Brainspotting
Brainspotting — What is it and how can it help me?
Do you find yourself feeling stuck? Maybe you’ve even tried therapy before and it just hasn’t felt as helpful as you thought it should be. You may find yourself struggling with intrusive thoughts or anxieties that just won’t go away. Brainspotting is like any other therapy you’ve ever experienced or heard about.
Brainspotting is a treatment modality that has been around for over two decades and is used to treat a wide variety of concerns from trauma to anxiety to to compulsions.
We know that where we look is connected to how we feel, and there are certain spots in our visual field, called brainspots, that are more connected to certain thoughts, feelings, or memories. Brainspotting is the intentional finding and looking at those spots to help support processing thoughts and emotions to help individuals feel better.
As we grow and age, we collect a lot of “rubbish” in our brain. This rubbish is things like negative thoughts about ourselves or the world, anxieties about every day things, or just maladaptive thought patterns that we pickup and have a difficult time shaking.
Brainspotting is a useful tool to shake out and get rid of some of that rubbish. It can be helpful in processing negative thoughts and attuning more to the helpful, supportive thoughts. It can help with processing past traumas, future anxieties, and current stressors.
That doesn’t sound real…
So, we are telling you that you are going to look at a spot in your visual field, stare at it, and you are going to feel better. That sounds like magic or something that isn’t real.
You are absolutely correct, Brainspotting is a modality that does sound very unusual, especially when you compare it to traditional talk therapy. Most people come in with the notion that healing has to be hard or painful, or that we have to spend hours or years and years in therapy rehashing old problems for them to feel even a tiny bit better. Let’s go ahead and put those assumptions on a shelf for a minute.
Brainspotting has a lot of evidence that shows it works. It has been around for over 20 years and has a wide network of therapists that are trained and utilizing this with a wide array of success. At our clinic, we highly value treatments with evidence that backs up that it is going to work so that you can know your invest of time and money is actually going to be helpful at the end of the day.
This modality also relies heavily on the attunement between the therapist and the client.
The therapist is with you the entire way to ensure that you are staying within your window of tolerance and that some sort of movement is happening. Therapists go through extensive training to be able to perform modalities like Brainspotting. Brainspotting is also one of many things in our arsenal that we can use to support someone in finding the healing that they have been seeking.