I Tried Brainspotting Therapy for Trauma and the Effects Stunned Me

This was a foreign and uncomfortable feeling, as up until that point, I had considered myself an optimist and had actively tried to see the best in everyone. In hopes of finding myself again, I desperately reached for anything mental health professionals suggested might help me restore some sense of reality.

Which is how I found myself sitting in front of my laptop for my first virtual brainspotting therapy session. Brainspotting is a type of trauma therapy that involves focusing your eyes on a specific point, or brainspot, as a way of releasing your pain.

If that sounds oversimplified, or out there, or unconventional, it’s because it is. And yet, I’m pretty sure it changed my life.

What is brainspotting therapy, exactly?

Brainspotting is a form of alternative therapy for trauma that has you look at a fixed point in space, focus on unwanted feelings, and sit with those feelings (under the watch of a therapist) until they change.

The approach is largely experimental and theoretical—a fact the founder of the technique, David Grand, PhD, spoke with me at length about in January 2023.

Grand was quick to say this theory is incredibly hard to prove in any semblance of evidenced-based Western medicine. But he also believes the proof is in the healing, so to speak.

Here’s his hypothesis, as he explained it to me: “If you ask someone to think about a traumatic experience, their eyes usually dart off to a certain position,” he says. In brainspotting, that’s called a gaze spot or a brainspot. A therapist helps a client locate this brainspot, then, using a pointer, helps them maintain their visual focus on that particular location. The thinking goes that there’s something about that spot in space that correlates with where a person is holding onto unprocessed trauma deep in their brain. Theoretically, “the visual systems give you access to neurological systems that you can’t get to any other way.”

Finding a brainspot is like being handed an extra-long-handled broom, so you can now finally reach the dustiest corner of the attic of your brain where the traumatic experience has been tucked away—and sweep the cobwebs free.

Grand discovered the importance of the gaze spot while working with an ice skater, an anecdote now memorialized in much of his writing and lecturing on brainspotting. The 16-year-old skater—who had a history of traumatic injuries and embarrassments during competitions—was struggling during performances, often forgetting her routine or losing feeling in her legs. One day during a therapy session, while Grand was guiding the skater to follow his fingers with her eyes, he noticed that her eyes “wobbled” in a specific spot. Eventually, Grand dubbed this location a brainspot.

Keeping your gaze on that spot and focusing on your feelings, Grand says, allows you to process your trauma. “It starts to feel less and less like it happened right now and more like it happened in the past,” he explains.

(He expanded on this greatly in his March 2013 article in Medical Hypotheses, and in 2017, he published results in the Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology showing a small group of people reported a reduction in post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms after a single brainspotting session .)

If a therapist asks a client to recall the traumatic experience after a brainspotting session, the client will say things like “It’s fuzzy, it’s farther away, I’m not feeling it so strongly,” Grand says. “Those are sensory reflections of the fact that the unprocessed trauma from the past is getting processed in the present. The system knows more and more it’s over, and we don’t have to be so afraid it’s going to happen again.”

That in turn lessens a person’s experience of trauma responses like intrusive memories, mood changes, irritability, and trouble concentrating, according to the Mayo Clinic.

That’s exactly how I felt in the moments—and months—after my first session with a brainspotting therapist: If time heals, it’s like we had sped up time.

Finding a brainspot is like being handed an extra-long-handled broom, so you can now finally reach the dustiest corner of the attic of your brain where the traumatic experience has been tucked away—and sweep the cobwebs free.

What a brainspotting session involves (and feels like)

Like many kinds of therapy, you can do brainspotting in person or virtually. All of my appointments were teletherapy.

A typical brainspotting session starts with a therapist asking you how you’re feeling and what emotions (especially unwanted, traumatic ones) are foremost in your mind. In my first session, I told my therapist I was heartbroken.

She asked me how “activated” that heartbreak felt on a scale of 1 to 10 (in other words, how intense the feeling was). When you’re not feeling very activated before brainspotting, a therapist may coach you to focus on the feeling, think about memories that evoke the trauma, essentially rile yourself up until you’re somewhere in the 8 to 10 range. Trust me when I say it’s unpleasant.

Then, your provider will ask you about where in your body you most feel that activation. During various brainspotting sessions, I felt my heartbreak like a weight in my chest, my loneliness like a pit in my stomach, my anger like a burning lump in my throat.

Next, my therapist would unfurl her pointer. She’d slowly move it across my visual field on screen, asking if the sensation of my heartbreak was stronger on the left or the right, up or down, closer to her camera or farther away. She assured me there was no right answer, and that she’d also be looking for signs we’d landed on the gaze spot even if I couldn’t tell (like the ice skater’s eye wobble from Grand’s case study). Sometimes I couldn’t. Sometimes it was faint. Sometimes after the fact she’d tell me she could clearly see my facial expression change.

Once she knew where to hold her pointer, I’d put on my headphones and start a track on Spotify of bilateral nature sounds. (Bilateral sounds move back and forth between the right and left sides of your headphones. They’re used in other types of trauma and anxiety therapies, too.) I found an hour-long rainstorm that felt very comforting. Your therapist might tell you to search for anything “binaural” or “bilateral” on your favorite music platform and experiment with a few options until you find one that feels soothing. (Grand assured me this is one of the least important parts of the set up, so you don’t have to spend too much time on this.)

And then…I sat there. I expected to feel nothing. Yet within a few minutes, as I was sitting still and thinking about the burning lump in my throat or the sinking pit in my stomach, my eyes boring a hole through my laptop screen into that pointer, something would shift.

I’d start to cry, or sweat, or nearly dry heave as I forced myself to focus on the pointer and the “activation” of my pain. Long, drawn-out minutes would tick by, and my therapist would gently chime in with encouragement like, “You’re doing great,” while crashes of rain and thunder in my headphones pinned me to my chair.

We’d continue like this for about 20 minutes. Around then, I’d usually feel profoundly tired and unable to maintain my focus much longer, and my therapist always said it was fine to end things whenever I wanted. She was there to follow my lead, rather than the other way around. Or, as licensed professional counselor Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, LPC, who trained with Grand to become a brainspotting therapist, says: “My job is to stay in the tail of the comet; the client is the head of the comet.”

During my very first session, those gentle rainstorm sounds made me feel grounded and steady for the first time in months. The discomfort in my chest lifted as my body sank into my seat. The tightness flowed into my head and out my right eyebrow—manifesting into a subtle headache that morphed into a migraine two mornings later (which my therapist had warned me could happen).

After a session, I almost always went to bed early. It’s common to feel wiped out, and all the practitioners I spoke with for this article—and my own therapist—recommended taking good care of yourself, with lots of water, a nutritious meal, and a relaxing and quiet activity while you sit in the post-brainspotting emotional state. Grief and trauma therapist Ajita Robinson, PhD, described this state to me as wet paint: “You wouldn’t immediately touch that fresh paint, you would let it dry.”

Brainspotting vs. EMDR

Brainspotting is considered by many to be a cousin of EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, another vision-focused trauma therapy. It wasn’t long ago that EMDR would have been considered just as out-there as brainspotting may sound today, but it’s now relatively commonplace for working through trauma, says Kendra Kubala, PsyD, a trauma-focused licensed clinical psychologist in New York and Pennsylvania (who does not practice brainspotting).

“When working with trauma survivors, EMDR is often regarded as a ‘go-to’ approach,” she says, on par with prolonged exposure therapy (PE), which teaches people how to gradually approach trauma-related memories, and trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (TF-CBT), which helps people reevaluate their thoughts and reactions related to their trauma.

Interestingly, in one small January 2022 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, brainspotting and EMDR delivered comparable results in a single session and were more effective than meditation or reading a book.

EMDR itself was born out of CBT, Robinson says, but uses eye movement to dispute and replace a negative thought. Therapists aim to activate both sides of a client’s brain with side-to-side eye movements or bilateral sounds while they talk about their trauma. Brainspotting adds the relational component with the therapist, who encourages and supports you through the process, as well as a focus on how the traumatic experience feels in your body.

Ultimately, how a therapist and client decide to use one or the other is highly personal, Kubala says: “Each patient’s background, needs, triggers, current stressors, etc. absolutely must be taken into account when designing a treatment plan.”

How we remember trauma

To fully understand how brainspotting aims to process trauma, it’s helpful to know how trauma gets encoded into our memories to begin with.

Trauma is a safety mechanism the brain has devised, Grand says. For example: Imagine a 5-year-old child witnessing a fatal car accident. “That is so out of the norm and so threatening to our safety and our survival, our nervous system gets overwhelmed and can’t process that experience,” he says.

Many of us would intuitively understand if that child had nightmares or flashbacks of car crashes or, as an adult, felt anxious and sweaty with a racing heartbeat whenever driving on the highway. We may not entirely know why, but it makes some amount of sense that the traumatic memory is in there, somewhere.

The idea that “trauma is stored in the body” is often repeated in the sort of books I found myself reading during this chapter of my life. As a health journalist, I’m more comfortable with facts than metaphors, and none of these books clearly explained what this actually meant. If this trauma was something I was harboring, I wanted it out.

It finally made more sense to me when I read Grand’s description in one of his articles: “Nothing is held in any part of the human system that does not affect all parts and the entirety of the system.” In other words, the traumatic memories and feelings in my mind weren’t separate from my body.

Another way to think about it is like learning to ride a bike, Robinson says. “In the beginning, we’re uncertain about our ability to stay on the bike, but through practice and understanding, it becomes muscle memory: You get on the bike and just go.” Our reactions to trauma also become like a sort of muscle memory. “The body remembers what it needed to keep you safe. The brain doesn’t make any distinctions between emotional, psychological, or physical harm—the body responds similarly” to each, she says.

“I have got to leave the world better than I’ve found it, and right now, brainspotting is the best I’ve found for healing.” —Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, LPC, brainspotting therapist

How brainspotting helps

Brainspotting, Grand’s theory goes, helps you unlearn that muscle memory. Robinson, who trained with Grand, believes there is rewiring going on when we process traumatic experiences. As we (slowly but surely) recognize we aren’t actually unsafe, we adapt by making new mental connections to replace the old, unwanted ones, she says.

Any one of the components of a brainspotting session can be healing, if you think about it: a strong and encouraging therapeutic relationship, nature sounds, quiet time to sit and be present with your thoughts and feelings (aka mindfulness) without judging them or doing something to shoo them away. There’s really no way of knowing (without loads more research) if the gaze spot is really crucial to what’s going on here.

But perhaps that’s like saying as long as you’re well-hydrated, you can skip eating a balanced diet, getting enough sleep, and exercising regularly, Robinson says. Maybe one single coping tool is enough when you’re not in a triggering environment, but when you are, you need every component of brainspotting for the optimal outcome, she says. “It might depend on the situation, the person, and their other coping mechanisms.”

Still, the relational side of brainspotting came up again and again in my interviews with proponents of the technique. “I’m attuning with you, which is more healing than anything, to just be with you during that process,” Monroy says.

Bonus: It’s equitable

Because brainspotting operates a bit outside of traditional evidence-based health care, Monroy sees it as a more equitable option. It accepts all clients where they are, meaning you don’t have to fit any stereotypical paradigms of who tends to seek out mental health care (namely, wealthy white women).

Monroy was among the first people of color certified in brainspotting, and she’s worked hard to include more people from marginalized communities in her trainings by offering discounted rates and sharing widely how non-oppressive and non-hierarchical she finds this practice to be.

“From a cultural competency perspective, marginalized people often experience trauma in therapy,” she says. But rather than feel further discriminated against by the brainspotting community, she felt welcomed and embraced for her differences. “Brainspotting is about making it your own.”

As such, she sees it as a tool for community healing. “I have got to leave the world better than I’ve found it, and right now, brainspotting is the best I’ve found for healing,” Monroy says.

Potential drawbacks of brainspotting

Brainspotting isn’t for everyone—and Grand doesn’t expect it to be: “Everything is transitory. Proprietary is antithetical to healing. I don’t want everyone to get brainspotting, I want them to get the optimal healing they need.”

The path to optimal healing will look different for everyone. Kubala cautions that, given the lack of robust research supporting brainspotting, “untrained or inappropriately trained clinicians” might claim to offer help without actually providing sufficient care or supplementary care like talk therapy.

Robinson says people who actively disassociate should probably avoid brainspotting (say, if you’re driving and suddenly find yourself at your destination without remembering the journey).

“We want to make sure folks are grounded and present. There’s a higher risk of dissociation when we tap into unconscious parts of the brain [during brainspotting],” she says.

People who experience migraine attacks or who have other neurological conditions may also need to be mindful of when they do brainspotting and may need to work with a mental health care provider with a higher level of training in brainspotting who knows how to handle their unique conditions.

So, should you try it?

Trauma care is understandably nuanced, says Brooke Schwartz, LCSW, a social worker who helps clients process trauma but doesn’t offer brainspotting therapy. What works for one person might not for another, so as long as you’ve taken the potential risks into consideration, there’s generally no harm in trying various techniques to see what’s helpful to you.

To find a therapist and discuss whether you’d be a good candidate for brainspotting, search the database of certified brainspotting therapists at Brainspotting.com.

I’ll never know exactly how much of my healing I can attribute to brainspotting alone and what was simply due to the effects of time (not to mention lots of talk therapy and other forms of support). I do know, though, that I felt different after that first session and after several other subsequent sessions.

As Robinson emphasizes, we’re still in the infancy of our scientific understanding of the brain. There’s so much room for future research to examine how the brain changes over time and how we can help encourage positive changes in the brain, especially in relation to trauma.

For the time being, at least, I feel like I’ve swept away a little more dust from mine.

—reviewed by Smita Holden, MD