What is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting® is a highly attuned brain-based relational therapy which is used to treat a wide range of issues. It was developed in 2003 by Dr David Grand PhD and comes out of his work with EMDR ( eye movement desensitization reprocessing).
Talk therapy can only take you so far in your healing process. You may already realize this if you are wanting to try something else. After you have progressed all you can with talk therapy, you may find you need to continue with a therapy that can access the rest of your brain. That’s where Brainspotting® comes in.
Brain-body based therapies are the fastest growing in the field of psychological health because of their proven ability to address and completely resolve issues that talk therapy cannot. Brainspotting® focuses on the body’s experience during the processing rather than what thoughts you are having.
The motto of Brainspotting® “Where you look affects how you feel.” In other words, if something is bothering you, how you feel about it changes, depending on whether your eyes look left, right, up or down.
Your eyes and your brain are intricately connected and signals from your eyes are processed deep within your brain. Your brain directs where to focus your eyes moment to moment.
Trauma and emotionally charged issues can overwhelm the brain’s processing, capacity leaving behind pieces of the trauma, frozen in an unprocessed state. Brainspotting® uses your field of vision to find where you are holding pieces of the trauma in your brain. Your eyes can actually scan inside your brain as well as outside.
Brainspotting® uses this inner scanning ability of your eyes and brain to identify an external spot in your field of vision and while mindfully focusing on it, your brain begins to naturally release and resolve the frozen pieces of your unprocessed trauma.
Brainspotting® does not require you to talk about the whole story of what happened, in fact, it is preferable to minimize the amount of talking, as parts of the brain uninvolved in speech are the parts which are processing the bulk of the “stuck” story which traditional talk therapy has not been able to connect to.
Talk therapies only access the cortical region of the brain and cannot access the subcortical region at all which Brainspotting® does. Whole brain recovery is possible with Brainspotting®. At the end of the Brainspotting® session the cortical brain is also accessed when debriefing of the session verbally and cognitively occurs.
