What is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a psychotherapy technique that helps people process psychological trauma, anxiety, grief, or general “stuckness” using bilateral stimulation music and eye positions. If you are looking to get unstuck outside of the typical talk therapy model, or looking to release trauma without having to talk about the experience, Brainspotting may be a great fit for you!
Brainspotting helps therapists find specific points in a client’s visual field that connect to unprocessed trauma stored in the deeper, subcortical parts of the brain. Brainspotting (BSP) was discovered in 2003 by Dr. David Grand. Since then, more than 13,000 therapists have been trained in this method.
Brainspotting works by helping clients identify, process, and release the root causes of emotional pain, physical discomfort, trauma, dissociation, and other symptoms held in the nervous system. It is both a way to understand what is happening in the brain and body and a method of treatment at the same time.
“Brainspotting is based on the profound attunement of the therapist with the patient, finding a somatic cue and extinguishing it by down-regulating the amygdala. It isn’t just PNS (Parasympathetic Nervous System) activation that is facilitated, it is homeostasis”
—Robert Scaer, MD, “The Trauma Spectrum”
Dr. Grand described Brainspotting with the phrase, “Where you look affects how you feel,” to explain how eye position can influence emotional and physical experiences.
Brainspotting evolved from roots within classic modalities such as Mindfulness-Based practices, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming) and SE (Somatic Experiencing). Brainspotting gives us a tool, within the therapeutic clinician-client relationship, to neurobiologically locate, focus, process, and release experiences and symptoms that are typically out of reach of the conscious mind and the mind’s cognitive and language capacity.
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A few resources if you’re curious to learn more about the science and process of Brainspotting:
https://brainspotting.com/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030698771300114X
https://rockymountainbrainspottinginstitute.com/
