The power of Brainspotting
- amandaemoule
- Apr 23
- 7 min read
WHERE YOU LOOK AFFECTS HOW YOU FEEL…
A Guide to understanding Brainspotting
By Amanda Moule, RTC | Abbotsford, BC | amandamoule.com
───────────────────────
HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED WHERE YOUR EYES GO WHEN YOU'RE UPSET?
When anxiety kicks in, your gaze might drop and drift left. When you're replaying something painful, your eyes settle into a particular corner of the room. When you're calm and grounded, they rest somewhere soft and open. This isn't random. There is actual neuroscience behind it — and it's the entire foundation of Brainspotting.
Where you look in your visual field connects directly to where your brain and body are storing certain emotions, memories, and experiences. Brainspotting uses that connection as a doorway into healing.
You don't need the perfect words. You don't need to re-live everything. You don't even need to fully understand it. Your brain already knows how to heal. Brainspotting simply helps it find the spot to begin.
"Where you look affects how you feel. The eye position that activates the strongest body response is precisely where the brain is holding that experience."
— David Grand, PhD, Founder of Brainspotting
Brainspotting was developed in 2003 by David Grand while working with EMDR therapy. During a session, he noticed that a client's eyes naturally paused at a particular point — and something significant shifted. That accidental discovery became one of the most promising trauma therapies of the past two decades.
───────────────────────
HOW A BRAINSPOTTING SESSION ACTUALLY WORKS
Eight steps — in plain language. No jargon. No mystery.
───────────────────────
🧭 STEP 1 — IDENTIFY THE ISSUE
We start by gently naming what's bothering you — something that feels disturbing, stuck, or heavy. You don't need perfect words. Even a vague sense of "I just feel off when I think about it" is completely enough to begin.
───────────────────────
🧭 STEP 2 — CONNECT TO THE FELT SENSE
Rather than analyzing the situation, we ask: where do you feel this in your body? Not your thoughts about it — the actual physical sensation. A tightness in your chest. A knot in your stomach. A heaviness behind your eyes. The body holds the story, often long after the mind has tried to move on.
Note: This connects to somatic (body-based) trauma research — the understanding that trauma is stored not just in the mind, but in the nervous system itself.
───────────────────────
🧭 STEP 3 — RATE THE ACTIVATION
On a scale of 0–10, how intense is that body sensation right now? This gives us a clear starting point. You'll often be surprised by how much it shifts — sometimes within a single session.
───────────────────────
🧭 STEP 4 — FIND THE BRAINSPOT
Here's where the magic happens. Using a pointer, your therapist slowly guides your gaze across your visual field while you stay connected to that body sensation. When the sensation noticeably increases or intensifies — that's your Brainspot. That specific eye position is where your brain is holding this experience.
Note: Research by Corrigan & Grand (2013) proposes this activates a retinocollicular pathway connecting the eye to deep midbrain structures — including the superior colliculi and periaqueductal gray — where trauma memory is stored beneath conscious awareness.
───────────────────────
🧭 STEP 5 — BEGIN BILATERAL SOUND (Optional)
You put on headphones and listen to gentle music or tones that alternate softly from left ear to right ear. This bilateral (two-sided) sound keeps both hemispheres of your brain gently engaged and supports processing — without overwhelming you.
───────────────────────
🧭 STEP 6 — MINDFUL FOCUS
With your gaze held softly on the Brainspot, you simply notice. Sensations, images, memories, emotions, or even nothing at all — whatever arises, you don't chase it or push it away. You observe. Your therapist is present with you the entire time.
───────────────────────
🧭 STEP 7 — ATTUNED OBSERVATION
Your therapist stays deeply attuned — watching for any shifts in your body, breath, posture, or expression. This relational attunement isn't just supportive. It's actually part of how the nervous system co-regulates and heals. You are not doing this alone.
───────────────────────
🧭 STEP 8 — SOMATIC PROCESSING & MIDBRAIN HEALING
Here, something profound unfolds. While holding the eye position and staying connected to the body sensation, your deep brain begins doing what it was always designed to do — process and release. Trauma residue is freed. Memories can be reconsolidated with less emotional charge. The nervous system completes a cycle it may have had frozen for years.
Your brain does the healing. We helped it find the door.
Note: This involves subcortical processing — below the "thinking" brain — which is precisely why Brainspotting can reach what talk therapy alone sometimes cannot.
───────────────────────
THE NEUROSCIENCE — IN PLAIN ENGLISH
Trauma doesn't just live in your memories. It lives in your body, your nervous system, and in the deep subcortical regions of your brain, below the level of conscious thought. This is why you can intellectually know something is in the past and still feel it in the present. Talk therapy works beautifully at the conscious level. Brainspotting goes deeper.
THE MIDBRAIN
Deep structures like the superior colliculi and periaqueductal gray handle threat response and body memory — and are directly linked to eye gaze pathways.
THE BODY HOLDS IT
Somatic research shows trauma is stored in the nervous system and body, not just the mind. The "felt sense" — that body sensation — is the access point into deeper healing.
BILATERAL SOUND
Alternating left-right sound engages both brain hemispheres, similar to REM sleep, when the brain naturally processes and integrates difficult experiences.
MEMORY RECONSOLIDATION
When a traumatic memory is accessed in a state of safety, the brain can re-encode it with less emotional charge, essentially updating the file.
───────────────────────
LET'S CLEAR SOME THINGS UP
Brainspotting is still relatively new, so there are plenty of questions. Here are the ones I hear most often.
──────────────────────
Is it the same as EMDR?
They share roots, Brainspotting was discovered by David Grand while working with EMDR. But they're different. EMDR uses moving eye stimulation; Brainspotting uses a fixed eye position that you hold. Many clients who haven't fully responded to EMDR find Brainspotting reaches something different.
✓ Same family, different tool — and they can complement each other.
───────────────────────
Do I have to re-live my trauma?
No. You stay connected to the body sensation, not a detailed re-telling of events. Many clients process deeply while saying very little out loud. Your nervous system does the work — not your narrative.
✓ You don't need to tell the whole story for healing to happen.
───────────────────────
Is this the same as hypnosis?
No. You are fully awake, aware, and in control throughout the entire session. Brainspotting works with your conscious awareness and body, not a trance state. You can speak, move, or stop at any time.
✓ Fully awake, fully in the driver's seat.
───────────────────────
Is there solid research behind it?
The research base is growing and genuinely promising. Studies from 2017 to 2024 have shown significant symptom reduction in PTSD. A 2023 clinical study found that, unlike CBT,
Brainspotting participants continued to improve even after treatment ended. I'll always be transparent about where the science is and where it's still growing.
✓ Emerging and expanding evidence, with strong clinical support worldwide.
───────────────────────
WHO CAN BRAINSPOTTING HELP?
Brainspotting was originally developed for trauma and PTSD, but its applications have grown significantly. If any of these resonate, it may be worth exploring together.
• Trauma & PTSD — Single-event or complex, childhood or more recent
• Anxiety — Including when you don't quite know why you're anxious
• Attachment Wounds — Relational pain, abandonment, patterns in love and trust
• Chronic Pain — When the body carries what the mind hasn't processed
• Depression — Especially when rooted in suppressed emotion or grief
• Performance Blocks — Athletes, creatives, speakers — blocks that live in the body
───────────────────────
THE RESEARCH — CLICK ON LINKS TO READ
I believe in being transparent about what the science is at, including where more research is still needed. Below are the published studies I draw from, each with a plain-language summary.
───────────────────────
FOUNDATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
Corrigan & Grand · 2013 · Medical Hypotheses
Recruiting the Midbrain: Accessing Sensorimotor Memories of Traumatic Activation
The foundational paper proposing how a Brainspot connects to deep brain structures involved in threat response and emotional memory. This is the "why does it work" paper.
Read the full study here:
───────────────────────
NEUROSCIENCE
Corrigan, Grand & Raju · 2015 · Medical Hypotheses
Sustained Attention, Spinothalamic Tracts & Thalamocortical Processing
Expands on the neurological mechanisms, examining how held eye positions relate to thalamic processing and the healing of interrupted trauma responses.
Read the full study here:
───────────────────────
CLINICAL TRIAL
D'Antoni et al. · 2022 · International Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health
EMDR vs. Brainspotting vs. Body Scan: Processing Distressing Memories
A controlled study comparing one 40-minute session of each modality. Both EMDR and Brainspotting significantly reduced distress ratings linked to a specific target memory.
Read the full study here:
───────────────────────
PTSD EFFICACY
Hildebrand, Grand & Stemmler · 2017 · Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology
Brainspotting vs. EMDR for PTSD Treatment
Both approaches produced significant PTSD symptom reductions. Brainspotting showed large effect sizes (Cohen's d 0.74–1.04), supporting it as a credible alternative for trauma treatment.
Read the full study here:
───────────────────────
LONG-TERM OUTCOMES
Horton, Schwartzberg et al. · 2023–2024 · International Body Psychotherapy Journal
Brainspotting vs. CBT: Continued Improvement After Treatment Ends
While both BSP and CBT reduced PTSD symptoms during treatment, only Brainspotting participants continued to improve at follow-up — suggesting deeper, more lasting change over time.
Read the full study here:
───────────────────────
FULL RESEARCH LIBRARY
Brainspotting International
Complete Research & Case Study Database
The official Brainspotting International research page, aggregating all published studies, case reports, and clinical findings from practitioners worldwide.
Explore the full library here:
───────────────────────
A NOTE FROM ME
I want to be honest with you: I didn't come to Brainspotting as a technique I learned in a textbook. I came to it because I've done my own deep healing work, and I know what it's like to carry things that talk therapy alone couldn't fully reach.
There's something that happens in a Brainspotting session that is genuinely hard to put into words, a kind of settling, a release, a sense of something completing itself that you didn't even know was unfinished. I've trained through Pacific Brainspotting Training, and I bring to every session not just the skill, but the real understanding of what it feels like from the inside.
If you're curious, whether you've tried other therapies before or this is your very first step, I'd love to have a relaxed, no-pressure conversation about whether this might be a good fit. You don't need to have it all figured out before you reach out.
───────────────────────
READY TO FIND YOUR BRAINSPOT?
Book a free 15-minute consultation. It's relaxed, no pressure, just a chance to connect and see if we're a good fit.
Book your free consultation today:
───────────────────────
A note on the research: Brainspotting is an emerging therapy with a growing but still developing evidence base. The studies linked above represent current published research. Larger randomized controlled trials are ongoing. This post is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for individualized clinical advice. If you have questions about whether Brainspotting is right for your situation, please reach out directly.
───────────────────────
Amanda Moule Counselling | Abbotsford, BC | amandamoule.com
Comments