Brainspotting Therapy: A Path Beyond Traditional Talk Therapy
You've likely spent countless hours talking through your challenges, understanding the "why" behind your reactions, and gaining insight into your patterns. Yet something still feels stuck. Your body holds tension you can't explain, anxiety surfaces without warning, or old patterns keep repeating despite your best efforts. This disconnect between intellectual understanding and embodied experience is more common than you might think, and it's precisely where Brainspotting therapy offers a different path forward.
Understanding the Deeper Layers of Healing
When we experience overwhelming situations, our brains and bodies respond in ways that protect us in the moment. Sometimes, these protective responses get frozen in time, continuing long after the original threat has passed. Traditional talk therapy excels at helping us understand these patterns cognitively, but the body often needs something more to complete its natural healing process.
Brainspotting works from a fundamental principle: where you look affects how you feel. This isn't metaphorical—it's neurological. Your eye positions connect directly to subcortical brain regions where emotions, sensations, and survival responses are stored. These deeper brain areas don't operate through language or logic; they communicate through sensation, emotion, and instinct.
During a Brainspotting session, I help you locate specific eye positions, called "brainspots," that correlate with activation in your nervous system. By maintaining your gaze on these spots while staying present with whatever arises—thoughts, sensations, emotions, or images—your brain begins to process and integrate experiences that may have been incomplete or overwhelming at the time they occurred.
What Makes Brainspotting Different
Beyond Cognitive Understanding
Many clients come after years of traditional therapy. They can articulate their trauma history, identify their triggers, and explain their coping mechanisms. They've done the work of understanding, yet their nervous systems remain activated, their bodies stay braced for danger, and their emotional responses feel disproportionate to current circumstances.
Brainspotting bypasses the analytical mind to access the subcortical brain directly. This means we're not trying to think our way through healing; we're allowing your brain's natural processing mechanisms to complete what was interrupted. It's the difference between knowing about swimming intellectually and actually getting in the water—your body needs the direct experience to truly integrate the learning.
A Client-Led Process
Your brain possesses innate wisdom about what needs healing and in what order. My role is to create a safe container for this process, help you locate relevant brainspots, and support you as your system does its natural work. This approach honors your autonomy and recognizes that you are the expert on your own experience.
You’ll start recognizing limitations as what keeps you stuck, and building on what's already working for you. It's not about changing you or overcoming obstacles, but learning to read the landscape better and how to navigate based on who you are.
The Science of Stored Experience
Research in neuroscience has revealed that traumatic and overwhelming experiences are often stored in the brain and body in fragmented, sensory-based forms rather than as coherent narratives. These fragments—a particular sensation, an emotional state, a visceral reaction—can be triggered by current experiences, flooding your system with responses that belong to the past.
Brainspotting provides a way to access these stored experiences through the visual system's direct connection to the midbrain, where many of these fragmentary memories are held. By maintaining focused attention on a relevant brainspot, you create conditions for your brain to reprocess these experiences, allowing them to integrate into your broader life story rather than remaining as isolated, activating fragments.
The Role of Bilateral Sound
Bilateral sound stimulation is gentle music or nature sounds that alternate between your left and right ears. This bilateral stimulation helps regulate your nervous system and supports interhemispheric integration, allowing both sides of your brain to work together more effectively. Many clients find this creates a sense of calm presence that helps them stay grounded while processing challenging material.
The Brainspotting Process
In a Brainspotting session you’ll be invited to bring to mind an issue you'd like to address. This might be a specific memory, a recurring pattern, a physical sensation, or an emotional state. You don't need to share extensive details—sometimes just holding the issue in awareness is enough.
You’ll be guided to find the eye position that most strongly activates your felt sense of this issue. This is your brainspot—the window into where this experience is held in your nervous system. Once located, you simply hold your gaze there and notice whatever unfolds.
There's no right or wrong way to experience this process. Some clients report vivid memories or images, others notice shifts in body sensations, and still others experience waves of emotion or periods of calm. Whatever arises is valid and part of your unique healing process.
Integration and Support
At the end of each session, we take time to help you integrate what's emerged and ensure you're grounded before leaving. We'll discuss any insights or shifts you've noticed and talk about how to support yourself between sessions. Your brain continues processing after our sessions end, and I'll help you understand how to work with this ongoing integration.
Conditions Addressed Through Brainspotting
Trauma and Nervous System Dysregulation
Whether you've experienced a single overwhelming event or prolonged difficult circumstances, trauma can leave your nervous system stuck in patterns of hypervigilance or shutdown. Brainspotting helps your system complete the interrupted processing of these experiences, allowing your nervous system to return to a more regulated baseline.
This is particularly relevant for those dealing with the effects of strokes, TBIs, or other neurological conditions, where the nervous system may need additional support in reorganizing and healing.
Anxiety and Overwhelm
Anxiety often represents your nervous system's attempt to protect you from perceived threats, even when those threats are no longer present. Through Brainspotting, we can access the root experiences that fuel anxiety, helping your system recognize present-moment safety and develop new responses to triggers.
Depression and Disconnection
Depression frequently involves a sense of being cut off from vitality, purpose, or connection. Brainspotting can help process the experiences that led to this disconnection, rekindling your innate capacity for engagement and aliveness.
Relationship Patterns
Our earliest relationships shape how we connect with others throughout our lives. When these early experiences included disruption or inadequate attunement, we may find ourselves repeating painful patterns in current relationships. Brainspotting can help heal these foundational wounds, creating space for new ways of relating.
Integrating Multiple Modalities
In addition to Brainspotting, I'm trained in complementary approaches that support deep healing:
Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) uses specially filtered music to help regulate your nervous system through the vagus nerve, creating a physiological state of safety that supports all other therapeutic work.
Accelerated Resolution Therapy provides rapid relief from distressing memories and symptoms, often achieving significant results in just a few sessions.
Somatic Experiencing helps you develop greater awareness of body sensations and learn to discharge trapped survival energy, supporting your nervous system's return to balance.
These modalities work synergistically, each offering unique pathways to healing. During our consultation, we can discuss which approaches might best serve your specific needs and goals.
The Path Forward
Healing isn't about erasing the past or becoming someone different. It's about integrating all parts of your experience so you can respond to life from a place of wholeness rather than fragmentation. Brainspotting offers a unique pathway to this integration, one that honors both your cognitive understanding and your embodied experience.
If you've been feeling stuck despite your best efforts, if talking about your challenges hasn't created the shifts you're seeking, or if you sense there's something deeper that needs attention, Brainspotting might offer the key you've been looking for.
This work requires courage—the courage to feel what's been unfelt, to witness what's been unseen, and to trust your innate capacity for healing. But you don't have to do it alone. I'm here to provide the attuned presence, safety, and guidance you need as you navigate this terrain.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is Brainspotting different from EMDR? While both approaches use bilateral stimulation and eye positions, Brainspotting tends to be more flexible and client-directed. Many find it gentler and more precise, allowing for deeper processing without the structured protocols of EMDR.
How long does Brainspotting take to work? Each person's healing journey is unique. Some clients experience significant shifts within a few sessions, while others benefit from longer-term work. We'll regularly assess your progress and adjust our approach based on what's serving you best.
Can Brainspotting help with physical symptoms? Many physical symptoms have roots in nervous system dysregulation or stored trauma. While I don't treat medical conditions, clients often report improvement in stress-related physical symptoms as their nervous systems become more regulated.
What if I can't identify a specific trauma? You don't need to have a identified "big T" trauma to benefit from Brainspotting. It's equally effective for developmental trauma, chronic stress, and the accumulated impact of life's challenges.
Will I have to relive traumatic experiences? Brainspotting allows for processing without re-traumatization. While memories or emotions may surface, the process is designed to keep you within your window of tolerance, processing only what your system is ready to handle.
How do online sessions work? Online Brainspotting is just as effective as in-person work. We'll use video conferencing, and I'll guide you through the same process we'd use in person. Many clients appreciate being able to do this deep work from their own comfortable space.
Ready to explore what lies beyond talking? Contact me today for your free consultation and discover how Brainspotting can support your unique healing journey.
