About Brainspotting

Overview

Brainspotting is a science-based approach that works at the foundational level of the nervous system. Through specific eye positions, attunement, and mindfulness, it supports the brain’s natural ability to process stress and trauma at its source.

Brainspotting results in deep, lasting changes - not just temporary management. Clients often experience meaningful symptom relief along with a deeper sense of calm, clarity, and resilience in how they relate to themselves and their life experiences.

Why people choose Brainspotting:

  • Resolve the constant feeling of overwhelm
  • Profound feeling of loneliness or sadness
  • Stuck and frustrated: Having difficulty creating change or moving forward
  • Recovery from trauma, shock, grief, or chronic stress—recent or long-standing
  • Seeking private work without having to revisit personal history or relive stressful events
  • Have tried other modalities, but still feel stuck at a deeper level

Understanding Brainspotting

Brainspotting is a therapeutic approach that helps identify and resolve the underlying sources of emotional and physical stress. It works by identifying specific eye positions—called brainspots—that are directly connected to unprocessed experiences stored in the brain and body.

When experiences are overwhelming or incomplete, the brain may hold onto them beneath conscious awareness. Storing the experience in a more primitive, survival-based part of the brain. Over time, this can show up as anxiety, emotional reactivity, physical tension, chronic patterns, or a sense of feeling stuck.

Brainspotting gently accesses these deeper brain networks, allowing the nervous system to naturally process and heal unresolved issues.

What Is a Brainspotting Session Like?

Brainspotting is a gentle, client-centered process.

As a trained practitioner, I will help you locate a “brainspot” — a point of visual focus that connects with an internal experience — and then support you as your system processes at its own rhythm.

The work is not about reliving past events or forcing change. Instead, it creates the conditions for the brain and body to reorganize and regulate naturally, with care and precision.

Sessions are guided, supportive, and tailored to your capacity, helping you stay present while meaningful change occurs.

What Can Clients Experience?

Clients often describe Brainspotting as both subtle and powerful. Reporting both immediate and long-term benefits, including:

  • Reduced emotional reactivity and stress
  • Increased clarity, focus, and insight
  • Relief from anxiety, overwhelm, or persistent negative patterns
  • Greater nervous system regulation and resilience
  • A deeper sense of calm, grounding, and self-trust

How Resolving Past Events Makes You Stronger Now and for the Future

Brainspotting doesn’t just help resolve past stress or trauma — it strengthens how your brain and nervous system respond to future challenges. Here’s how this works:

1. It completes unfinished stress responses.

When stress or trauma happens, the brain sometimes can’t fully process the experience. Those unprocessed responses stay stored in the deeper (subcortical) parts of the brain and body.
 Brainspotting helps the brain finish what it couldn’t complete at the time, so those stress patterns no longer get automatically reactivated in the future.

Result: Future stress feels more manageable instead of overwhelming.

2. It increases nervous system resilience.

Through specific eye positions and attuned presence, Brainspotting helps regulate the autonomic nervous system. Over time, your system learns how to move out of fight, flight, or freeze more efficiently.

Result: You recover faster after stress instead of staying stuck in it.

3. It retrains the brain’s threat detection.

Past trauma can cause the brain to overestimate danger — reacting strongly to situations that aren’t actually threatening. Brainspotting helps recalibrate this response at the neurological level.

Result: You respond based on what’s happening now, not what happened before.

4. It integrates mind and body responses.

Because Brainspotting works below conscious thought, it connects cognitive awareness with somatic (body-based) regulation. This creates better internal communication between the cortex (thinking brain) and subcortex (survival brain).

Result: You stay clearer, calmer, and more grounded during stress.

5. It builds internal trust and self-regulation.

As your brain experiences safe processing and relief, it learns that it can handle intense states without being overwhelmed.

Result: Increased confidence in your ability to cope with future emotional or high-pressure situations.

Simply ...

Brainspotting doesn’t just heal the past — it upgrades your nervous system so future stress and trauma don’t hit as hard, last as long, or derail you in the same way.

How Does Brainspotting Work? (The Science)

Brainspotting is grounded in established neuroscience principles:

  • Eye position and brain activation
     Research in neurophysiology shows that eye gaze is linked to activation of specific neural networks. Holding the eyes in a precise position can access areas of the brain & nervous system (subcortex) associated with memory, emotion, and trauma.
  • Subcortical processing (More detail below)
     Trauma is mostly stored in subcortical regions of the brain, which are not fully regulated by language or conscious thought.

Brainspotting works in the subcortex, where talk therapy alone may not reach.

  • Mind–body integration
     Brainspotting incorporates awareness of bodily sensations (heartbeat, muscle tension, nausea, temperature, and pain), aligning with evidence that trauma is stored not only cognitively but also somatically (in the physical body).

Neuroimaging and clinical neuroscience consistently show that unresolved trauma alters autonomic nervous system regulation.

Brainspotting supports re-regulation by allowing the brain to complete interrupted stress-response cycles.

What Can Brainspotting Help With?

Brainspotting has been used successfully to address:

  • Trauma and PTSD
  • Anxiety and panic disorders
  • Depression
  • Chronic stress and burnout
  • Grief and loss
  • Performance blocks (athletics, public speaking, creativity)
  • Chronic pain with emotional components

Documented Outcomes and Effectiveness

Clinical studies and outcome data indicate that Brainspotting can lead to:

  • Significant symptom reduction in PTSD, anxiety, and depression
  • Faster processing compared to some traditional talk therapies
  • Improved emotional regulation and nervous system stability
  • Lasting results, even with complex or long-standing trauma

Peer-reviewed research and practitioner outcome studies have reported measurable improvements in standardized trauma and anxiety scales after Brainspotting interventions. Many clients report meaningful changes within fewer sessions than expected, particularly when trauma is stored somatically rather than verbally.

Cortex vs Subcortex Processing

  • Cortex = understands
  • Subcortex = reacts and remembers
  • Trauma = stored in subcortex
  • Brainspotting = helps the subcortex release what the cortex can’t talk away

Cortex is the Thinking Brain

What it does:

  • Thinking, reasoning, analyzing
  • Language and talking
  • Logic, insight, and understanding

In therapy:

  • This is where talk therapy mostly works
  • You explain what happened and try to make sense of it

Limit:

  • Trauma and deep stress don’t live here
  • The cortex can understand a problem without being able to resolve it

“I know why I feel this way, but I still feel it.”

Subcortex = the Survival & Feeling Brain

What it does:

This is the part of your brain that remembers stress and trauma in the body and runs your automatic emotional responses—long after the event is over.

This part of the brain does not use words or logic.

Keeps you alive:

  • Breathing
  •  Heart rate
  • Sleep–wake cycles

Stores emotional and body memory:

  • Trauma
  • Shock
  • Chronic stress

Triggers survival responses:

  • Fight
  • Flight
  • Freeze

Controls instinctive reactions:

  • Fear
  • Startle
  • Gut feelings
  • Muscle tension

In Brainspotting therapy ...

  • This is where trauma, chronic stress, and stuck patterns live
  • It does not respond well to talking or logic
  • It responds to felt experience, attention, and safety

“My body reacts before I can think.”

How Brainspotting Works with the Subcortex

Brainspotting works below the thinking brain.

  • Eye position helps access the subcortex
  • The therapist helps you stay present while your brain processes
  • You don’t need to explain or relive the story
  • The brain completes what got stuck at the survival level

Instead of:
 “Let’s talk about it until it makes sense”

Brainspotting says:
 “Let’s let the brain finish processing it where it’s actually stored”

Why the subcortex matters in Brainspotting

Many people feel “fine” logically but still experience:

  • Anxiety
  • Fatigue
  • Overwhelm
  • Tightness
  • Reactivity
  • Feeling stuck

Brainspotting works by accessing the subcortex directly, allowing the brain to:

  • Process what never finished processing
  • Release stored survival energy
  • Regulate the nervous system from the inside out

To learn if Brainspotting could be helpful for you, schedule a free consultation.

Schedule a Free Consultation