brainspotting
“Where you look affects how you feel.”
here is a phrase that brainspotting practitioners use: where you look affects how you feel. It sounds deceptively simple. But once you have experienced it, it is hard to argue with.
You have probably noticed this yourself without having a name for it. The way a certain direction of gaze seems to bring up a certain quality of feeling. The way you might look down and to the left when you are trying to access something painful, or up and to the right when you are imagining something hopeful. The body knows things the conscious mind has not caught up with yet. Brainspotting works with that knowledge directly.
What Brainspotting Is
Brainspotting was developed by David Grand in 2003, initially as an extension of EMDR. Grand noticed that when clients held their gaze at specific points in their visual field, they accessed deeper layers of emotional and physiological processing than talk or even eye movement alone could reach.
The basic premise is this: traumatic and emotionally significant experiences are stored in the subcortical brain, the parts of the brain beneath conscious awareness, the parts that regulate survival, emotion, and the nervous system. These parts of the brain do not speak in language. They speak in sensation, image, impulse, and feeling.
A brainspot is a specific eye position that correlates with activated neural activity related to a particular experience or emotion. When a trained clinician helps a client locate that eye position and hold it, with focused, attuned attention, the brain begins to process what has been held there. Often without words. Often without the client needing to narrate the experience at all.
“Because you’re a human organism and naturally oriented toward thriving, your brain already knows how to heal. Brainspotting is one way to give it the conditions it needs to do that work.”
What a Brainspotting Session Feels Like
A brainspotting session is quieter than most therapy. There is less talking. Your clinician will ask you to bring your attention to something, a feeling in your body, a memory, an image, an emotion, and then use a pointer or their hand to slowly guide your gaze across your visual field.
When they notice a reflexive response, a blink, a subtle shift in your breathing, a change in your expression, or when you notice something shift internally, that is a brainspot. You hold your gaze there. Your clinician holds the space with you. And you follow wherever your internal experience goes.
People describe the experience in different ways. Some feel emotions arise and move through. Some notice physical sensations that release. Some access memories or images they had not consciously connected to what they came in with. Some feel very little during the session and then notice significant shifts in the days that follow.
The clinician does not direct where you go. They hold the frame while your nervous system does the processing. This is one of the things that makes brainspotting feel different from talk therapy: you are not performing insight for anyone. You are just following what is true for you in this moment, with someone steady beside you.
Why Brainspotting Works
Brainspotting works because it bypasses the part of the brain that edits, narrates, and defends, and accesses the part where the experience is actually stored. For people who have tried talk therapy and found that understanding their experience did not change how they feel about it, this is often the piece that was missing.
The research on brainspotting is growing and promising. It has been shown to be effective for trauma and PTSD, anxiety, depression, grief, performance issues, chronic pain, and a range of other presentations. It is also particularly useful for people who find it difficult to put their experience into words, either because the trauma happened before language developed, or because the experience itself resists articulation.
Brainspotting at Hearten House
Brainspotting is one of the tools available within the experiential, embodied clinical model at Hearten House. It is used in individual therapy and can be integrated into intensive formats depending on the participant's needs and readiness.
It is especially useful in combination with other modalities. Psychodrama might bring something into the room. Brainspotting might then help the nervous system complete the processing that the action opened. The methods work together rather than in competition.
Your frequently asked Questions about brainspotting, Answered
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Brainspotting is a brain-body based therapy developed by David Grand in 2003. It uses specific eye positions, called brainspots, to access and process trauma, emotional pain, and other experiences stored in the subcortical brain. It works below the level of conscious thought and language, which makes it particularly effective for experiences that resist articulation.
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A brainspot is a specific position in your visual field that correlates with activated neural activity related to a particular experience or emotion. When you hold your gaze at a brainspot with focused attention, the brain begins to process what is stored there. Your clinician helps you locate your brainspot and holds the space while your nervous system does the work.
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Both brainspotting and EMDR work with the brain-body connection and are used for trauma processing. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, typically moving eye movements back and forth, to activate processing. Brainspotting uses a fixed eye position held with sustained attention. Brainspotting tends to be quieter and more internally directed, with less therapist-led structure. Some people respond better to one than the other, and some clinicians use both.
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No. One of the distinctive features of brainspotting is that you do not need to narrate your experience for processing to happen. You bring your attention to something, locate the eye position, and follow your internal experience. Significant processing can occur with very little verbal content.
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Brainspotting tends to feel quiet and inwardly focused. People often notice emotions arising and moving through, physical sensations releasing, or a deepening sense of calm. Some people feel a great deal during the session. Others notice the most significant shifts in the days that follow. Your experience is your own and your clinician will follow your lead throughout.
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Yes. Brainspotting is one of the tools available within the clinical model at Hearten House. Most of our therapists are trained in it and use it regularly. We also regularly host brainspotting trainings for professionals.