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Brainspotting
What is Brainspotting (BSP)?
Brainspotting is a modality that uses your visual field to access and re-process trauma stored in the subcortical brain, with the goal of releasing emotional distress and restoring homeostasis around the stressor. Much like EMDR, Brainspotting is rooted in REM sleep science, and we utilize a combination of your eye movements and somatic awareness to connect to stressors and stay with them, to begin to excavate and process the harbored impacts of your lived experiences.
While you’re telling me a story of your lived experience, we’ll begin to utilize a Brainspotting pointer and eye movement to locate a spot in your visual field that connects to a strong emotional or physical reaction to what you’re discussing. Then, we hold your eye gaze on this spot as you voice what is beginning to emerge from your body and mind, to begin to disentangle, process and re-integrate the trauma stored here.
In this process, we’re leveraging the neural connections between the eyes and the brain, connecting to a place that talk therapy often can’t reach.
While Brainspotting, we often utilize bilateral stimulation in the form of sound or (tactile) tapping, which mimics the processing pattern of REM sleep, facilitating both hemispheres of the brain to work together to process trauma and stress.
The Unbroken -Rashani Rea
There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.
I find that Brainspotting is a profound modality for those with complex PTSD, or who have survived traumas that have impacted the body such as medical trauma, birth trauma, domestic violence or sexual assault. Rather than trying to talk through what we think about the trauma, we’re accessing it through the way the body is telling us how it feels about the trauma, then we’re unraveling and process the context for those feelings, context that may have been protected and not otherwise available to the conscious mind.
