research organization,” Dr. Christy shared, already beginning to see the bigger vision unfold.
The Bridge Back Project was being born.
Together, along with Ben Dennis, they set out to form a 501(c)3 organization to be able to raise the funds needed to pioneer clinical trial studies that would measure the possible applications and impacts of counterstrain.
When Dr. Christy was asked what the research would focus on, she knew without hesitation that she wanted to focus on post-traumatic stress injuries.
Dr. Christy — a former professional soccer player — began her medical career in sports medicine. There is an undeniable satisfaction that comes from relieving debilitating pain or restoring physical mobility to someone whose quality of life has been negatively impacted because their pain or reduced range of motion has shrunken the scope of their world.
But in the years leading up to the founding of the Bridge Back Project, she had found herself attracting a new kind of patient. People were coming to her who were dealing with the after effects of severe, complex trauma; from the lasting impacts of involuntary violence in the form of trafficking, domestic violence, and sexual assault to professionals who had witnessed or endured trauma in their line of duty.
What they had had in common was an extensive profile of symptoms that prevented them from thriving. They reported that they couldn’t sleep, they were tired but wired, stuck in hypervigilance, and often their relationships were suffering. Some of them didn’t want to go out in public, or they had a hard time functioning “normally”. Things that the rest of us take for granted as easy — like holding a glass of water or going to the grocery store — were daunting or impossible for these patients whose nervous systems were locked in overdrive. Their experiences affected their ability to trust, connect, stay calm around, or be patient with others. Many shared stories of reactive anger, irritability, experiencing flashbacks, living with constant fear, or constantly scanning for danger.
In the privacy of her clinic, she had a front row seat to the ways in which the application of high-precision counterstrain was alleviating many of these symptoms to such a degree that many patients felt like they were getting their life back and that they were experiencing relief and hope for the first time in many, many years. The first-hand reward of being able to relieve people’s suffering was deeply moving and inspiring.
She had the anecdotal evidence to show that counterstrain could profoundly impact the physical, psychological, and emotional wellbeing of people recovering from complex trauma. But she knew that she would need more than heartwarming stories and compelling before-and-afters to build the awareness needed to make a large scale difference and win-over the medical and research communities.
She would need data.
The Bridge Back Project’s first practitioner team was created, and they spent the next 3 years discussing, refining, and finalizing the ideas and protocol that would become BBP’s first clinical trial study, which ran from January 2020 to October 2021.
The goal was to answer the question:
“Can Fascial Counterstrain effectively treat symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder and its comorbidities?”
Our preliminary findings have been promising.
(To learn more about our research studies, click here.)
As we recruited participants, it became clear almost instantly that the team could not and would not turn away folks who didn’t meet the study requirements. It seemed unjust to turn people away who needed treatment because they didn’t have “enough trauma” or who had “too complex of trauma” to “qualify” as research participants. The team decided that not only would the control group also receive the full treatment protocol upon conclusion of the study, but that no one from the communities they served would be turned away.
This marked the soft, unofficial start of what would later become known as the Impact Program, which directly and fully funds 3 counterstrain sessions for those seeking support with the symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress injuries.
The two biggest challenges that the team knew they would come up against in their mission to change the way the world imagines treatment for traumatic-impacted people were 1) a lack of public awareness and understanding; and 2) finding enough sufficiently trained practitioners to meet the treatment needs of trauma-affected people effectively.
Afterall, the first hurdle was what sparked the very question that led them down the road to create the Bridge Back Project in the first place.
The second takes time and resources. To become masterful at counterstrain takes years of training and practice.
Together, these two challenges inspired the third focus of Bridge Back work — our Education Program.
Currently our education efforts are fully focused on disseminating information and building awareness, but we have an ambitious goal to launch our Scholarship Fund in 2025.
In January 2023, the Bridge Back Project hired its first Executive Director, Theora Moench, and Dr. Holly Christy transitioned here energies into her role as Principal Investigator — lead researcher and author of our forthcoming paper — and Head of Impact — the person responsible for defining the vision and scope for our different programs.
The Board also voted to officially give name to the Impact Program and the teams have been working together to ramp up outreach efforts to spread the word to the communities we serve so that we can build awareness and get treatment to people who need and would benefit from our care.
We’re excited about what comes next, and we’re so glad you’re here with us
