You’ve tried traditional talk therapy in order to heal from the traumatic experiences of your past.
But the hurt, pain, and anguish are still there. As are the nightmares, the feeling of constant danger, and the inability to sleep well. It seems like you’ve tried everything.
What can you do now?
Perhaps you have heard of brainspotting, but have no idea what it's all about. Brainspotting holds the potential for you to finally heal from your trauma. It takes a novel approach that allows both you and your therapist to “zero-in” on what’s really bothering you. This is done by finding the connection between your subconscious and your physical body.
Here’s how brainspotting can facilitate healing trauma.
What Is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a therapeutic technique first introduced in 2003 by David Grand. It utilizes eye movements to connect with painful memories or thoughts that have not been processed or resolved.
Now, you might be thinking, isn’t this like EMDR therapy (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing)? The answer is no.
With EMDR, the therapist has the client activate (recall) a memory and then ask them to follow their finger back and forth to reprocess and resolve that painful memory. With brainspotting, the therapist has the client follow a pointer across a visual plane, such as from left to right. As the pointer moves, the therapist pays attention to cues from the client to signal a brain spot. These signals can include bodily reactions and especially facial expressions.
The eye position where the client feels the most distress is where they are holding the traumatic memory. Finding that brain spot triggers a bodily sensation. As the therapist instructs the client to hold that particular eye position, the client shares how they are feeling in relation to it. In successive sessions, the therapist helps the client's brain to release the emotions connected to the traumatic memory.
How is brainspotting connected to neuroscience?
It’s thought that brainspotting helps the client and therapist connect with the subconscious through certain parts of the brain. These may include the hippocampus, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex.
All of these are areas are responsible for the more primal thoughts and feelings that humans experience. And therein lies the connection.
Basically, traumatic memories are unresolved memories and thoughts that are based on primitive emotions, such as fear. And those emotions are what keeps clients “stuck” in a survival mentality. As you can imagine, this mindset greatly interferes with how you function in everyday life. That’s because you are more worried about survival than you are living your life to the fullest.
Creating a Deeper Connection Between Therapist and Client
Another way that brainspotting helps with trauma treatment is through the connection between the therapist and the client.
In talk therapy, the therapist might guide the conversation by asking questions, and the client responds. There can be a tendency among therapists to assume that they already know what is bothering the client. These assumptions actually make it more difficult for the therapist and client to connect and experience any real change.
With brainspotting, the therapist is taking a different position by letting the client guide them versus the other way around. Also, the therapist is paying more attention to nonverbal cues from the client. Certainly, eye positioning is important in brainspotting but also other indicators related to body position.
The result is that both parties are more connected than if they were simply participating in a back-and-forth therapy discussion.
Targeting Specific Feelings
The advantage of brainspotting is that it allows both the therapist and client to directly target the feelings and thoughts associated with trauma. This is as opposed to traditional talk therapy where people sometimes feel as if the session is wasted because the therapist is “fishing” for details.
With brainspotting, it’s much easier to lock-in on those specific thought patterns. This allows the client to better understand why they are having them and, ultimately, resolve them.
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Brainspotting really does hold the potential to help victims of trauma to finally heal. However, it’s a technique that requires collaboration with a skilled and compassionate therapist who is trained in brainspotting.
If you are struggling with past trauma and would like to know more about how brainspotting & trauma treatment could help you, please contact me.