What is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a powerful body-based treatment for emotional distress and trauma. It addresses therapeutic needs that can be difficult to reach through traditional talk therapy, by accessing different regions of the brain. 

While talk therapy primarily engages the prefrontal cortex—the conscious, thinking brain, Brainspotting accesses deeper subcortical brain regions where emotions, unprocessed trauma, and unconscious material are stored. 

To reach these deeper regions of the brain, the client and therapist work together to identify a unique eye position that corresponds to the client’s emotional experience. While maintaining this eye position, the client engages in mindful self-observation, simply noticing and sharing whatever arises within them —without judgment or effort to control the process.

This “focused mindfulness” activates the brain’s innate self-healing capacity. Over time, clients often find relief from overwhelming emotions and physiological sensations connected to their unresolved trauma or other emotional experiences.  

What does Brainspotting feel like?
Naturally, Brainspotting feels different from person to person—and even from one session to the next. It is a gentle approach, yet strong emotions and sensations may arise due to its focused nature and the removal of external distractions. Clients often experience waves of emotions that come and go. Similarly, physical sensations may intensify, lessen, or move to different areas of the body.

For clients who are more visually oriented, Brainspotting may elicit internal imagery such as colors, textures, shapes, or visual memories. Insight may spontaneously arise, or a fresh perspective. At times, clients notice a shift toward greater acceptance of something that was previously difficult to face.

While processing, clients are given space to choose when and what to share verbally. Some clients will want to talk throughout, and others will prefer to share very little. In fact, one of the huge gifts of Brainspotting is that clients do not have to verbally describe their trauma to the therapist, which we know can be re-traumatizing. In Brainspotting, we meet the client where they are. One of our sayings is "We don't have to know WHAT it is to know THAT it is." With or without words, we follow the emotions, body sensations, and body reflexes, trusting the client's nervous system to know how to heal itself with the right conditions and support in place.  

Because Brainspotting is grounded in neurobiology, physical reflexes typically occur during a session. Examples include small twitches, changes in breathing and facial expressions, sighs, blinks, and small mouth and eye movements. The therapist observes these nonverbal responses, and uses them both to find relevant eye positions, and to attune more closely to the client’s experience. Reflexes offer valuable information about the brain’s processing in real time. The client may or may not be consciously aware of them. Another gift of Brainspotting is the therapist can attend to the clients' unconscious reflexes to guide the process when working with clients who struggles to connect to their emotions and body sensations.

How long has Brainspotting been around?
Brainspotting was discovered/developed in 2003 by David Grand, Ph.D. He was already a seasoned clinician at the time, primarily treating clients using EMDR. David now teaches the Neuroexperential model of Brainspotting worldwide.