What Is Brainspotting?

 

Brainspotting is a therapy developed by Dr. David Grand that works from the idea that "where you look affects how you feel." A trained therapist helps you find a specific eye position — a "brainspot" — connected to where a difficult memory, emotion, or body sensation is being held. Holding attention there, with the therapist's attunement and support, allows your brain and nervous system to process what's stuck, often below the level of conscious talking or analysis.

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Brainspotting was actually discovered during an EMDR session. Its founder, Dr. David Grand, was working with a client whose processing seemed to be looping and stuck — but he noticed the client's eyes kept sticking in one particular spot. In that moment, he guided them to hold their gaze there instead of continuing the usual eye movement, and their processing opened back up. That observation became the basis for Brainspotting: both approaches work with the brain's natural capacity to process and heal — but it uses a fixed eye position rather than side-to-side eye movement, and it tends to lean more heavily on body awareness and the felt sense of what's happening internally, moment to moment.

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The theory behind Brainspotting: The eyes connect through the optic nerve directly into subcortical structures — the amygdala, hippocampus, basal ganglia, and brainstem — the parts of the brain that encode threat, survival responses, and emotional memory, often below the level of conscious thought or language. This is different from the neocortex, the "thinking brain" responsible for language, analysis, and narrative, which most talk therapy engages most directly.

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The idea is that a particular eye position can correspond to where a specific piece of unprocessed trauma or activation is being held in these deeper, subcortical networks. By holding attention on that spot — while a trained therapist tracks subtle physical cues like a shift in breath, a blink, or a small change in posture — the nervous system gets direct access to material it may have never been able to put into words in the first place, because it was never encoded as a story to begin with. It was encoded as bracing, activation, or a survival response. This is part of why Brainspotting can sometimes reach experiences that talk therapy alone has a harder time touching.

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A note on the evidence: Brainspotting is a newer approach, and it's important to be direct about where the research currently stands. It does not yet have the same depth of clinical trial evidence as a modality like EMDR, and it isn't currently included in major clinical guidelines' lists of first-line PTSD treatments (unlike EMDR, which is). What does exist is a small but growing body of promising research, along with a large and expanding base of clinician and client-reported experience.

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It's worth saying that "not first-line" doesn't mean "doesn't work." Plenty of respected, widely-used trauma approaches share this position. Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Peter Levine, is a good example. It's also a body-based approach, and like Brainspotting, it isn't currently on major guidelines' first-line PTSD list. Even so, it has a growing base of research, including randomized controlled trials showing real symptom improvement, and it's widely respected and used by trauma clinicians. The guideline lists tend to favor therapies with decades of large randomized trials behind them. That mostly reflects how long an approach has existed and how thoroughly it's been studied, not necessarily a ceiling on how well it can work for a given person.

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In our own clinical experience, Brainspotting works — including in situations where EMDR hasn't. We've also found it easier to titrate for complex trauma, since Brainspotting offers different ways to ease activation during processing than EMDR does. Brainspotting isn't better than EMDR, any more than EMDR is better than Brainspotting — they're simply two different treatments we use at Shoreview, and we'll help you think through which one (or both) fits what you're working on.

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Brainspotting is often used alongside talk therapy to support:

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• Trauma and PTSD symptoms

• Dissociation, including Dissociative Identity Disorder — Brainspotting's flexible titration options make it particularly well-suited here

• Anxiety and chronic stress

• Emotional processing when talk therapy alone feels like it "hits a wall"

• Body-held tension or somatic symptoms connected to past experiences

• Performance-related blocks (creative, athletic, or professional)

• Grief and difficult life transitions

• A growing range of other conditions — as a newer treatment, Brainspotting is still a developing practice, and clinicians are actively building and refining frameworks for conditions like substance use disorder, OCD, and others

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