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Today’s piece is on something called “Brainspotting (BSP),” a modernized version of Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR).

Before diving into it, we need a bit of EMDR context. What follows is an abridged version of my post, “When the Past Is Present—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).”

EMDR

In 1979, an NYU doctoral candidate named Francine Shapiro was studying how external events influenced characters' behavior in 19th-century English literature.

When a devastating cancer diagnosis upended her life, she quickly shifted her priorities, perspective, and discipline. Instead of investigating the impact of external events on fictional characters, she wondered about something more pressing: How do external stressors impact the living?

She enrolled in a doctoral program in clinical psychology.

By 1987, she was deep into the program. One afternoon, struggling with some upsetting thoughts she couldn’t seem to free herself from, she decided to go for a walk to try and clear her head.

As someone studying to be a clinical psychologist, she had become accustomed to using her mind and body as a laboratory, a place to discover techniques and inventions, and so it wasn’t unusual for her to notice connections as they were being made inside her body, in real-time. As she walked, she noticed that her painful thoughts were dissipating.

When she went to retrieve them, she was stunned to discover they’d lost their power over her.

She wasn’t doing anything in particular, so what was happening? She scanned herself and realized that she had in fact been doing something. Her eyes felt as though they were darting back and forth.

Could these two things be related, she wondered?

She brought forth a different unsettling memory and tested herself again, consciously using these same saccadic eye movements, and boom: The disturbing memory lessened in intensity.

This was something! She decided to take it one step further and recruited friends. She began by asking them to call up an upsetting thought while following her fingers as they moved back and forth across an invisible horizon line. The same thing happened to them. Their painful thoughts receded.

Francine Shapiro had landed on a groundbreaking treatment that would become the gold standard for trauma recovery.

In 1990, the mental health community had just begun to diagnose people with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a psychiatric disorder that occurs in people who have experienced or witnessed events that were traumatic to them.

Shapiro wondered whether her method might work on people with PTSD. She volunteered to test her methods on veterans at an outreach center and watched with astonishment as stuck memories that had haunted veterans for 20 years disappeared in moments.

What exactly was happening here?

As she examined her own technique, she discovered a connection between rapid eye movement and memory. What we learn is stored physically in complex neural networks in the brain.

Everything we are not currently thinking about or remembering—from our earliest moments to the present moment—including sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and fears, gets stored in the unconscious mind.

These memories contain our feelings and interpretations about the world and ourselves, and they are separate from our conscious mind, which remains entirely unaware of what’s going on in the unconscious.

Because we contain a storage space filled with physical memories, these memories can be retrieved at any time, even when we haven’t asked for them.

Memories that we can’t recall continue to impact our point of view and inform our feelings about every situation—in essence, the showrunner of our entire life is our unconscious mind.

The fascinating thing about these stored memories is that they don’t differentiate between now and then. All moments are now, which is why negative memories from our past can get “triggered” by something in our present, and we’ll unconsciously experience the current situation as dangerous—even when it’s perfectly safe.

When, in our present-day life, we react or behave in ways that are out of proportion to the situation at hand, the reaction can be traced back to an early memory that continues to hold the emotions, charge, and belief we had at the time the memory was formed, psychologists consider these memories to be “unprocessed.”

When we are battery-operated by painful memories, we suffer needlessly. We feel inadequate when we’re immensely capable; we feel like a failure when we’re succeeding; we feel devastated by minor conflicts.

These experiences are symptomatic of agonizing unprocessed memories in our unconscious mind.

The brain has a mechanism called the Information Processing System whose main role is to process and digest disturbing experiences so learning can take place.

EMDR targets these unprocessed negative memories with the goal of metabolizing the pain attached to the memory, discarding the bad “nutrients” and digesting what’s useful.

This is the function of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and why getting enough sleep is vital. During REM sleep, it’s believed that the brain processes all information and learning that took place that day; your dreams are like a daily diary in scenes and images.

After your brain has finished processing the new information, it turns into memory and is ready to be introduced to all the old memories that contain useful information that the new memory can learn from.

EMDR takes the original episodic memory that is causing pain and manually integrates it, so it can make the necessary connections to transform it into a useful long-term memory, where it gets stored in its changed form.

When negative events go unprocessed, either because they are so upsetting they overwhelm the entire system, or because the system was interrupted during processing, the memory of the situation does not get introduced to all the old memories and remains unintegrated, separate, and unresolved.

The memory gets stored exactly as it was experienced, and the sensations and feelings that were attached to the original event do not get digested and understood.

It can’t adapt or be more useful because it lives in isolation, without access to the library of stored memories that act as a springboard for growth. Rather than learning from the experience, it lives in the brain like a bully who refuses to change, grow up, or evolve, constantly waiting to be triggered so it can act out.

The memory gets trapped at the age that the Big or Little T trauma occurred. This is why, as adults, instead of remaining calm, we can suddenly explode, or why the appearance of certain people can make us so uncomfortable, and we can feel like children.

These abrupt reactions are unprocessed memories from childhood, stuck in time, keeping our past forever present.

It’s for these reasons that “time doesn’t heal all wounds” and why you can be stunted by feelings that are decades old. Unprocessed memories are frozen and without the proper attention, they can wreak havoc on your personal life, emotional life, and physical well-being.

EMDR is used to process the memories that are wreaking havoc on our lives. It does this by linking the REM method used to metabolize the events of the day during sleep to episodic memories from our life.

EMDR takes the original episodic memory that is causing pain and manually integrates it, so it can make the necessary connections to transform it into a useful long-term memory, where it gets stored in its changed form.

Learn more about this modality, including how to conduct EMDR on yourself using Dr. Shapiro’s book Getting Past Your Past.

BRAINSPOTTING

In 1993, David Grand was a young psychologist in training, learning EMDR from Francine Shapiro.

He found the method exciting and effective. When he learned Somatic Experiencing Therapy in 1999, he decided to integrate psychoanalysis, somatic experiencing, and EMDR, using eye movements of varying speeds and directions, healing sounds, and different tactile innovations. He called this Natural Flow EMDR.

But the events of 9-11 took Dr. Grand’s work in a new direction, leading to his eventual discovery of what he would call Brainspotting (BSP). Working with first responders, family members, and survivors forced him to relive the experience over and over again, allowing him to stumble upon a much more targeted approach to trauma.

Because Dr. Grand was constantly tuned in to the heightened state of his clients, he consciously and unconsciously absorbed their cues, anticipating what was coming before it occurred.

This attunement created the opening he needed to discover the power of Brainspotting.

In the two years following 9/11, Dr. Grand was feeling himself burn out, and focused on recalibrating and processing everything. It was during this time that Dr. Grand started to work with a young figure skater who had a history of family trauma. She was having trouble landing a triple axel—without that jump, she wouldn’t be able to compete.

As Dr. Grand conducted Natural Flow EMDR on this young skater, moving his fingers left to right across the invisible horizon line, he asked her to visualize doing the triple axel in slow motion and to freeze the moment where she was going off balance. As she followed Dr. Grand’s bilateral finger movements, he noticed that when his fingers were at the midline of her nose and eyes, her eyes wobbled and locked in place. She stayed in that position for ten minutes, and Dr. Grand held his fingers in place.

In those ten minutes, his young patient reported a flood of images of past childhood traumas, illnesses, deep wells of frozen grief, and family fights. As she reported what she was seeing, she was processing traumas Dr. Grand thought were resolved, but that seemed to have resurfaced and then processed on a deeper level.

When she was done, they were both astonished by what had happened, but neither mentioned it. The next day, his client called from the rink to excitedly inform Dr. Grand that she’d landed the triple axel with no problems. And she’d done it again and again and again.

He began to observe his clients on a deeper level, watching to see when or if their reflexes startled, their eyes widened, they gasped, or shifted when his fingers hit a certain point. And he discovered that with every single client, there was a specific spot that correlated to memories and traumas that deepened the work. The clients reported that the session felt different and more powerful.

Dr. Grand called the method Brainspotting (BSP). (Not my favorite name, but that’s neither here nor there.)

The method relied upon being carefully attuned to the client’s energy and body, something he’d become expert at working with the 9/11 survivors. When he saw the specific signal, he would hold his fingers in place and the deep processing would begin. The client had no idea how he knew where or when to stop. He called this Outside Window Brainspotting

Later, as clients became used to the method, and he moved his pointer (his fingers couldn’t take it after a while) horizontally across the X axis and then vertically along the Y access, his clients began to direct him to the spot, telling him he missed it, or it was off to the left, or up higher. He called this client-oriented BSP Inside Window Brainspotting.

Brainspotting relies on reflexes, which makes sense since it targets trauma, and the visual images of trauma are stored in the amygdala, which is located in our limbic system and is known as our fear center.

When trauma is triggered, the amygdala is activated. Brainspotting relies upon primal reflexes which are the responses in our startle circuit—the amygdala. These responses reveal themselves in our bodies as macro or micro tells. Dr. Grand discovered that holding a client’s gaze on the specific spot that’s reflexively activated deepens the processing of trauma.

The same process is occurring in BSP as in EMDR. The invisible work that’s occurring is the integration of the right brain with the left brain. When we are stuck in our left brain, we are caught up in overly analytical thinking and cut off from our emotions. When we are stuck in our right brain, we are flooded by emotion and often can’t think straight. What BSP manages to do—more quickly than EMDR—is to integrate the right and left brains so that they are in balance and we can perform more effectively.

Brainspotting uses our field of vision to find where we are holding these traumas in our brains. Just as the eyes naturally scan the outside environment for information, they can also scan our inside environments—our brains—for information. BSP uses the visual field to turn the “scanner” back on itself and guide the brain to find lost internal information.

Hence Brainspotting’s motto: “Where you look affects how you feel.”

Dr. Grand discovered that finding the right spot in which traumas flare unlocks what a year of effective Natural Flow EMDR cannot. By keeping the gaze focused on a specific external spot, we entice the brain to focus on the internal place the trauma is stored, which promotes deeper processing and the release and resolution of trauma.

While this is a young technique, there are now 100 BSP trainers covering every continent around the world and over 30,000 therapists trained.

Read more about Brainspotting in Dr. David Grand’s 2013 book, Brainspotting: The Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change.

I’m so curious to know whether you’d heard of Brainspotting before this. Shoot me an email and let me know!

Until next week, I remain…

Amanda

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