2/24/22, 7:21 PM Brainspotting Changed my Life. Can it Change Yours?

Yours?Joel T Blackstock LICSW MSW PIPYellow garden spiders have a fat yellow…

Joel T Blackstock LICSW MSW PIP Feb 6 7 min read

Brainspotting Changed my Life. Can it Change

Yours?
Updated: 4 days ago

Yellow garden spiders have a fat yellow abdomen

slicked with yellow and black stripes. They weave a
tiny white squiggle in the center of their webs. I
stare at the faintly milky zig zag. It sways when wind
moves the web and stirs the iris sepals the web
hangs between in my mothers garden. I am biting
on the seam of injection molded red plastic in a
1980s baby walker. Later, I ponder the way that
Alabama red clay cakes in the grooves of my tennis
shoe and poke it with a stubby finger and later a
small twig. My dreams were a miasma of detailed
childhood imagery. I vividly re-experienced half
remembered and seemingly insignificant moments
from when I was a toddler in photorealistic detail. When I woke up my phone rang. “Did you have weird dreams?”
asked a colleague “Everyone is saying their dreams are weird.”.

I had just had my first session of brainspotting on my first day of brainspotting training. You learn brainspotting
by having the brainspotting process done to you and by conducting the brainspotting experience on other trainees.
The brainspotting training teaches clinicians to “hold” a patient's experience without analysis or judgment.
Clinicians are taught to turn off the impulse to try and teach the patient anything. Instead the patient's own
experience is what the patient learns from when the clinician can "make room" to let the experience unfold. Unlike
cognitive models of psychotherapy, brainspotting does not train you to analyze your experience. It teaches you
nothing. Brainspotting practitioners are taught to feel instead of understand so that they can “hold” the experience
of patients who are learning to hold traumatic memories and unresolved parts of self.

Brainspotting began as a branch of EMDR and quickly became its own modality. Developed to treat trauma and
PTSD, providers quickly discovered that it works for just about everything else as well. The technique itself is
extraordinarily simple; a clinician holds a pointer and a patient looks at it. Despite that, the nuances of the
technique can be infinitely complex. Brainspotting helps most people get to know, and get comfortable with the
parts of themselves that they are the most out of touch with.

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Trauma occurs when our felt emotional response is at odds

with our "thinky" ability to understand the world. In the
simplest terms trauma a result of our emotional system feeling
more than our intellectual brain can comprehend.

In trauma therapy teaching patients to let go of their

cognitive “thinky” brain and experience the “feely”
body brain is the name of the game. Our subcortical
brain is the oldest part of the brain. It rapidly directs
our use of energy for survival into fight, flight, and
freeze responses. This process takes place before we
intellectually or linguistically understand why we
are thinking or what we are doing. Teaching patients
to feel their unconscious emotions and their somatic
reactions to trauma is the only way to get to the root
of how trauma is affecting the brain. Our ego
defends us against experiencing the unconscious
parts of our being. It is threatened by the fact that
parts of us that we do not understand can control us
so deeply.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote that

language was the house of being. He meant to that
our words were all we were. Language is implied to
be a confining prison. The philosopher René
Descartes stated that "I think, therefore I am". His assumption that cognition was the essence of what made us
real underlies most of modern medical science. I wonder how the landscape of existential philosophy would have
changed if these philosophers had ever had a brainspotting session. Our ego driven cognition does not want to
turn itself off. It does not want to admit that there is a deeper and older part of the brain . Our mid and sub brains
are arguably the most important component to our sense of self and understanding of the world. Some times
called our lizard brain, they come from our reptilian ancestry and are responsible for our intuitive and
unconscious snap judgements. Put simply we are not logic or rational creatures. A large component of our
instinctual thinking occurs before we are thinking in words or with intellect.

David Grand, the creator of brainspotting, made the point that our neocortex front brain thinks that it is all of us,
but we must teach it that we have a mid and sub cortex that are part of us as well. Our brains feel before we think.
It is our cognitive neo cortex brain that sometimes forgets to be aware of the powerful energy our feeling and

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intuition hold. The reason that trauma therapy is

difficult for patients and providers is that our ego
defends us from the experience of the unconscious
feeling and emotion. Teaching patients to let go of
what they know is hard. Facing younger and
traumatized parts of self in the deep brain is not
something that our intellect can help us with. Even
though we have an intellectual understanding of
trauma and how it affects us, that does not help us
loosen its effect on our lives. There is not a formula
or even a manual for good therapy. Effective therapy
helps you find and face the parts of yourself we
avoid.

Brainspotting is amazingly effective at this.

Brainspotting strips away our defenses and plunges
our awareness into the deepest and most recessed
areas of ourselves. Brainspotting turns our gaze to
the places that we most avoid. Brainspotting allows
us to repair and rewire the damaged assumptions
trauma makes us hold about ourselves, the world
and our relationships. Cognitive therapy teaches us
to train and flex our intellect. This is one of the
reasons that cognitive therapy alone can not take
patients to the deep roots of trauma's effect on the brain. Somatic and brain based therapies can teach us to feel
ourselves again.

It is a common phenomenon that patients “lose” language during a brainspotting session and start to feel a deep
emotion and intuitive self. It is normal to realize your body and emotional state is shifting and moving without
your permission. Put another way our physical and emotional selves are able to be experienced without cognition
interfering. This is similar to the way that psychedelics reorient our consciousness. Brainspotting can help us feel
the emotional states “under” our lives that we often run from and avoid. It can help us confront and repair
emotional damage and unremembered pain.

Carl Jung observed that symbols and metaphors are the language of the unconscious. This is perhaps why when
we stir the subconscious brain with brainspotting it causes highly mythic or symbolic dreams. The two hallmarks
of a brainspotting dream are vividly remembering minutiae from childhood in photo realistic detail and also
dreams with highly allegorical narratives. Patients often remember “important” and “deep” dreams that they can't
quite explain or put into words. After the dream images from my childhood in my first brainspotting session I
began to have dreams about shadowy wolf-like figures in the woods . They peered through the windows of
Vestavia home to eye my children.

During the brainspotting sessions I felt myself dropping down into a terrifying feeling of inadequacy and
inferiority that had always underlaid my life. I hadn't noticed it or confronted the feeling. I realized that wit,
education, learning skills and even my career were nothing more than mechanisms for me to turn this feeling off
and run from it.

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Brainspotting was the first kind of therapy that

allowed me to not only identify the feeling that
controlled my behavior from the shadows, but also
to face it and master it. Social workers are often
wounded healers. Therapy can become a crutch
when therapists won’t do their own work. Therapists
can become, unconsciously, obsessed with giving
others the medicine that they themselves need.

Many Brainspotting therapists, like myself and

David Grand, began as EMDR practitioners. EMDR
takes patients into the deep brain just like
brainspotting. The difference between the
modalities is that EMDR immediately makes
patients analyze and cognitivize the experience of
the deep brain. What you get in the room is what
you get with EMDR. In a brainspotting session a
therapist is simply opening a box in the patients
brain. The majority of the processing takes place
over several days while the patients brain decides
with the experiences in the box that we have
decompartmentalized.

Brainspotting changed my life. I had been in many types of therapy for years and nothing else had this effect. After
Brainspotting I was able to notice when I was reacting based on emotion while hiding in my intellect. I was able to
feel the way that my body was reacting based on how I felt. I didnt need to hunch my back when angry. I didn't
need to twist my spine when I was sad. Instead I noticed the, previously unconscious, reaction and chose to do it
or not. I was able to stop avoiding the problems in my life and deal with the deepest part of the emotional root of
my own pain. Brainspotting gives us more time and room in our own head to react to how we are feeling.
Brainspotting was the inspiration for the name Taproot Therapy Collective and the direction of my career and
practice.

Just like the technique itself the effects of brainspotting are subtle but profound. Before

brainspotting, I thought therapy was about learning information or knowing something new. After brainspotting I
realized that therapy was more than this. Brainspotting changed my life but afterward I didn't know anything new.
There was no big reveal or discovery. Brainspotting let me feel how big my own soul was and how much work I
have to do in the project of finding and becoming that potential. If anything, brainspotting helped me forget. I
forgot my ego and saw how much my own intellect was stopping me from experiencing who I really was.

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We absolutely do not exist because we think. We

exist despite the fact that we are trying to think
ourselves into existing. The mystic Simone Weil
wrote that “The smart man proud of his intellect is
like the prisoner proud of his jail”. Language is not
the house of being. It is the house that we are trying,
foolishly, to cram being into. We are so much bigger
than we can think. Trauma makes us feel and act
small but we are all bigger than we are able to know.
Outside of our intellect lies a tremendous felt sense
of creativity, intuition and a larger more whole self.
We do not have to learn anything to find it. All we
have to do is stop talking, stop thinking and begin to
listen to who we are.

Behold your thoughts and feelings....there

stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage—
whose name is Self.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

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