If you have ever tried to talk your way out of a feeling and gotten nowhere, you already understand the problem Brainspotting is trying to solve. You can know exactly why you react the way you do, explain it clearly, even see the pattern coming, and still feel your chest tighten when something sets it off. Insight and relief are not the same thing.
I trained in Brainspotting because I kept meeting people in that gap. They had done the work of understanding themselves. What they had not been able to do was change what their body did about it.
This is a plain description of what Brainspotting is, what happens in a session, and what the research does and does not yet support. I am not going to tell you it works for everyone, because it does not.
Where you look changes how you feel
Sit with something that bothers you and slowly move your gaze across the room. For most people, the feeling is not evenly distributed. At certain eye positions it fades into the background. At one or two, it gets noticeably louder, and something in the body responds. A tightening. A held breath. A restlessness that is hard to name.
That louder spot is what Brainspotting calls a brainspot, and finding it is most of the work.
The idea behind this is that visual attention and the parts of the brain that handle threat and body regulation are more closely wired together than we tend to assume. Where your eyes rest is not neutral. Fixing your gaze on the spot where the activation is strongest seems to keep you connected to the feeling steadily enough that it can finish moving through, rather than getting interrupted the way it does in ordinary conversation.
I want to be careful here, because this is where a lot of writing about Brainspotting overreaches. That explanation is a proposed mechanism, not a proven one. Corrigan and Grand laid it out in Medical Hypotheses in 2013, and it is worth knowing that this is a journal specifically for ideas that have not been tested yet. It is a reasonable hypothesis. It is not settled science, and I would rather you hear that from me than discover it later.
Where it came from
Brainspotting was developed in 2003 by David Grand, a psychotherapist who had been working extensively with EMDR. He noticed that particular eye positions seemed to matter on their own, apart from the back-and-forth movement EMDR uses, and built a method around that observation.
So Brainspotting and EMDR are relatives, not rivals. If you have had EMDR, parts of Brainspotting will feel familiar. If EMDR did not suit you, that does not tell us much either way about this.
What actually happens in a session
The honest answer is that it looks like very little is happening, and that surprises people.
We start with what you want to work on and where you feel it in your body. Not the story in detail, just enough for both of us to know what we are looking at, and where it lives physically.
Then we find the spot. Sometimes I move a pointer slowly across your visual field and you tell me where the feeling changes. Sometimes you already know where you do not want to look, which is usually informative. Either way, you are the one identifying it. I am watching for the small involuntary things, a blink, a swallow, a shift in breathing, and asking about what I notice.
Then you hold your gaze there, and we wait.
That is the part that feels strange. There is no technique to perform. You notice what comes, and you say some of it out loud if you want to. Often people are quiet for long stretches while a great deal goes on internally. Your attention may wander somewhere apparently unrelated, and that wandering is usually not a distraction, it is the processing. Many clients use headphones with quiet alternating sound during this, which some find helps them stay with it.
My job is mostly to stay with you and not interrupt. That sounds like doing nothing. It is the difference between a session that goes somewhere and one that stalls.
You will not be asked to relive the event in detail, and you can stop at any point. If you have spent years avoiding a memory because describing it out loud was unbearable, this is the part worth knowing about.
How it compares to EMDR
| Brainspotting | EMDR | |
|---|---|---|
| Eyes | Held still on one spot | Moved back and forth |
| Structure | Loose, follows where you go | Eight defined phases |
| Talking about the event | Minimal | Brief, but more defined |
| Evidence base | Early, few controlled trials | Extensive, decades of trials |
| Who leads | You find the spot | Counselor guides the protocol |
That last row is the real difference in the room. EMDR has a protocol to return to when a session gets difficult. Brainspotting has far less scaffolding, which some people find freeing and others find unmooring. Neither reaction is wrong.
If you want the fuller picture of the more established option, my colleague Sara has written a detailed piece on what EMDR therapy is and how it works.
What the research does and does not show
Brainspotting is roughly two decades old, and the research reflects that.
There are small studies pointing in a promising direction. Hildebrand, Grand and Stemmler compared Brainspotting with EMDR for post-traumatic stress and found comparable results. D'Antoni and colleagues published a comparative study in 2022 looking at EMDR, Brainspotting and body scan meditation for distressing memories. There are also published case reports, including work with survivors of the Bataclan attack.
What does not exist yet is a body of large randomized controlled trials. That is the specific thing that moved EMDR from promising to recommended, and Brainspotting has not done it. No major clinical body currently lists it as a first-line trauma treatment.
Both of those things are true at once, and I think you are owed both. If a therapist tells you Brainspotting is proven, they are ahead of the evidence. If someone tells you it is baseless, they have not read what is there. It is an approach with early support and real clinical use, and choosing it is a reasonable decision made with clear eyes.
Who it tends to suit
In my experience it is worth considering if:
- You understand your patterns intellectually but they have not shifted
- Talking about what happened out loud is more than you can currently manage
- You lose the thread in more structured protocols
- Something feels stuck in your body rather than your thinking
It tends to be a harder fit if unstructured quiet feels unsafe to you, or if you are in acute crisis and need stabilizing first. That is not a small caveat, and it is one I raise before starting rather than after.
If you want to talk it through
I offer Brainspotting at our Fulshear location, alongside EMDR and the other approaches I am trained in. If you are not sure whether it fits what you are carrying, a short conversation will tell us more than any article will. You can reach out here or call the Fulshear office at (346) 233-1513, and I am glad to say so if I think something else would serve you better.
Sources:
- Corrigan, F. M., & Grand, D. (2013). Brainspotting: Recruiting the midbrain for accessing and healing sensorimotor memories of traumatic activation. Medical Hypotheses, 80(6), 759-766.
- Hildebrand, A., Grand, D., & Stemmler, M. (2017). Brainspotting: the efficacy of a new therapy approach for the treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in comparison to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology.
- D'Antoni, F., Matiz, A., Fabbro, F., & Crescentini, C. (2022). Psychotherapeutic techniques for distressing memories: A comparative study between EMDR, Brainspotting, and body scan meditation. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(3).
- Masson, J., Bernoussi, A., & Moukouta, C. S. (2017). Brainspotting therapy: About a Bataclan victim. Global Journal of Health Science, 9(7).
- Brainspotting.com, the official site of David Grand, PhD.