Brainspotting - An alternative therapy for trauma
Brainspotting is an alternative approach to dealing with emotions and feelings.
The core concept is that you are affected by what you can see.
In the past, I have discussed how what you perceive through your senses - sight, sound, smell - shapes your reality.
Using the same principle, Dr David Grand developed the concept of brainspotting.
In this form of therapy, you target specific eye positions, also known as brainspot. These areas are believed to corelate to area in your brain that store trauma and emotions.
A trained expert would then guide you to identify an area, a point in your visual field, that connects to a prior experience. By holding your gaze, you process the emotions and rewrite the memory.
So is this science?
Traditionally, therapy has used verbal processing to deal with emotions. You express what you are feeling to yourself or a third person.
By expressing, you are allowing your rational brain to reason your emotions, allowing you to diminish the trauma.
The goal in brainspotting is to delve deeper. It is designed to bypass the conscious mind and tap into the body’s stored trauma.
It recognizes that trauma often resides in the deeper, subcortical regions of the brain, which are less accessible through conversation alone.
Researchers believe that this subcortical brain activity is the reason individuals often experience trauma on a visceral level, such as feeling a tight chest or a lump in the throat.
By unlocking these areas through targeted eye positioning, brainspotting helps release the stored trauma, facilitating healing.
The concept of going beyond language is not new.
Others have recognized that the body processes emotions at different levels, but certainly also processes them physically and subconsciously.
A treatment, especially for those who are yet to heal with traditional methods, could consider alternative therapies such as brainspotting.
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