What is Brainspotting (BSP)?
When it comes to navigating difficult experiences, emotions, illness, pain, or any other traumatic event, you may start to feel a weight within yourself that you just can’t place. Oftentimes trauma manifests as stress, but it can manifest in many other ways, like avoidance, procrastination, dissociation, exhaustion, and even impact your beliefs and ideals.
Everyone processes trauma differently. But one thing is clear, when you’ve experienced trauma, your window of tolerance - the optimal zone in your body that can function in everyday life managing stressful events - gets smaller and it becomes more difficult to regulate your emotions effectively.
Your body stores its traumatic responses in your nervous system. This is why the impact of trauma most keenly affects your biological reactions and stress responses.
Brainspotting is a brain and body-based therapy that allows you to process difficult emotions or traumatic experiences by accessing those hard-to-reach places in your brain.
This type of therapy is a relatively new one having only been around since 2003, but it is an expansion of another trauma therapy: Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). However, EMDR and brainspotting therapy are very different.
Brainspotting therapy and trauma
Brainspotting therapy was developed to address distressing emotions or “stuck” patterns. The process is done with a therapist who guides you through finding a “brainspot,” the area where your eyes focus when your physical discomfort is the strongest. Once the brain spot is found, your therapist will guide you through a series of bilateral movements to help “reprogram” the neuropathways associated with the brainspot.
The theory behind brainspotting therapy is that these “brainspots” represent the area in the brain where your trauma is stored. But, you need to remember that your body also stores trauma.
Most conventional therapies (like talk therapy) don’t focus on the areas of the body where you feel your trauma. Which leaves an open pathway from the part of your brain responsible for your nervous system regulation and your body.
With brainspotting, we stimulate the memories stored in your midbrain (that hard-to-reach, protective area that is responsible for your central nervous system) and assess where in your body your trauma response is manifesting.
This can feel like a tightness in your chest, stomach issues, headaches, chronic pain, and many other physical and emotional manifestations.
While brainspotting therapy is often used to help individuals manage trauma, negative thought patterns, and stress it can also be useful to help you enhance positive feelings, and unlock creativity.
What to expect from your Brainspotting therapy sessions?
Brainspotting sessions are a bit different than what you’d expect from talk therapy sessions. This is especially true because brainspotting therapy focuses on the connection between the mind and body. It’s a practice that involves movement, mindfulness, and attunement to be effective.
But, because knowing what you are getting into is important, here is what you can expect from our brainspotting sessions:
The Process:
Relaxation: We begin with breathing and grounding exercises to help your body feel safe.
Body Connection: You'll identify where you hold stress or trauma in your body, focusing on what needs attention.
Finding Your Spot: Using eye movements, we locate specific points that connect with deeper emotional processing.
Mindful Focus: Your eyes rest on this spot while we explore the emotions and sensations that come up for you.
Working Through: Together, we create space to process the emotions and memories that come to light, helping you move beyond these experiences.
Curious if Brainspotting is right for you?
Brainspotting is mainly used to help relieve traumatic experiences and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, it can also be a useful technique to guide you with attachment issues, unresolved emotional wounds, building self-esteem, and personal growth to name a few.
If you identify with any of these issues, then I encourage you to book a free consultation to see if we’re a good fit and get you started on the right path.
Healing from trauma, and processing difficult emotions is not easy. But you can get there, and live your life out of the shadow of your experiences.