What is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a powerful mind and body therapy that reduces and resolves troubling symptoms. The therapy relies on the connected relationship and dual attunement between the Client and Counselor. Brainspotting works from the principle of Where you look affects how you feel. The position of your eye helps recall situations and your feelings change depending on the direction you look.
We have 100 billion neurons in our brain that fire around 10 times per second. As we experience daily life, typical and even difficult events are able to be fully processed to completion in our brain and will not cause ongoing stress or challenges.
In situations where a real or perceived threat is experienced, the amygdala activates survival instincts of fight, flight, or freeze. When the brain is overwhelmed and not able to fully process an event, the traumatic sights and sounds remain encapsulated or “stuck” in our brain as we experienced them at that time.
How you would know if you were stuck? Present day events and interactions would be informed or even dictated by this trauma “capsule” and the past experiences and feelings held there.
Brainspotting is a physiological approach that has psychological consequences. It allows you to access the deepest part of your brain subcortically and heal on what appears to be at a reflexive or cellular level in the Central Nervous System.
It stops the cycle of negative beliefs, feelings, and actions on a mind and body level. What this means is you will remember the event but will not have any emotional activation when revisiting the memory. If we wrote your story down and then engaged in Brainspotting, the story doesn’t change but how you feel about it will change in a positive way. Brainspotting appears to stimulate, focus, and activate the body’s inherent capacity to heal itself from trauma
What is like to engage in the Brainspotting process?
- A topic you would like to work on will be selected and often we will use Biolateral sound to enhances the brain’s processing abilities.
- I will guide you to get in touch with how the topic is activated in your body when you focus on it (tight chest, pounding heart, sweaty palms) This activation is called your felt sense which brings awareness to the inside of your body including sensation, energy, and emotions. The felt sense moves focus from the outside world in to the internal world and experience inside your body and what is present for you in the moment.
- Next we will find the fixed point in space (Brainspot) that is most closely associated with this felt sense that will help you access the deep subcortical part of your brain, allowing for processing and creating forward movement in the trauma healing. You will discover a different understanding of the past events while decreasing or eliminating distressing thoughts and feelings.
You are in control of your healing journey. I will be present and attuned to your process and trust you will go where you need to in order to heal. There is no right way or one way to do Brainspotting so everything you experience has value.