Have you felt like your progress wavers in therapy? Ever felt stuck in overcoming your trauma?
Do you battle with migraines or other chronic health conditions? Are you or someone you know a child, adolescent, or adult with ADHD, depression, anxiety, PTSD, complex trauma, or on the Autism Spectrum? If you said yes to one or more of these questions, then you may be a candidate for Brainspotting (BSP) therapy!
“What is that?!” you may ask. It is a type of therapeutic approach, known as brain-based therapy, that provides more promising and quicker results/response for individuals who struggle with any of the previously mentioned challenges. This gives clients an additional treatment option that is less invasive than other therapies and goes beyond the mind to gain access to the brain for a powerful healing process to occur and have positive lasting effects.
Now, you might be wondering, “how does this treatment work? What occurs during a Brainspotting session with a trained Brainspotting therapist?” BSP is based on the following premise: where you look affects how you feel. When we think about past events or certain memories, notice how our eyes naturally shift to a particular direction. As we focus on these memories or thoughts, sometimes our eyes may shift again causing us to feel either uncomfortable, angry, happy, or peaceful. These responses are great indicators to what those specific events mean to us. In other words, it is our brain’s way of communicating to our body our natural flight or fight response, which provides insight into any barriers, factors, or what is occurring when triggers or physical symptoms arise-allowing us to have a better understanding into our process of healing.
Brainspotting was first discovered and developed by Dr. David Grand, a psychotherapist and author, in 2003 during a session with a client he had been seeing long-term. One day, during a somatic experiencing session, the client, who was a professional figure skater, shared that she struggled with mastering a triple loop. As Dr. Grand asked the client to visualize the move while following his finger with her eyes, he noticed that the skater’s eyes repeatedly wobbled at a particular point of her visual field; causing him to pause his finger at this spot and asked the client to hold her gaze there. She then began sharing about a past-undisclosed trauma. A few days after this session, she was able to perform the triple loop move 22 times in a row! It was then that Dr. David Grand realized he discovered something significant to help clients heal and further developed additional techniques in Brainspotting.
In present day, a trained BSP therapist, such as myself, will utilize BioLateral Sound and/or a pointer to identify a brain-spot while holding space for a client to neurobiologically locate, focus, process, and release experiences and symptoms that are typically out of reach of the conscious mind. This helps unwire pathways by causing the brain to take traumatic memories and combine them into long-term memories, moving them into the subcortex part of the brain. As a result, clients feel that what they experienced in the past no longer negatively affects them.
If you find yourself interested after reading this or would like to explore a different approach in your healing process, I encourage you to consider Brainspotting Therapy. Feel free to look into peer-reviewed research that has been conducted on BSP and/or check out Dr. David Grand’s book: “Brainspotting The Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change”. As a Brainspotting therapist, I look forward to working with you in your wellness journey!
Comments