Psychotherapeutic Neurophysiology

“Where we look effects how we feel”

– David Grand, PhD

Clinician Paige Roberts talks about what Brainspotting is.

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What is Brainspotting?

Brainspotting works by identifying, processing, and releasing core neurophysiological sources of emotional or body pain, trauma, dissociation, and a variety of other distressing symptoms.
Brainspotting is a simultaneous form of diagnosis and treatment. This is enhanced with bilateral sound, which facilitates a deep and direct connection to locating and releasing trauma.
Brainspotting is a neurobiologic tool, within this clinical relationship. This allows us to neurobiologically locate, focus, process, and release experiences and symptoms that are typically not within the conscious mind and its cognitive and language capacity.
A “Brainspot” is the eye position which is related to the energetic or emotional activation of a traumatic or emotionally-charged issue within the brain. Typically associated in the amygdala, the hippocampus, or the orbitofrontal cortex of the limbic system, they are revealed by eye position, paired with externally observed and internally experienced reflexive responses. A Brainspot is actually a physiological subsystem holding an emotional experience in memory form.
When a Brainspot is stimulated, the deep brain reflexively signals the therapist that an area of significance has been located. This typically happens out of the client’s conscious awareness. There are a multitude of reflexive responses, including eye twitches, wobbles, freezes, blinks (hard and double blinks), pupil dilation and constriction, narrowing, facial tics, brow furrowing, sniffs, swallows, yawns, coughs, head nods, hand signals, foot movement and body shifting. Reflexive facial expressions are powerful indicators of Brainspots. The appearance of a reflexive response as the client attends to the somatosensory experience of the trauma, emotional or somatic problem is an indication that a Brainspot has been located and activated.

Brainspotting works with the deep brain and the body through its direct access to the autonomic and limbic systems within the body’s central nervous system.
The Brainspot can then be accessed and stimulated by holding the client’s eye position while the client is focused on the somatic or sensory experience of the symptom or problem being addressed in the therapy. This processing, which appears to take place at a reflexive or cellular level within the nervous system, brings about a de-conditioning of previously conditioned, maladaptive emotional and physiological responses.
Brainspotting is aimed at activating, locating, and processing the Brainspot. Bilateral sound enhances the brain’s processing abilities by alternately stimulating each cerebral hemisphere.
There is growing recognition within the healing professions that experiences of physical and/or emotional injury, acute and chronic pain, serious physical illness, dealing with difficult medical interventions, societal turmoil, environmental disaster, as well as many other problematic life events, will contribute to the development of a substantial reservoir of life trauma. That trauma is held in the body. The traumatic experience then becomes a part of that individual’s trauma reservoir. The body and the psyche cannot remain unaffected by the physical, energetic and emotional costs extracted by this accumulated trauma load (Grand, Brainspotting Pro, 2015)