What Is Brainspotting? A Madison Therapist Explains
I have been a licensed professional counselor for over twenty years, and I started using Brainspotting in 2013. I have watched it grow from something people thought was a little strange to something a lot of therapists now reach for. When I first trained, if you brought up spirituality, consciousness or energy work and anywhere near it, people would look at you sideways. Thirteen years later that has completely changed, and the work itself has only deepened and evolved.
Personally, my own experience with brainspotting was nothing like I had ever experienced–I had worked through issues that I had my whole life, in just a few hours. And was so excited to bring it to my clients in therapy that were feeling just as stuck in their life. With Brainspotting I was getting my clients unstuck much faster than ever before. It felt so wonderful to be able to finally support and guide my clients into more freedom, peace, and overall well-being.
So let me tell you what it actually is, because I think it is hard to picture from the outside, and most people have only ever known “therapy” as a conversation.
Why Talking Sometimes Isn't Enough in Therapy
When you go to most therapists, you talk. And talking is good, and there is real purpose in that. I still use it. I teach skills and mindfulness etc. But when we talk, we can only work with what we already know, what’s top of the mind or even surface level. Also we can only reach the parts of the story through words and language.
There are things along our timeline that happened to us that we don't recall or remember, and some of them are really pivotal to our growth and healing. Even though we are not conscious of these things, we carry them anyway. They live in the body, in the nervous system, underneath the reach of language, and no amount of talking about them quite gets you there, because talking is happening in a different part of the brain than where it is stored, which is the subcortical part of the brain. This is the part of the brain that controls everything you can’t think about, such as your emotions, stress response, memories, and motivation.
Brainspotting takes you deeper into those core places: into how things actually got started for you. One of the sayings we use is that “what's in the brain is in the body, and what's in the body is in the brain.” Meaning it is all connected, all one system, and that is the part of you this work is speaking to.
How Something Gets Stuck
Let’s start with, it does not always take a catastrophe. We talk a lot about trauma, and people assume it has to mean something enormous, but much of what we carry may be smaller and quieter. It could be a time you didn't feel heard, a time you didn't feel safe, a friendship that hurt, or a moment you felt you had to make yourself small.
In Brainspotting we sometimes call these trauma capsules. When something happens and we cannot fully process it in the moment, that gets held and stored as information or material held in the subcortical part of the brain. Through the Brainspotting process we are able to tap into the brain’s natural capacity to process what has remained unprocessed. There is a saying that “neurons that fire together wire together”. So a pattern forms, and it hardwires, and before long you are moving through your days running on an old reaction rather than a present choice.
With Brainspotting we can create and strengthen positive neural connections in the brain in a way that you want them to “fire and wire” positively and effectively. Also what is known as “neuroplasticity”.
We each have what is called a window of tolerance, which is the band where we can meet life and move through it, where things happen and we handle them and we are okay. But when something knocks us above that window, the nervous system goes into overdrive: you are anxious, restless, rushed, and unable to slow down. And when it drops us below that window, you go the other way: you check out, you want to sleep all the time, everything feels heavy and hard. A lot of people are living in that spiked, wired place or down in that flattened place, without much of the calm, regulated middle where life tends to be easier to navigate.
Where You Look Affects How You Feel
Here is the piece that makes Brainspotting different, and it is simpler than it sounds for where you look affects how you feel. The gaze anchors the focus, so that the midbrain can become accessible, where implicit memory rises, and where the nervous system does what it is able to do with the right conditions and that is to reorganize, release, heal and repair.
I will give you a real example. Last night I was nervous about a presentation. I decided to notice where I felt it: it was right in my stomach, turning, and was about an eight out of ten in intensity. This was my starting place when brainspotting. I scanned my body, found where the feeling felt-sense was, and then found the spot in my visual field that held the most charge when thinking of that presentation. Your eyes are already doing this on their own; when you go to remember something, notice how they drift to one side. That drift is your nervous system pulling up the file.
Once I found that spot, I remained there. In Brainspotting we say we “follow the tail of the comet”- your nervous system knows where it is going. We simply trust it and follow it with our attention. Whatever comes up is coming up because it is ready to. Sometimes it is a memory, sometimes a flash of an image, sometimes just a feeling in the body or a wave of emotion. You do not have to know exactly what it is to know that it is something. Through the observing and experiencing I was able to access the sensations, thoughts, memories and emotions that were unprocessed from the past that were related to what I was feeling about this upcoming presentation. Once processed, I was able to find myself feeling much less anxious and overall positive about the upcoming experience and as a result it went well the next day.
What a Session Actually Feels Like
We often add bilateral sound, like gentle nature sounds, a brook or the ocean, etc., that move softly from one ear to the other and help balance the two sides of the brain. It eases you into a calm, almost meditative state. The bilateral sound helps quiet that reactive part of the brain and supports the gentle processing.
Then you sit with the spot, and you notice. Memories may surface, or thoughts, or sensations, or emotion. Many people describe it as watching a movie of themselves, “Oh, and that's related, and that's related, and that's related.” The brain often processes these visuals so quickly that you often do not need the story to go with it.
What tends to happen is that the activation rises, and then it plateaus, and then it dissolves, and we stay with it until it settles all the way down to where there is no charge left in it. Afterward, when you think about the thing again, it feels like something that simply happened to you, rather than something that is still happening in you. There is less or even absence of the charge that was once there.
People are sometimes surprised that there is not a lot of talking. Sometimes, it can look and feel like very little is happening. But we are highly attuned to you the whole time, and we are trusting your brain, which knows exactly what it is doing. The whole thing is led by you, your awareness, and your experience. You do not have to relive anything, and you do not have to talk about it if you do not want to. Your nervous system does the work to bring you back to peace and balance.
If you have done the talking and something still hasn't moved, Brainspotting may reach it from a different direction. Sessions are available in Madison and by telehealth.
Book a consultation to talk about whether it's a fit for where you are.
