What is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a type of psychological treatment founded by Dr. David Grand in 2003. It's built on the premise that where you look affects how you feel, positing that our eye positions correlate with emotional and traumatic memories stored in the brain. During therapy, clients are guided to use their visual field to locate spots that trigger a strong emotional or somatic response. A brainspot is thus identified, and by maintaining focus on this spot, the client can access and process the underlying trauma within the subcortical brain. Proponents of Brainspotting assert that it can lead to profound and lasting changes by tapping into the body's natural self-scanning and self-healing abilities, making it potentially effective for treating emotional and psychological challenges.
Brainspotting Therapy @ SBCS:
Susan Stork, LCPC + Diana Harden, LCPC
The brain’s complexity is not just a challenge—it's a vast landscape where a certified Brainspotting therapist can guide you to tap into your greatest resource. With the combination of profound knowledge and extensive experience, a Brainspotting specialist can help unlock your full potential, fostering phenomenal ideas and catalyzing transformative actions. However, the same intricate mind can often serve as a repository for deep-seated pain; trauma and burdensome memories from your past can become entrenched within your unconscious, subtly steering every aspect of your life.
What if there was a bespoke therapy, like Brainspotting, that could 'crack the code' of your mind and address the root of your persistent thoughts, fears, and barriers? Imagine harnessing a scientifically-backed, brain-based therapy that grants you access to past trauma and empowers you to manifest lasting change in just a few sessions. As a trained Brainspotting practitioner, I can facilitate this groundbreaking process, offering a path to healing and self-discovery that is as profound as the brain itself.
Introducing Brainspotting Therapy: a powerful, focused method for treating trauma and other unresolved psychological issues.
This unique approach helps you release the psychological blocks that keep you from being your most connected, creative, actualized self.
“Brainspotting is based on the profound attunement of the therapist with the patient, finding a somatic cue and extinguishing it by down-regulating the amygdala. It isn’t just PNS (Parasympathetic Nervous System) activation that is facilitated, it is homeostasis.
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You may have heard “eyes are windows to the soul” before. As it turns out, there’s medical research that proves that this old phrase is true. As the creator of this Brainspotting, Dr. David Grand, says, “where you look affects how you feel.”
Brainspotting helps track points in your visual field that reveal unprocessed trauma in the brain. A skilled Brainspotting clinician will utilize a pointer to guide your gaze whilst playing Bilateral sounds that stimulate both sides of the brain. Simultaneously, the Brainspotting clinician will carefully watch your physical responses as you talk through or think about a troubling event or concern.
How Does Brainspotting Work?
According to David Grand, Ph.D.,“A “Brainspot” is the eye position which is related to the energetic/emotional activation of a traumatic/emotionally charged issue within the brain, most likely in the amygdala, the hippocampus, or the orbitofrontal cortex of the limbic system. Located by eye position, paired with externally observed and internally experienced reflexive responses, a Brainspot is actually a physiological subsystem holding emotional experience in memory form.”
Laser-like efficiency is possible when you are processing on a Brainspot, as it holds the brain's attention on the precise brain region that needs healing.
What is a “Brainspot”?
Brainspotting is usually done with both eyes but may also be done with one. A therapist identifies a Brainspot by waving a pen-shaped / pointer object in a specific pattern in front of the client's eyes, and when the pen-like object comes across a Brainspot, the deep brain will reflexively signal to the therapist that a Brainspot has been found.
At times, this happens outside of the client's consciousness. These reflexive signals can include (all without the client being aware of these happening) an eye twitch, facial tic, brow furrow, pupil dilation/constriction, swallows, yawns, coughs, foot movement, or body shifting. Among these signals, facial expressions are the strongest indicators of a Brainspot.
The identification of a reflexive response that indicates a Brainspot hint at the somatosensory experience of the trauma, emotional or somatic problem. By finding these Brainspots, the therapist is triggering these somatosensory experiences in the client. To access the Brainspot and the emotions that can follow, the therapist holds the client’s eye position while the client focuses on the experience of the symptom being accessed by the Brainspotting.
The therapist and client work together to find the Brainspots. The client participates in this by letting the therapist know, during the Brainspotting scan, when he or she feels any heightened intensity, either physically or emotionally.
HOW DO THERAPISTS IDENTIFY BRAINSPOTS?
Our practice founder, Susan Stork, LCPC, NCC, is trained in Brainspotting to help you find the neurophysiological origins of emotional and physical pain. Once you and your therapist have worked together to develop rapport, you’ll then identify the specific issue you’d like to address, and then you can begin the work of resolving the issue.
Brainspotting is a powerful, co-creative process.
Susan sees Brainspotting as an ideal supplement to psychotherapy for those who feel stuck in their healing or who want to achieve a new level of success.
Coming to SBCS for a few Brainspotting sessions doesn’t mean you’re breaking up with your current therapist. Instead, you’re invited to look at it as an adjunct to your current work.
Most people seek BSP sessions for 3 to 9 sessions, depending on the severity of past trauma + individual goals.
What does a course Brainspotting treatment at Space Between Counseling look like?
People come to SBCS for Brainspotting because they want to heal and they want to grow.
You might come because you’ve hit a roadblock in therapy and want to try to access your problem in a different way. Clients often come to SBCS for a limited series of Brainspotting sessions while continuing their ongoing relationship with another therapist.
High performers, entrepreneurs, creatives, and others entering a new phase of growth in their life and work also come to Brainspotting for the way it can help you “level up.” You can resolve issues in your unconscious mind that kept you from embodying your fullest potential.
Brainspotting can be utilized to treat a variety of psychological “roadblocks” and issues, such as:
Physical and emotional trauma
Recovery from injury and accident trauma
Trauma resulting from medical interventions and treatment
Stress and trauma-related medical illness
Sports Performance and Creativity Enhancement
Fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions
Addictions (especially cravings)
ADD and ADHD
Perceptual problems
Stuttering
Environmental Illness and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Phobias
Asthma
Preparation and recovery from surgery
Trauma resulting from war and natural disasters
Anger and rage problems
Anxiety and panic
Management of major medical illness
What kind of problems can Brainspotting help to treat?
The way that Brainspotting heals is that it helps the client process the trauma that lies within him or her or them. When the therapist accesses a Brainspot, the client experiences the distress that is associated with that Brainspot. The client then experiences the physical or emotional pain that presents itself, and the client can experience it in a comfortable setting in the presence of the therapist. Over time, accessing this trauma in a safe environment will help the brain to break away from the associated trauma.
Within the field of psychology, professionals have come to realize that when someone experiences trauma, whether it be emotional or physical, it is held in the body. This trauma, potentially caused by a variety of events, such as a serious physical illness, acute or chronic pain, or life trauma in general, can manifest itself in a variety of ways, and one way that professionals can help to target and locate that pain is through Brainspotting. Therapists use Brainspotting to target these areas of trauma stored in the body from previous traumatic experiences.
These traumatic experiences become stored in the body typically because the traumatized person has not had the means to properly deal with the trauma that he or she has experienced. Because the traumatic experiences have not been properly dealt with, they become a part of the person’s trauma reservoir, which can manifest in other physical and emotional symptoms.
HOW DOES BRAINSPOTTING ACT AS A HEALING AGENT AGAINST TRAUMA?
Health care professionals realize that there are many instances in which physical symptoms are present as a result of psychological or emotional trauma, and it can be very difficult to separate these two. Often, traumatic events, whether they were physical or emotional, lie dormant in the brain in the individual’s unconscious and later manifest themselves into very real physical or emotional symptoms.
What Is THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL TRAUMA?
Ultimately, Brainspotting is intended to help you gain fresh insights into old problems. This might mean that old traumas cease to have a hold on you. It might also help shed new light on creative, relational, or professional challenges.
Immediately after a session clients report different results. You might feel tired, drained, and emotionally raw for a little while, especially if you’re working on painful issues. Some people feel relieved or even euphoric after a session. Overall, the goal is to help you release trauma and limitations so you can feel lighter and freer in all aspects of your life.
What are the benefits of Brainspotting?
““Where you look affects how you feel.””
Brainspotting is a powerful, focused treatment method that works by identifying, processing, and releasing core neurophysiological sources of emotional and body pain, trauma, dissociation, and a variety of other challenging symptoms. Brainspotting is a simultaneous form of diagnosis and treatment, enhanced with Bilateral sound, which is deep, direct, powerful yet focused, and containing.
Brainspotting functions as a neurobiological tool to support the clinical healing relationship. There is no replacement for a mature, nurturing therapeutic presence and the ability to engage another suffering human in a safe and trusting relationship where they feel heard, accepted, and understood.
Brainspotting makes use of this natural phenomenon through its use of relevant eye positions. This helps the BSP therapist locate, focus, process, and release a wide range of emotionally and bodily-based conditions. BSP is also a brain-based tool to support the therapy relationship. We believe that BSP taps into and harnesses the body’s natural self-scanning, and self-healing ability. When a Brainspot is stimulated, the deep brain appears to reflexively signal the therapist that the source of the problem has been found. BSP can also be used to find and strengthen our natural resources and resilience. Brainspotting is designed as a therapeutic tool that can be integrated into many healing modalities.
BSP is even more powerful when used with the enhancement of BioLateral Sound CDs.
The Difference Between Brainspotting and Talk Therapy
Brainspotting can be done with or without talk therapy. BSP is ideal for clients that desire to stay with their current therapist but need booster sessions for trauma work, stagnant lulls, regulation, creativity, and exploration of self/memories. Additionally, BSP may be ideal for DRs, EMTs, Healers, and caretakers clinicians to process provider burnout, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue.
Brainspotting is based on the idea that the human system is self-healing, and that the role of the therapist is to set and hold a frame that promotes and utilizes the client's self-healing capacities.
Brainspotting is a process by which the client can access encapsulated trauma or other mental health issues without using extensive "talk therapy." Knowing that clients can often get wrapped up in telling stories, accessing the information using BSP gives clients another way to process their distress without going too deeply into the narrative. Accessing the information in the body using the field of vision cuts out the neocortex; a part of our brain that, while useful, can get really hung up on stories and the need to make sense of them.
A Few Words From Susan Stork, LCPC on Brainspotting:
“Brainspotting is exceptionally client-driven. Therapists are encouraged to "be the tail of the comet," as "the client is the head." The BSP approach is also familiar to me in many ways. Brainspotting is systems-oriented, with an emphasis on therapists themselves and the value of the therapeutic relationship. As a clinician strongly trained in family systems, the BSP modality fits in well with my existing skill sets. Attuning to the energetic field, tracking the client's body movements and facial expressions, and letting the client guide the sessions are all values of mine. Additionally, Brainspotting suggests the notion that a person has inside of them all the information they need to access, process, and heal themselves. The job of the therapist is to create a safe place to promote this, and provide a different way into the process beyond talk therapy”.
To learn more about Brainspotting, please visit the Baltimore Brainspotting Collective, by clicking the image below:
TELL ME ABOUT FEES AND INSURANCE?
Brainspotting fees at SBCS range from $275-$425 per individual 90-minute session.
SBCS is not paneled with any insurance plans but can offer you what's called, "out-of-network benefits" (OONB). Not everyone has this as part of their benefits package so please call your healthcare plan and ask these questions:
Do I have out-of-network benefits?
What percentage of my therapist's fee does my plan pay for?
MOST OONB PLANS REIMBURSE BETWEEN 50-90% OF OUR FEES.
At times insurance plans request upfront billing codes I will be using. You can share this list of codes for their approval:
90834 Psychotherapy, 45 minutes (x2 per session)
When using OONB your clinician would provide you with a document monthly called a "superbill" which is like an invoice but contains the service codes, dates of treatment, and monies paid during therapy. You would submit this to your plan directly and your plan would reimburse you directly as well.
You can get in-network therapy if this is out of your budget. Your plan can identify providers who are in-network should you need to use your benefits.
HOW ARE MY RECORDS STORED?
We at SBCS utilize a HIPAA compliant, encrypted, electronic medical record called Simple Practice that holds all of our client's mental health records safely in it. You will get a link to a client portal where you fill in demographic information and can access documents like invoices and superbills on your own.
HOW DO I PAY MY THERAPIST?
Simple Practice has a credit card processing system named Stripe embedded in it. If choosing to work with a therapist at SBCS, you would upload your credit card number and your therapist will charge after each session or late cancelation for the fee. Your therapist will only have access to the last 4 digits of your card and it is completely secured.
DO YOU HAVE A CANCELLATION POLICY?
All clinicians at Space Between Counseling Services have a 24- business hour cancelation policy You will be responsible for an entire session fee ($275-425) if the change is made in less than 24 business hours' notice. Exceptions may be made for emergencies such as sudden illness or accidents, at your therapist’s discretion. It should be noted that insurance does not reimburse for canceled sessions and HSA and FSA cards can't be used in these cases.