What is brainspotting therapy and can it help me?
What is brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a powerful technique that is a combination of neuroscience, somatic therapy, mindfulness, and the healing power of the relationship between you and a caring, attuned therapist.
In nutshell, brainspotting is staring at a point in your visual field that helps to activate an emotional issue you want to process. The brain uses this eye position to help you activate these neural networks in the brain and body, and it goes to work re-processing them as you practice mindfulness with the help of your therapist.
If you’ve heard of EMDR, brainspotting uses eye movements in a similar way to access certain parts of the brain, but the technique is a little bit different.
Brainspotting helps to activate the natural healing system of the brain and body.
What happens in a brainspotting session?
A brainspotting therapy session is different than a regular talk therapy session. In a brainspotting session, you and your therapist will identify an issue you want to work on. This can be a trauma, a negative self-belief, a powerful emotion, a creative block, or an area of expansion and self-growth you want to focus on.
Then together we will determine a point in your visual field where this issue is most activated in you. By “activated,” what I mean is that you are aware of somatic feelings in your body related to this issue. As you tune into those feelings in your body, your brain will also be lighting up in the deeper regions where neural pathways related to this topic are located.
“Where you look affects how you feel.”
The therapist will then use a pointer to help you fix your eyes to this point and then invite you to notice what you are feeling and thinking. This is essentially practicing mindfulness, making space for any emotion, thought, or feeling with compassion and curiosity. This is also powerful to do with a therapist present with you, attuning to your needs, helping you when you get stuck, and assuring you that you are not alone as you re-experience whatever things come up for you.
As you do this, the brain is literally changing the way this content is stored in your body and re-processing it in a way that promotes more healing, resilience, and integration. Think of it like locating a corrupted file on your computer and running a software program that de-bugs the file and re-saves it as an intact file that is no longer corrupted. That’s an analogy of how this technique activates the innate healing power of your own brain and body.
The power of brainspotting also comes from the relationship between the therapist and client. Having the attuned presence of a caring and grounded therapist can enable clients to feel safer to experience painful or anxiety-provoking thoughts, feelings and sensations. It is powerful to experience your thoughts and feelings mindfully but knowing that are not alone with them, but connected to another compassionate human being here to help navigate you through whatever comes up.
How to find a brainspotting therapist in Tacoma, WA?
If you are looking for a brainspotting therapist in Tacoma, WA or WA state, I can help! I would love to introduce you to this powerful modality and draw upon it and other therapeutic tools to help you find lasting relief from trauma, anxiety, depression, or whatever patterns you are looking to re-write in your life.
Give me a call today for a free 15-min phone consultation to find out if we’d be a good fit!