Brainspotting Therapy
Your eyes really are the windows to your soul and your tears are the windex of healing.
Squirt squirt.
Brainspotting is a newer method of therapy that….
Every time you brainspot and close your eyes, your brain rewires thousands of neural connections.
One thing that is unique about therapy + BSP is that you don’t actually have to talk about it – you can do it internally.
You’re in the driver’s seat. There is no right or wrong way to add brainspotting into your therapy practice. You have a lot of control, freedom, and flexibility to make it what you want – to go as deep as you want, or to stay more in control of what’s happening.
All I need to know is what you want out of brainspotting and where you feel it in your body, but you don’t have to go into detail. It’s a super powerful tool that allows your brain to process and move through emotions much faster than just talking about it, which is rewiring your brain one neural connection at a time.
What is brainspotting?
Do you have a thinking face where you're staring off into space while you're thinking about your mental shopping list at the grocery store?
Weirdly, that's actually how Brainspotting (BSP) works. It uses your natural eye gaze to access your trauma and other emotions.
BSP contends that where you look determines how you feel. BSP was developed through the trauma processing modality of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Both work well and are backed by neurological research, but the ways that they work are different and lend themselves to different personality types of the therapists trained in them.
Why I added brainspotting into my therapy practice (and love it)
I like Brainspotting because it feels more intuitive and less regimented than EMDR. It allows you to process through any emotion, including trauma, in a non-linear way rather than needing a beginning, middle, and end. With BSP, you can move through bigger traumas, uncomfortable feelings, physical pain and body sensations, and even through things you don’t remember. With BSP, you can also increase feelings that you want more of, like confidence, calmness, or even the feeling of being supported by a loved one.
Past BSP Experiences
Doing BSP for myself and with clients, I have seen huge releases of emotion.
While spotting, I am paying attention to my client’s facial expressions, breathing, body language, and eye dilation. I can see them move through different emotions, from sad and angry to scared, and then finally into calm. Clients have reported back to me huge decreases in fear in things that were previously very triggering.
Many clients also report decreases in physical manifestations of stress, like tension in their shoulders and unclenching their jaws.
Active Brainspotting Education
Below is a video of a mock brainspotting session with a paid actor who has actually done brainspotting.
As an actor, her facial and body expressions are outwardly visible. For the majority of my clients, their facial expressions and body language are far more muted, but this is a great example of how it works and how powerful it is.