Your Brain, Your Spot!
Brainspotting was developed by David Grand. Brainspotting is a powerful, focused treatment method used to identify, process, and release experiences and symptoms which are out of reach to the conscious mind; specifically cognitive and language capacity.
In other words, depending on where you place your eyes, you can have greater access to what is causing you pain and/or the feeling of being stuck. This greater access allows you to either increase in activation or groundedness. This is done by locating eye position in your visual field that pairs with a sense of activation that you feel in your body.
The reality being, what you need to heal is already within you!!! Once you give yourself space and permission, your brain and body will give itself what is needed. The key is to release control, and welcome the uncertainty into your life.
How’s Brainspotting Done?
A “Brainspot” is an eye position associated with an emotional activation of a traumatic or emotionally charged experience within the brain, typically located in the amygdala, hippocampus, or limbic system.
The “Brainspot” is paired with the external observation of reflexes and the internal awareness of responses, which holds emotional experiences in memory form. Once stimulated, the deep brain provides a cue to the therapist, taken out of your conscious awareness. These cues can be, but are not limited to; eye twitches, blinks (hard and double blinks), facial tics, brow furrowing, sniffs, swallows, yawns, coughs, head nods, hand signals, foot movement, and body shifts. The most powerful being facial expressions.
Brainspotting is helpful in moving one from being in a state of dysregulation to regulation, chaos to calm - the truth is, the body already understands how to do this. However, for many, a state of panic, chaos, overwhelm, and stress has been normalized and continuous without resetting or grounding.
During brainspotting, the focus is a sole memory, thoughts, belief, or issue. Activation is observed as it shows up in the body in relation to the eyespot. This is paired with bilateral sounds which move by alternating from ear to ear. This experience will differ for everyone. This process is free-forming to your own natural processing and is organically complete with each experience.
