Brainspotting Therapy - Getting Started
By: Emily McCulloh, Graduate Intern
What in the World is Brainspotting Therapy?
Brainspotting sounds like a weird, confusing, and somewhat scary concept. A therapist uses a large pointer that you stare at with some calming music & all of a sudden the traumas that you have been working through for years start to heal? It sounds too good to be true and it can be hard to believe.
How could something that is seemingly so simple help us heal in such a deep way, especially after we have been trying so desperately to find help and heal for years.
The Body Keeps the Score
Our bodies carry so much trauma with us. Every single experience that we have is stored in our brain (and our body), whether we realize it or not. Each and every situation that we are in impacts us in some way. Trauma can be like a spiderweb, made up of all of our different negative experiences, some major and some small. It is not always life-altering event. It can be a build-up of many different negative experiences that has negatively impacted your life or your view of yourself.
Sometimes, it is not what has happened to us but instead what didn’t happen for us. Trauma causes inflammation to build up in our body, which leads to a lot of outcomes. Chronic illness and pain, cold/flu season seeming to be harder for you than others, fatigue and quick overwhelm are just a few. With trauma our nervous system gets dysregulated, leaving us constantly feeling burned out or on edge.
We are impacted both emotionally and physically. Therapy often focuses on emotions and cognitions, which are important but leave out an essential part of healing.
Why Did That Bother Me so Much?
Do you ever feel extremely anxious, depressed, or triggered for no apparent reason? It is likely that you have stumbled into your web of trauma. Certain experiences that do not seem to be traumatic can cause a LOT of uncomfortability and can cause a physical reaction.
Brainspotting helps us to realize how the puzzle pieces of our trauma and struggles are connected; it helps us to see the full picture - not through thinking but feeling. It can also help us to begin to better understand and listen to our body. After living life a certain way for a long time our body might not feel like a safe place to be anymore. Brainspotting supports in bridging that gap, to help your body feel like a place you can hang out in and fully live into.
The goal of Brainspotting isn’t to stay in the trauma, but to relieve your body enough that it can start taking in new, more joyful, experiences and be shaped by those experiences.
How is Brainspotting different from Talk Therapy?
You may have been in talk therapy for years, with limited success. Talk therapy is amazing to help you gather new information, find support and understand yourself a little better. Brainspotting helps heal ona different, deeper level! Brainspotting helps us to access a part of our brain called the Subcortial region (big fancy word for referring to the unconscious).
This part of our brain controls things that we do not normally think about or have much control over. Thin about all your automatic actions, saying yes quickly to plans without thinking about it, agreeing to help when your plate is already full - these are actions stored in our subconscious mind. In brainspotting, when we are able to reach this part of our brain by looking in a certain direction for a long time, we are able to make connections that we never have before.
You might begin to see how your different experiences are all part of a spiderweb/ puzzle. Not only does brainspotting help us to better understand and process trauma, but it can also help our brain to rewire itself. Our brain is constantly forming new neural connections and brainspotting can help our brain to form new, healthy connections.
Helping us in turn move into the direction that we have wanted for our whole lives.
What a relief it is to finally be able to understand why we are struggling. Brainspotting allows people to have breakthroughs that they never thought were possible. Not only can it help you heal on an emotional level, but a physical level too. As we release past trauma, adversity and conditioning our body creates less stress and inflammation.
So often we disregard our bodies and the wisdom that they have to offer us, but in Brainspotting, we are creating an environment to listen to what our bodies have to tell us. You deserve relief from the trauma that you have been carrying around with you for so long & you deserve to feel safe in your body.
If you want to learn a little more we have a brief 90 minute psychoeducation video available here!