The trigger lands.
Your response is already moving.
The heat in your face.
Your mood drops flat.
The pull to leave a room you were fine in ten seconds ago.
Language turns up late to all of it.
By the time you have a sentence for what happened, you’re describing something that already finished happening.
That sequence is built into your brain’s architecture.
The amygdala and the hippocampus sit deep in the middle of your head, far below conscious thought.
That’s where your brain keeps fear, threat, and emotional memory. They were doing this work before you had your first word. Language never came into it, because they never needed language.
The reaction you want changed is run from down there.
Your conversation and your reaction have been happening on two different floors of the same brain.
Brainspotting is built on that one idea. David Grand, PhD, developed it in 2003. He was a psychotherapist working with trauma survivors, first responders from 9/11 among them.
Specific eye positions turn out to be connected to how your brain and nervous system hold emotional pain. That connection runs underneath memory and underneath language, which is exactly why it reaches material a conversation never gets near.
The premise of the approach is that your eyes have access to the territory those structures occupy. So a place in your visual field is a way in.
This is what I reach for when the thing that needs to move sits below where a conversation goes.
The work goes to the floor where the reaction is generated, instead of the one above it. Brainspotting is younger than most of the methods you’ve probably been offered. Its research base is still developing.
What sits underneath it is established science: interpersonal neurobiology, somatic therapy, and mindfulness-based work with trauma.
None of it asks your thinking mind to talk your nervous system into feeling safe.
What clients describe is a gap where a reaction used to be. The reminder turns up. Your body doesn’t go with it.
Hours later you notice you’d been holding yourself ready for something that never arrived.
The memory keeps all its detail.
You get your afternoon back.
Before any of this, there’s a phone call. It’s free and runs 15 minutes. That’s enough time for you to tell me which reaction you want to stop having. It’s enough time for me to say honestly whether this approach may work.
If Brainspotting doesn’t seem appropriate, I may have other tools that will be what you need. Take the 15 minutes with me to find out: (910) 502-3339.
You’ve waited long enough for the feeling to catch up to the understanding.
Email me and we’ll find a time to connect by phone for a free 15-minute consultation. You’ll get to know me a little, and we can both tell whether we’re a good fit for this work.
Emotional Transformation Therapy for teens 14+ and adults. Raleigh, North Carolina, and online across the state.
A sentence or two is plenty.
