Brainspotting – beyond words

"The eyes are the mirror of the soul," as the saying goes. Perhaps there is more than poetic truth to this.

Brainspotting was developed in 2003 by the American psychologist David Grand. During an EMDR session, Grand noticed something: When he guided her eyes to a particular position in her visual field, she suddenly went much deeper into her processing. Something opened up. He began to investigate this further, and what emerged was Brainspotting.

The core idea is this: traumatic experiences and other difficult emotional material are stored not only as memories, but as unprocessed experiences in the body and the deeper parts of the brain – in what we might call the "old brain," the subcortical areas that operate beneath the level of language and conscious thought. It reaches into the parts of us where words cannot. 

Which is perhaps why talking about difficult things doesn't always change how we feel about them as much as we would like.

A "brainspot" is a specific eye position that corresponds to where difficult material is being held in the brain and nervous system. When the eyes rest at that particular point in the visual field, it is as though a door opens to the deeper layers of the experience. The body often responds – perhaps a shift in breathing, a heaviness, a memory surfacing, a wave of emotion. Something that was frozen begins, slowly, to move.

Perhaps you're thinking:

"But what does the direction of my gaze have to do with what's stored in my nervous system?"

The eyes are, in a very real anatomical sense, an extension of the brain. The visual system has deep connections to the parts of the brain involved in emotional regulation, threat response and memory – including the amygdala, which can be thought of as the brain's alarm system, and the brainstem, where our most primitive survival responses live. When we hold a position with our eyes while simultaneously holding our attention on something emotionally significant, it seems to activate the brain's own capacity to process what it hasn't yet been able to digest on its own.

In this sense, Brainspotting shares something fundamental with EMDR and IFS: a deep trust in the mind and body's own self-healing capacities. It is not the therapist who heals you. The therapist creates the conditions in which your own system can do what it might have been trying to do for a long time.

You can imagine the unprocessed experience as a splinter under the skin. The body already knows what to do with a splinter – it works to push it out. But sometimes it needs a little help finding the right angle. Brainspotting, in a sense, helps the system find exactly that.

What makes Brainspotting particularly interesting is that it works beneath the level of language. Many people have had the experience of knowing, intellectually, that something belongs to the past – and yet the body hasn't quite received the message. Perhaps a rational understanding of what happened has long since been reached – but the stomach is still in a knot, the heart pounds, the old reactions still arise as though the danger is present and real.

This is because trauma and deep emotional experiences are not primarily stored in the parts of the brain that think in words. They live in the body, in sensation, in the nervous system's learned responses to the world. And they are often most effectively reached through approaches that don't require the person to put everything into language.

In a Brainspotting session there is no pressure to find the right words for something that may be beyond the reach of words. There is instead an invitation to notice – to follow what arises in the body, the images, the feelings, the sensations – while the eyes rest in a position that seems to connect to where it all lives.

It is a quiet process. And sometimes profoundly moving.

Brainspotting is used for trauma and PTSD, but also for anxiety, grief, creative blocks, performance anxiety and many other challenges where something seems stuck despite the person's best efforts to move forward.

There is a quality in brainspotting that is hard to describe without having experienced it. A kind of stillness. A focused presence. The sensation of something long-held beginning to soften.

And sometimes, something quite remarkable emerges: a lightness that wasn't there before. A memory that no longer carries its old charge.

The nervous system is wiser than we often give it credit for.

Sometimes it just needs to look in the right direction.