Holistic Counseling

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What is Brainspotting?

Brainspotting is a brain-based therapy that harnesses the body’s natural drive towards healing. It is a powerful, rapid, effective tool that focuses on the deep brain sources of many emotional and somatic issues and resolves these issues from the source.

What can Brainspotting help treat:

  • Trauma (big or small)
  • Enhancing performance and creativity/creative blocks
  • Anxiety (and the underlying trauma that contributes to it)
  • Depression (and the underlying trauma that contributes to it)
  • Addiction
  • Attachment wounds
  • Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
  • Complicated grief/Traumatic grief


In this video, David Grand, PhD–the discoverer and developer of Brainspotting–answers questions about what it is, how it is different from EMDR, and the issues it can be helpful for.

The process begins by the client holding an issue in their awareness that they wish to work on and noticing where they feel that issue in their body (This helps to bypass the thinking part of the brain and go into the limbic system where emotional memories are stored). From there, we find a spot in the visual field that is connected to that issue and sensation. Next is the processing, where the client witnesses whatever comes up as it comes up–it may be memories, images, sensations, thoughts, or emotions—and the idea is to just stay with whatever you are experiencing and notice that.

“I am happy because I choose to look at things that make me happy and my eyes catch their funny edge and I laugh”

— Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality

Below are some videos with more information about Brainspotting.