EMDR Therapy vs Brainspotting: Why Your Brain Needs More Than Talk Therapy

What is brainspotting therapy and how does it actually work? Dr. Jenny Hughes, licensed clinical psychologist and trauma expert, explains this revolutionary approach to healing trauma — including how it differs from EMDR, why where you look affects how you feel, and what happens during a real brainspotting session.

In this interview, Dr. Hughes breaks down the science behind brainspotting: how it accesses the subcortical parts of your brain where trauma is stored, why you don't need to talk through your trauma for it to work, and the accidental discovery by David Grand that changed trauma therapy forever.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 — Intro: What Is Brainspotting?
1:33 — Myth or Fact Lightning Round
5:11 — The Accidental Discovery (David Grand & the Skater)
8:15 — EMDR vs. Brainspotting: Quick Overview
8:49 — How Brainspotting Actually Works
10:08 — The "Inside Window" & Finding Your Brain Spot
10:52 — Focused Mindfulness & the Subcortical Brain
12:26 — The Pointer, Variations & Therapist Training
13:33 — Why Therapists Experience Brainspotting First
15:21 — EMDR vs. Brainspotting: The Key Differences
16:50 — What Changes After Brainspotting Therapy
18:15 — Which Therapy Is Right for You?

🔗 ABOUT DR. JENNY HUGHES
Dr. Jenny Hughes is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in trauma, anxiety, and evidence-based therapies including Brainspotting and EMDR.

🎙️ ABOUT RECOVERABLE
RECOVERable answers the internet's most-asked questions about mental health, anxiety, depression, trauma, and addiction recovery — through expert interviews you can actually understand.

Find the right treatment for you at Recovery.com
https://www.recovery.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You don't have to share anything for a brain spotting session to work.

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Licensed clinical psychologist and trauma expert Dr. Jenny Hughes joins us to explore how brain spotting and EMDR help to process traumatic memories. Is brain spotting effective for anxiety, depression, chronic stress, eating disorders? Yes, yes, yes. Okay. Hi, and welcome to Recoverable. I'm your host, Terry McGuire. Have you ever noticed that when you try to remember a hard day or specific event or process a big emotion, your eyes kind of wander and sometimes settle in on a spot. Well, today we're exploring that brain spotting, a revolutionary therapy based on the idea that where you look affects how you feel. Dr. Jenny Hughes is with us again, and we are going to talk with her. She is both a trauma therapist and a psychologist, and we're going to dive into how a simple pointer like the one on the table can unlock deep-seated traumas that years of talking didn't touch. Thank you so much for having me again. Welcome back. I'm glad to do this because this is one I haven't heard of. EMDR, I had heard of. We talked about that last week. And this is a different one that you say is also really effective.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Yeah. And it's actually that's that's a really common thing that people will say is they've heard of EMDR, or maybe they kind of heard of brain spotting, but they never have. And they're actually uh in the historical lineage, very connected, but ultimately quite different interventions for trauma. We're gonna learn about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

We're gonna start by a quick lightning round of myth or fact to address some of the misconceptions around it. And then we will, like we did last week, dive into it in more depth. So, Dr. Hughes, truth or myth? Brain spotting is basically just a different name for EMDR.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Uh, myth, 100%. It it was developed by and out of EMDR, but it is totally different.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Myth or fact, where you look affects how you feel.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

True. That's true. That's a fact. And just like you said in the at the top of it, our eyes and our brain naturally do this, and we can use that for therapy now.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

It is interesting how often I just did self-looking. Yeah. And when I think it's like upper right, and then you see people when they're sad or something, there's you know, the stereotype of someone looking down for a reason. Yep, exactly. Very interesting. So, myth or fact, you have to talk through your trauma for a brain spotting session to work.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Myth. You don't have to share anything for a brain spotting session to work.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Like you don't have to say, This is why I'm here.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

It's helpful to know why you're here, but once we get past that, and that can be very brief as well, you truly don't have to even talk.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

I look forward to hearing more. So, myth or fact, the brain spotting therapist uses a pointer to find a spot in the brain.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Uh fact. Seems to be true. Fact. Uh, but we don't always use a pointer. So there's a lot of ways to find a brain spot. And the pointer is a great way for us to help kind of hold that spot for the client as they're doing the work.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Related myth or fact. If you can't see the pointer, the therapy won't work.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Oh, that's a myth. And like I said, I actually don't use my pointer a whole lot anymore as a brain spotting therapist because I've learned how to really harness that our my clients are brain spotting all the time.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Myth or fact. Brain spotting is only used for big T traumas.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Myth. It is used for anything, little T, big T, and things that don't on the surface maybe look like they would be traumatic or stressful.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Myth or fact. You often listen to music during a brain spotting session.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

So that is can be true. So the developer of brain spotting, uh, his name's David Grant. He developed something called biolateral music. So it is music in headphones that will go back and forth between the ears, but not on the beat necessarily. It's called biolateral. So it's kind of always kind of a random back and forth so that your brain doesn't get used to it. But it can help with the processing.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Interesting. Myth or fact. Brain spotting can cause physical reactions like shaking or heating up.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Fact. Uh, absolutely. It's a somatic bottom-up approach to treating trauma. And those actually are common things that can happen during a brain spotting session.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Myth or fact. You can brain spot yourself effectively using a mirror.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Well, so there is something called self-spotting. You don't have to do it in a mirror. Uh and you can self-spot, you can brain spot for yourself, but we would only recommend on certain things.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Certain reasons you're wanting to do it?

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Yeah. So we, for example, would never recommend someone to do brain spotting or self-spotting on anything that is related to a relational or an attachment trauma. Self-spotting can be great for like resourcing brain spotting. We can do a lot of really cool things with expansion and help to improve people's capacities, but we would not recommend self-spotting on anything that's really triggering or traumatic.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Myth or fact, brain spotting was actually discovered by accident.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

That's a fact. It was totally discovered by accident.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

I think this is the story about the skaters. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Uh, so David Grand is the developer of brain spotting, and he was an EMDR trainer, and he had developed his own approach to EMDR that he called natural flow EMDR. So this is where the music comes in. He had actually developed the bilateral music for his natural flow EMDR. And in EMDR, typically when we're doing the reprocessing, like we talked about last week, the bilateral simulation is pretty fast. And David started in natural flow to go slower even during phase four of reprocessing. And so he was doing that with his clients and he'd started to train that to EMDR therapists. And because he was going slower, he started to notice things that were happening in his clients, both reflexes in the eyes, the face, the body. And there's this origin story about this skater. And so she was really a professional ice skater. And he'd been working with her. She was young, she was like a teenager. And he'd been working with her on a number of things. I think the way it goes is that her parents had divorced and they were doing a lot of work around the divorce. And specifically as it related to her skating, because she could not get this triple loop. And so they'd been doing EMDR, natural flow EMDR. And then one day he was doing the bilateral movements and he decided to just hold his fingers in a certain spot because he kind of felt pulled towards it. He noticed that something was happening. And he just had her notice that, go with that, see what happens here. He, the way he describes it is all of a sudden, she just really quickly dropped into all of these memories that they had worked on through EMDR. And after the session, they kind of debriefed it. She was going deeper into these memories and much more quickly than when they were doing the bilateral simulation with her eyes. So he started to experiment with that. And actually, a lot of his clients were also therapists. And so then they were like, What the hell is this that you're doing? And can you teach me how to do it? Because this is so amazing to experience myself. I want to do it with my clients. So that's how brain spotting kind of started and how it started to spread. And that was over 20 years ago, actually. Uh, and brain spotting became much more well known during COVID because trainings finally went online. So prior to COVID, they were all in person. And then they went online. And so so many more people could get trained in brain spotting. And it has been a really amazing explosion in brain spotting therapists and in clients being able to benefit from it.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

And you are certified. I'm a certified brain spotting therapist. Yes. So in that description, you said EMDR a lot. And that's because we just did an episode on it. But for someone who's watching this one and maybe didn't watch last week, tell us what EMDR is briefly.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

So EMDR is we use bilateral stimulation, whether through eye movements, through sounds that go back and forth in your ears, through tapping or buzzers. And that bilateral stimulation helps to kind of distract the brain as you're working on a trauma memory or something stressful that you're bringing in to work on with your therapist. So it's kind of similar, but completely Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Got it. All right. Well, we're going to start with brain spotting. And the most asked question on the internet is just what you would guess. What is brain spotting therapy?

SPEAKER_01 8:49

So, just like you said, one of our biggest sayings is where you look affects how you feel. And so when you are doing a brain spotting session, uh, and something really cool about brain spotting is you can start brain spotting in session one with your therapist. And whether you know it or not, everyone is brain spotting all the time because our eyes are always going to places. But what we do is let's say, so last week in our um interview, you were we did a hypothetical example of bullying, right? So let's say we're working on the bullying again and something came up with your boss because it feels like your boss is a bully. And so I would ask you to, okay, as you're noticing this thing that happened with your boss this week, what do you notice in your body? And then share whatever comes up, or what do you notice inside? It can be sensations, images, words, sounds, colors, textures. It can be really truly anything. Just tell me what's coming up as you think about this thing that happened with your boss earlier in the week. Then from zero to 10, how activated do you feel right now in this moment, where zero is I'm totally calm, and 10 is the most activated or distressed that I could even imagine or I've ever been. Then I can use my pointer and help to find the position of your eyes where you feel the most access to that activation in your body. So let's say I would start by, for example, putting it over here. Say, do you feel more activated, less activated, or about the same? Then I'd go in the middle. And then over here. Let's say you felt the most activated over here. Well, I can refine it left and right, right? Let's say right here, you're like, oh, I feel it really a lot right there. And and people will. I mean, you can't. Oh, yeah. It's incredible. Like it's it's it's really weird and very wild how it works. Um, and then you can go up and down. So this is a setup called inside window where the client is really guiding where the brain spot is.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

And so then if it was my heart beating fast, it's going to be faster when you're on that side and a little higher, whatever. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

And then so let's just say this is the spot. And so this is where we start, but your eyes can go wherever they want. You can do whatever you want. You can have your eyes open or closed. Okay. But we're just going to start by having you look here. And then just like in EMDR where we say notice that or go with that, we kind of use a lot of that terminology in brain spotting. So just notice what happens here. And then in brain spotting, we use the term focused mindfulness. So then the client's job is to just notice what happens inside through focused mindfulness. There's less literature on brain spotting compared to EMDR. A lot of the current and emerging literature in both areas is really using fMRIs and other brain imaging techniques to understand what's happening in the brain. And those the subcortical, the low parts of the brain that we talked about in last week's episode are turning on. They are lighting up in brain spotting, which is good because our trauma is experience processed and stored in the limbic system and the brainstem. So that's exactly where we want to be targeting and working as opposed to in the cortex, which is our thinking brain. And so when you're here at this brain spot and you're just noticing what happens, your brain and body, just like an EMDR, is doing the work to heal itself. It's just a different way to access it.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

Two things first, I want to make clear that that yellow thing isn't magical. You just have it on the end of yours because a friend made it. Okay, so a normal or normal, a traditional pointer looks more like well.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

So this is so when you go to your phase one brain spotting, you get a number of gifts. One of them is your pointer, you get your manual. When you do phase two, we actually in brain spotting, there's some cool stuff that we can do with one eye. So you get these goggles that will cover one eye or the other. But I do a lot of telehealth. And so it's hard. And also in person, it's kind of hard to see this little tip here. And so, yeah, my friend is a, she does like knitting and crocheting. So she made me this little ball that kind of looks like a brain, too. It does. I just wanted to make sure if somebody walked in and said, hey, she had a yeah. A lot of people have toppers that are like different um stones or things like that. With kids, it can be really fun to get finger puppets and put them on here. And then you can let the kid, you can have a whole array of finger puppets. Adults like the finger puppets too. You know, who do you want on the pointer today? Things like that. You can get super creative. It sounds too easy to work. I know.

unknown 13:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

And um, so in EMDR and in brain spotting, when you get trained as a therapist, a big part of that is actually experiencing it yourself as a client. Because in the trainings, you're gonna learn the protocols, we call them in EMDR, in brain spotting, we call them setups, but you're learning all of these different interventions. And there's so there's the didactic portion of the training, but then you break out into practicum where you are paired up with another therapist and you're gonna be practicing it. And you are working on real stuff for yourself, uh, as opposed to pretending like you're a client or making something up. And we're not diving into, you know, therapists like deep traumas in these trainings, but it's important that they are working on real things so they can really experience what it's like to do this therapy. And, you know, it's never a requirement that therapists have their own therapist, but it can often be helpful. And especially when you're specializing in a certain kind of treatment, it can really make a difference for your clients to know that you've experienced it too, whether you tell them that or you sort of communicate that in other implicit ways.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

So you know its effectiveness, both having used brain spotting for yourself and as a therapist who uses it.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Exactly. And having the experience of a pointer all of a sudden increasing the activation in your body and being like, oh shit, what just happened? As a therapist is incredibly powerful and it makes a big difference because then when your clients experience that, it's just normal. You can normalize it and be like, yeah, that's exactly what happens.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Okay. Second most common question on the internet about brain spotting is how is it different from EMDR?

SPEAKER_01 15:22

So the main difference is really that in EMDR, we're doing eye movements, that bilateral stimulation back and forth. Whereas in brain spotting, we're talking about fixed eye positions. Now we can have multiple brain spots going on at any given time, and you can move back and forth between the brain spots, but it's not about, it's not like this. Right. So it might be that over here is an activation brain spot, and over here is a resource where I feel more regulated in my body. And so I can go to the resource brain spot to regulate. And then once I'm ready, I can go back to this activation spot to do that work. And that is a really, really powerful thing to do. We do similar things in EMDR in different ways, but really integrating those resources so that we're not white knuckling our way through the work. It's not just about getting through and gritting your teeth and burying it. It is about truly supporting the entire system and bringing all those resources online so that when you're working on this beginning, middle, and end of whatever it is you're doing in therapy, there's much more kind of resolution for lack of a better word, because you are building things up as you're also kind of breaking down the stuff that's holding you back.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

So the result of brain spotting, if I come into you and we have you tell me how many sessions, at the end of that, what's going to be different in my life?

SPEAKER_01 16:50

A lot of things could be different. Um, so especially when we're talking about trauma, the the first thing is you won't feel like whatever the trauma is or the stressor it is that you're coming into work on, you won't feel like it is just controlling your life and running the show. So it can be a lot of times it can feel like that memory, that experience feels further away or just not as intense or kind of the impact of it doesn't it's not getting in the way of you being able to do the things you want to do in your life. It also about getting your quality of life back and getting to live life and whatever that means for you. It's never about erasing memories. We can't erase memories. Uh, and for better or for worse, you know, that's our, that's our life, that's our timeline. And it all of those things build up and and add up to be the person that we are today. And so doing trauma work means that the difficult things still get to matter and exist alongside the the things that you're really working on enhancing and so that you can be the complete and complex person that you are.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

So we cannot erase a bad memory. But through therapies like EMDR and brain spotting, our relationship to them changes. Yes, exactly. So that they're no longer like running the show.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Yeah. Exactly. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

Looking at last week's EMDR, this week's brain spotting, is one or the other more effective for different traumas, or do they both work on traumas and it's which one you have access to, which one you prefer?

SPEAKER_01 18:28

I'm not aware of any studies that have no, actually, I take that back. There are studies that have sort of compared them EMDR to brain spotting. There are um, there's some difficulties in some of that literature, some criticisms of that literature. And so when it comes to the research base, especially for brain spotting, because it is much more new relatively than EMDR, we're still really having to work on building up that literature base, getting funding to really understand what is going on with brain spotting and to answer your question, they are both going to be effective for a lot of the same things. And some of it comes down to kind of personal preference and access. So not everyone is going to be able to find a brain spotting therapist because it is relatively newer. And not everyone's gonna, you know, like brain spotting or like EMDR. And so having all of those different options is something that I think is so important out there in the world of psychology and therapy because everyone is unique. And so it's not about necessarily which intervention is more effective than others, but which intervention is the best match for you as the client.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

And how would you determine that?

SPEAKER_01 19:43

It really is up to the client. So, you know, we talked in the in the last episode about the hand model of the brain and kind of bottom-up and top-down psychotherapies. Um, I kind of like to think about those almost as a spectrum. So, cognitive processing therapy, for example, it is a cognitive behavioral approach to treating trauma for adults. And it is very structured. We're really doing a lot of cognitive restructuring, things like that, as it relates to the way that trauma affects our beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world. That for a lot of people, especially people who have never been in therapy before, can be a really great first intervention for trauma. What ends up happening is they make a lot of gains. For some people, that's all they need is CPT. And then there are people for whom, and we talked about this last week too, they they understand all the things that are going on cognitively, but then they still are like, well, why am I not really making the progress? Why do I feel so triggered still all the time? That's when things like EMDR and brain spotting can be a great next step. Um, and I often think about kind of if you were looking at this as a stepped approach, is kind of EMDR, cognitive processing therapy, CPT, then EMDR, because it's sort of uh blending both the cognitive and the somatic. And then brain spotting is much more somatic and bottom up.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

And so it's kind of like a spectrum of a menu of options for therapy, but it really is about what is the client needing? What is going to be the best approach for them? And how can we pivot when we need to as a therapist?

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Is there scientific evidence that brain spotting is effective?

SPEAKER_01 21:26

There, yes, there is. So we have a growing literature base showing that people are getting better after they do brain spotting therapy. So when we're looking at kind of the the literature and how we can tell if someone is getting better, oftentimes we're wanting to look at, you know, objective measures of sort of PTSD symptoms, anxiety, depression, any of those things. And when you look at the literature base for brain spotting, yeah, we've got articles out there that are showing that, that, that those scores are going down, the severity of PTSD, et cetera, are going down. And then when you talk to clients who are doing brain spotting, they will just tell you all the amazing things that they get to experience as a result of this intervention.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

So gotta ask the skeptics question. So what do you say to somebody who is thinking I have been living with the repercussions of this trauma I have been carrying for decades? And you say if I stare at a pointer, I will feel better. It does sound unlikely.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Honestly, I'm like, you gotta try it. You'd say you have to see it to believe it. Um and and also so much of that is comes down to the therapeutic relationship. So in any therapy, that connection is super important. In brain spotting, we talk a lot about the attunement of the therapist to the client. So it is my presence, my awareness of you, my ability to allow you to take the lead and for me to follow. We have a lot of metaphors in brain spotting. One of them is that the therapist needs to be the tail of the comet. Uh so the client is the head of the client of the comet. And wherever they're going is wherever they're gonna go. Because everything's connected. We might start with the bullying and then end up with one summer you thought you were gonna drown, right? I don't know. Right. Um, and so it's my job to be attuned and connected with you to follow you. And if I fall out of the tail of the comet, that's okay. I can get back into it. But that feeling that connection with another person is so deeply healing. And it's not something that we can quantify, right? And that's one of the difficulties in the literature of these more somatic and bottom-up therapies, is it's really hard to quantify attunement or to um quantify what's happening in the therapeutic relationship outside of like satisfaction scores of how much do you like your therapist? And yet, when you talk to people who are clients and getting to receive these interventions, what they're experiencing is oftentimes the first relief that they've ever gotten from the stress and trauma that they've experienced in their lives.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

So if someone's trauma has led them to disconnect, you know, to not be in their body, so to speak, what's the likelihood that they're gonna know when you pick the spot with your pointer in brain spotting and be like, oh, I feel more activated there. Is there a role you play if that the client can't, where you say, I see your eyes doing something, or I can tell you're whatever, agitated or calm or I don't know what?

SPEAKER_01 24:47

Yeah, absolutely. So in phase one, you learn kind of the three main setups for brain spotting. The one I demonstrated earlier is called inside window, which is where the client is aware of their body and they're helping to guide the spot, helping us pick together. We also have outside window, which is where I would just take the pointer and let's say we're working on the bowling, I would very slowly, like really super slow, be having you follow this. And I'm looking for reflexes. So I'm looking for um perhaps blinking or swallowing or taking a deep breath, or if we're in person, notice that all of a sudden you're tapping your foot, right? And so I'm looking for those subtle nonverbal reactions, and we'll go all the way across your visual field, and then I'm just gonna pick one. Um, and we'll start there. And often that is one of the first times that clients can begin to notice that there actually is something happening in their body and to notice that connection. And also in brain spotting and in EMDR, we very much normalize dissociation or that disconnection from our body because it's such a beautiful superpower that our brain can do that. And yet it can cause a lot of problems over time. And so, um, fortunately, in brain spotting, we can work with that in these really supportive and adaptive ways, but you don't have to be able to feel your body or to verbalize what's going on or even have any kind of clear memory about what you are working on in order for it to be effective.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Wow, that's gonna be a real relief to people. Yeah. So, how does brain spotting help someone dealing with trauma or PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder?

SPEAKER_01 26:30

So it it really helps to um, again, it helps to work on the ways that that trauma and stress are stored in the subcortical parts of our brain. So our limbic system is the amygdala and the hippocampus. The amygdala is kind of like our fire alarm of our brain. The hippocampus is the memory center. And this is where our trauma is like experienced emotionally and stored. It also in the brainstem, which is going to be controlling a lot of our immediate reactions to threats, that this is where trauma is, it lives. And so brain spotting helps to access these subcortical parts of our brain, which are by definition nonverbal, because our verbal capacities live in our cortex, our neocortex, the squiggly part of our brain, where all of our thinking comes from. And so by giving us a way through focused mindfulness, through the position of the eyes, through the therapeutic relationship and attunement, it helps the brain to heal itself and to do that work in really beautiful ways that we can't do just by changing a negative belief into a more positive one.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

Can you give me an example of a client you've had without violating anything HIPAA-related in how someone was changed through brain spotting?

SPEAKER_01 27:49

Yeah. I mean, historically, I was always a child person. I came up in my training doing a lot of work around child abuse and neglect. And then our careers take us in all these ways that we could never anticipate. And now I really just primarily in my in my as a clinician work with adults. And but my child training very much informs that. And I share that background because so much of what I do with my clients and brain spotting therapists and trauma therapists all over the world do with their clients is meet their clients where they're at. And in my opinion, all roads lead back to trauma. And often that trauma starts early off in life. And that early childhood trauma, whether it be big T or little T, creates ripple effects throughout our lives. And so people come to me because they are having so many problems with other people in their lives, or they are constantly triggered and they can't go and do the things that they want to be able to do, or they're just missing out on their life because they're so disconnected from it. And through brain spotting, they literally get to start living their lives again and in the ways that they want to. So they can start to make informed decisions about what they're gonna do with their life. They can be more present in those interactions, they can go after those goals, big, little, anywhere in between that they thought perhaps were they would never be able to achieve. And they can connect with people again. You know, so much of trauma, and especially oftentimes the most painful traumas are relational. And we can become so isolated out of self-protection. But as much as people sometimes hate it, we're relational animals. We need people. When we look at studies around um like solitary confinement, when we look at the literature on infants that have been in orphanages and do not have a consistent attachment figure, people who are in solitary confinement, they literally develop symptoms of psychosis because they don't have contact with other people. When we look at literature on, there's a lot of literature on um Ukrainian orphanages in the 70s and 80s. Babies were dying, not because their basic needs weren't met, but because they didn't have a consistent attachment figure. And so they've, there was failure to thrive and they died, even though they were fed, they were clothed, they were housed. And so we need people in our lives and being able to connect with people again is one of the most life-changing experiences that someone can have, especially after trauma.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Boy, I would bet. So again, we're not saying, regardless of how severe your trauma was, if you look at a pointer, it can be fixed. We're saying your brain can fix itself the same way you heal from a broken bone or a cut, and a pointer can be a facilitator to open that healing. Absolutely. Okay. Because I I really do think that if I was watching this and I didn't understand that, I'd be like, there's just no way in hell.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Right. I know. Yeah. I know. And and that's again why I say you kind of gotta like see it to believe it, experience it to understand it, because I'm the first to say it sounds woo, it sounds really weird and out there, and it it works.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

I'm telling you. What is involved in the number of sessions and the cost? And does insurance cover it? All those kinds of things if somebody's interested in trying it.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

So it's hard to say exactly how many sessions, right? But for in in general, um, there's kind of two ways that that most therapists are doing this right now. So one is your standard kind of hourly 50-minute hour sessions per week. Um, another is through intensives, which is where you're meeting for 90 minutes, three hours or more in these like big chunks of time. Um insurance absolutely will reimburse for those, you know, 50-minute sessions. And um, for a lot of clients, once they start to work with a brain spotting therapist, they can feel pretty quick and immediate relief in a lot of the things they're coming in to work on initially. Um, and then sometimes what happens is we and the client is like, oh, wait, now I'm ready to work on all this other stuff. And so we can have, you know, a short in a short number of sessions, a lot of progress. And then it can also be an intervention in a therapy that can go for the long term if that's what clients want as well. With our intensives, a lot of times those are very focused in that, you know, we have a specific goal, but with brain spotting and also EMDR, we're just gonna go with whatever comes up. And so everything's connected. We're gonna allow things to evolve and see what happens. But it's really cool the intensive model because in 50 minutes, a lot of times you get to that like 30, 40 minute period. Um, and you know, the first, you know, five, 10, 15 minutes is kind of checking in, settling in. Then you start brain spotting. And it's like right as things start to really get good, you have to like stop and wrap up. And so intensives are really great because you can actually move through that whole process. Insurance will not pay for intensives, unfortunately. But it is a really powerful and worthwhile investment because if you can reach whatever your goal is in three hours out of pocket versus months or even years of 50-minute sessions, they're probably gonna have a similar price tag and you're gonna get way quicker results through an intensive.

SPEAKER_00 33:25

When you say months or years of 50-minute sessions, do you mean in traditional therapies or in brain spotting or either?

SPEAKER_01 33:32

Either. But even with brain spotting in 50 minutes, it's kind of this like start-stop, right? And so there it's more, it's more difficult to experience that beginning, middle, and end in a 50-minute session.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Another internet question. Can brain spotting therapy help relieve chronic physical pain?

SPEAKER_01 33:51

Yeah, absolutely. Brain spotting is um can be really, really helpful for physical pain. And there are setups that are designed specifically for that, to work with pain in the body. So, in the body, migraines, any of those things. Oftentimes, especially with chronic pain, there are absolutely physical components to it. And then the way that we emotionally feel about the pain and the beliefs that we start to develop around it and what it means about ourselves to be living with chronic pain, it helps it exacerbates it, it makes it worse, it makes it more intense. And then it cuts us off from a lot of the activities and interventions like movement that are actually gonna be helpful for us. And so, in being able to target chronic pain and physical pain with brain spotting in conjunction with other, maybe it's physical therapy or, you know, other kinds of movement, other medical interventions, medications, is gonna be a much more comprehensive approach as opposed to having to just grit your teeth and bear the pain or being told by your doctors that it's all in your head.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

So I could step through these all individually, but is brain spotting effective for anxiety, depression, chronic stress, eating disorders?

SPEAKER_01 35:08

Yes, yes, yes. Okay. So I mean, and I don't want it to sound like it's a one size fits all. Okay. Because um, and you and I have talked about this how important it is to find a therapist who is specialized in the thing that you're wanting to work on in therapy. And so there are brain spotting therapists who um have really truly set like specialized within being a brain spotting therapist. So certainly trauma is going to be a big thing that any brain spotting therapist is working on, but there are brain spotting therapists who do eating disorders or who do OCD work through um brain spotting or just anxiety and depression, substance use, substance abuse. And so it can be really helpful to look at a therapist's website to really understand what is their specialty. And when you first meet them, ask them like, what is it that you do most in brain spotting? Do you have a specialty within this intervention that relates to the things that I want to work on? Brain spotting can also be used for performance enhancement. So can EMDR. Um, but there's a whole approach to brain spotting through expand. We call it expansion and performance enhancement, where you can work with professional athletes, you know, anyone, uh, but it a lot of that came out of working with professional athletes and um like artists, actors, things like that to really help to improve whatever your abilities are and to be able to perform even better in that area of your life.

SPEAKER_00 36:39

Is that about getting past something that's limiting your performance, or is that about tapping into your potential?

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Both and so David teaches a lot about this, David Grant. And uh when you're working with a professional, let's just take an athlete, for example, during their season, you're not gonna be working on a lot of like past activating trauma stuff. You're gonna be working on enhancing their abilities. When they're not in season, when they're in a down period, then you can work on things that are activating and are perhaps still coming up or impeding things. But you want to be really strategic about that because you don't want to be working on a bunch of activating trauma stuff when they have to be performing. Um, and and so you just kind of got to find a balance there.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

So there are a lot of internet questions that basically communicate fear, you know, that I don't want to talk about my trauma or I would have gone to a talk therapist. So explain the the way that brain spotting works in relation to how much do I have to disclose, how much do I have to remember and then tell you.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

You don't have to be able to remember anything. A lot of a lot of trauma, either because of the way it's processed and stored, we can't retrieve the memory from the hippocampus, or perhaps it's a pre-verbal trauma. So it's something that happened before you learned how to talk. And so those get encoded very differently in our brain and body. Uh, so you don't have to remember anything about it to know that you're having whatever X, Y, and Z difficulties in your life and you want to work on that using brain spotting. And in a brain spotting session, I was telling you before we recorded, um, a lot of times I don't talk a lot as a therapist, as a brain spotting and EMDR therapist, because once we find this spot and your job as the client is just to notice what happens, my job's to be quiet. And then you get to share as much or as little as you want. And there are sessions where 40 of the 50 minutes are almost entirely silent. Uh, because, and I'm certainly checking in. I am tracking you, I am deeply attuned with what's going on, but you don't have to tell me what's happening internally. And for you to describe what's happening is going to take you out of that subcortical processing. And so we don't necessarily encourage a lot of verbal processing unless the person is just naturally kind of sharing what's going on.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

So I'm trying to imagine a session. And and we've done the right, left, middle, you know, high and low with moving the point around. And I am locked on a particular spot, I feel it and you see it. How do you describe what's happening in that that will allow me then to feel different at the end of the process?

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Well, so you have a spot right here that you're just looking at. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, we call that a gaze spot. And gaze spotting is what we do naturally. And by your brain is, I mean, your eyes are going there for whatever reason. And and I mean, how do I describe what happens to make you feel different? I I can't really answer that because it's different for everyone. And by allowing for the space for your brain and body to process and to kind of feel the beginning, middle, and end in things, to do that in relationship with a therapist who can be with you and to support you. Um, that's really kind of where a lot of those outcomes and feeling different happens. Brain spotting sessions are so interesting because they can be very intense. You asked me about like shaking or feeling hot. Sometimes people will feel pain in specific parts of their brain or their body, or they'll like feel weird things in their head, and it can get quite intense. And when you and I can sit with that together, when we can hold that together, uh, that's how you start to get past this kind of peak of the intensity and come out on the other side. Instead of when it starts to get hard, you hit the escape button. It's so interesting because brain spotting sessions, and and I receive brain spotting as a client myself, and they can be so intense. And then there's just this moment where things start to come together, and you're like, oh, wait, that feels a little bit different now. Or I am able to see this from another perspective. Uh, my brain is able to access these other resources and supports and capacities, internal and external to me. And there's this deep sense of relief at the end of a brain spotting session, even when it has gotten really, really hard and really intense. We talked about kind of the hangover stuff with EMDR. And that also can happen with brain spotting, where it can be intense, then you feel a lot better right afterwards, and your brain keeps working on this stuff for the next couple of days or so. We also, though, there's sort of we sometimes joke about it in the brain spotting community of your sleep right after a brain spotting session. Sometimes it's really good, sometimes it's really bad. But then the next day, often we're like, oh, it looks like you have a brain spotting facelift. Because people just the next day, and especially when you're like in trainings or you do intensives, you can really see this. They come back very differently. And again, these are very hard things to quantify and to study. And so that unfortunately leaves kind of this stain on things like brain spotting and some of these somatic and bottom-up approaches because we don't have hard science to support it.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

But when you live it, you you know. How has brain spotting helped you as a client, not as a therapist?

SPEAKER_01 42:41

Yeah, immensely. Um I so it's funny. So I I run a community for trauma therapists to support them. And thank you. I share that because um I know how hard it is for therapists to ask for help to know that they're allowed to receive help because I am the worst at it in the whole world. And so brain spotting has helped me to really be able to begin asking for help. And that's like gonna be, it's it's a really hard process and it's gonna be a lot of work for me. It's continued work that I'm doing. And then to be able to receive that help. That's a very um old attachment wound for me. And at the same time, when I do my own brain spotting as a client, there I then am have more capacity to say when I'm not feeling when I'm feeling not good enough, um, to let people know that I need their support, and then to actually take their support in instead of armoring up and pretending like I can do it all by myself.

SPEAKER_00 43:50

I'm thinking about both of these therapies, the EMDR we talked about last week and brain spotting now. And I'm always of two minds. So there's a part of me that thinks that people who are Resistant to therapy. I am not going to talk about I'm not going to tell a stranger this might be an access point for them from which they can get some relief and and live a more connected, better life. I can also hear like that's nuts. So is it do you find people who've never done therapy saying, I'll give this a try if I don't have to talk about my stuff?

SPEAKER_01 44:25

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that can be a big draw for people. And let's just acknowledge that therapy is weird. Right? Like the therapeutic relationship is so weird. You don't know me, but but you're, I'm expecting you to tell me all of these weird, deepest, darkest secrets, right? Um, but you don't get to know anything about me if we're talking about the blank slate model, uh, which is fortunately changing a lot in therapy. But um, yeah, and so things like brain spotting and EMDR and other bottom-up and somatic therapies means yes, you still are going to be dealing with what it feels like to be vulnerable with another human being, but you don't have to share all the gory details if you don't want to. You can share as much or as little as you want, and you're still going to be able to work towards the goals that you have in therapy.

SPEAKER_00 45:15

I'm fascinated by this. So if someone is interested in exploring or even trying brain spotting, what do you recommend as their next steps?

SPEAKER_01 45:23

The brain spotting website, either brainspotting.com or.org, try both of them, uh, is going to have a comprehensive list of brain spotting trained therapists and certified brain spotting therapists. And so with brain spotting in a lot of therapies, there is a certification process so that uh therapists can really be trained up and that clients know that they're getting a therapist who's not just read a book or the manual or even just gone to a training, but that they have walked through specific steps and received special um specialty consultation from a con from a brain spotting consultant. And that consultant has said, yes, this therapist knows their stuff. They know how to do this. I know that they are effective in this and that they are trained up. And then they're able to become a brain, a certified brain spotting therapist. So if you go to the brain spotting website, you can find a list of therapists there. It also um allows you to um look at, you know, location in person via telehealth, insurance, and to really filter through those things so that you can, you know, find someone that fits a number of those different criteria.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

So when choosing someone, you we talked earlier about the the client. It's not, it's not patient right client either. Okay. The the my perspective and yours, and that when I'm feeling what I'm feeling, looking at the pointer, and you are watching, seeing what you're watching for. If we're doing this virtually, you wouldn't see my foot tap. You wouldn't, you might not see what my hands are doing under the table. Is there a difference in effectiveness between doing brain spotting in person and doing it telehealth or virtually?

SPEAKER_01 47:05

So with ultimate outcomes, no. Okay. Because and and my practice is is all online, my clinical practice. And so, yeah, I can't see what's happening, you know, below the screen. But at the same time, I'm very attuned to my clients. And so I can still tell when they're tensing. I can tell if they're moving or fidgeting, I can tell if things are happening, but that's not the crux of the work either. And a lot of it comes down to personal preference at this point. So we know from the literature base that telehealth is just as effective as in person. There are gonna be pros and cons to each. And a lot of that, again, is personal preference for the therapist and for the client. Um, and for clients, a lot of folks want online because it's more convenient. Absolutely. They're super busy. It actually makes therapy more accessible. Other people are gonna want in person for other reasons, right? Because they want to be able to feel that they want to have a space outside of their home, for example, that's gonna hold the trauma work that they're doing. And so it's just allowing yourself to be honest with what works best for you. And then also with all of this, the therapeutic relationship is the most important thing. And so if you don't feel like you are connected with your therapist, it's okay to switch therapists, even if they're supposedly the best, most fanciest certified brain spotting therapist. If you don't feel like you click, then you're not gonna get all that far. And so that should actually be one of the most important things to consider as a client and to be honest with yourself and your therapist. A good therapist is not gonna be offended when you decide to switch therapists. But the people pleasers amongst us.

SPEAKER_00 48:52

No, it's our like we don't want to be offensive, you know. So you don't even want to stop the therapeutic relationship because it's like, how do you say, like, I don't need you anymore? But that should be the roots and wings, like a parent.

SPEAKER_01 49:03

Yeah. And hopefully, you know, um, therapists are kind of making that known from the beginning, but also it's hard to find a therapist. Yeah, it is like not only the whole do I click, do I like this person? But just like literally, people can't get calls back because therapists are so overworked. They are their caseloads are exploding. There is a massive deficit in mental health providers across the country and the world. And prospective clients simply can't even get calls back. So we can't end there.

SPEAKER_00 49:38

What should we do?

SPEAKER_01 49:40

Well, you know, this is also where there's some cool innovative things that are happening in psychology and and in psychotherapy. So let's come come back to intensives, for example. Um, unfortunately, right now, they're not gonna be paid for by insurance, but the whole medical model is set up to fail psychology, unfortunately. And at the same time, when we for clients, there are so many layers of access and resources and privilege that we have to acknowledge here, right? Um, and there are a lot of nonprofits and other organizations that are starting to answer this call, this need for other ways to access treatments that work. But, you know, in thinking about, okay, can I carve out some focused time? Do I have the either monetary resources or access to a center where I can get an intensive and do some really focused work on something to then be able to reach a goal quickly and return to my life, right? Or can I, um, unfortunately, it's even more difficult to find an insurance-based uh therapist that that is really specialized in things, but can I find an a therapist that takes my insurance or you know, get creative in other ways? Um, it brain spotting is is really cool and it's interesting. You don't have to be a licensed therapist to get trained in brain spotting. So a lot of um, there's physical therapists, occupational therapists, coaches who also get trained in brain spotting. And so there can be other kind of integrative and interdisciplinary providers where you can get some of these supports and interventions in ways outside of the kind of traditional 50-minute psychotherapy build to your insurance model.

SPEAKER_00 51:32

Good. That is good advice. I would never have thought of going to a physical therapist for brain spotting. Right. So another option for somebody looking for a brain spotting therapist would be through you.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

Yeah. So I run the Brave Trauma Therapist Collective, which is this community of trauma therapists. And one of the things that we've started doing a lot of is being a resource when people are looking for a trauma therapist because we have members across the country and across the world, actually. And so when they go to my website, braveproviders.com, they can B R A V E. B-R-A-V-E. Yep. They can send us an email through our contact form and let us know that they're looking for a therapist. And then we can, you know, reach out to our community for that. We're working on building a directory to make it even easier to look for therapists. But right now we are able to share referrals with our entire community. And our members are trained in lots of different interventions for trauma.

SPEAKER_00 52:31

And so, you know, we can have a whole, a whole like menu of options for people when they're looking for a trauma therapist, which would be really nice to have because a lot of us don't know what we need, or even, you know, until I talked to you for last hour, what some of the options mean and what they are and how they work.

SPEAKER_01 52:48

Exactly. And just like I was saying earlier, when we think about this spectrum of like cognitive processing therapy, EMDR, brain spotting, it's it's nice to be able to have some options. And depending on where a client is coming in and their journey of working on their life and their past experiences, knowing that there are some different ways to approach it can feel really, really supportive.

SPEAKER_00 53:10

Yeah, I think so too. Thank you so much. I know so much more than I did what before we sat down and started talking. So if you are looking for additional reliable information on brain spotting, we will include a link to recovery.com's resource hub. There are a lot of medically reviewed articles there about different therapies as well as the ability to search for, like you said, various treatment center options, various treatment options in your insurance, in your area, all the different ways that you might want to narrow that search. And we will be back next week with a look into another of the topics about mental health, addiction, treatment, recovery, and we will answer your top asked questions. Thank you for being here and join us next week. And thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed this.