Where you look affects how you feel

In a session, you will first talk about what has brought you in for therapy. Together we will find the “Brainspot”, a place in the visual field, where you will gaze during the session, and which harnesses the brain’s ability to find balance again. We find this spot through a variety of easy, natural methods.

For example, one way of finding a Brainspot is called Gazespotting – you may have been looking at a certain area to the right, left, or center of your visual field as you’ve been talking the reason you came to therapy. You will be invited to bring your gaze there and hold it for a minute or so and you will just see where you go. We will then check in with you to see what you have experienced. The time on that “gazespot” will be lengthened until you are gazing there for most of the session. You may be quiet or speak if you feel so inclined. You might experience thoughts, feelings, memories, see an imagine in your mind, have a body sensation – a variety of experiences may occur as your deeper brain finds its way into “the file” of this disturbance or issue you have brought into the session. It is through the time on the visual spot that allows your brain to harness the regulatory networks which connect to our brain’s programmed ability to bring itself to a place of balance.

Other ways of finding the brainspot include what is called Inside Window, Outside Window, Z-Axis, One Eye Brainspotting and several other very easy and natural ways of find what we call the “relevant eye position” – relevant to the sensations of the difficulty.

With Inside Window, we work together to see where in the visual field feels most like the sense of activation around the issue and the body sensation that goes with that activation – so, how much do you feel the difficulty and where in the body do you feel it? How that works in the session is that we will ask you how activated you feel around what you are working on – say it is the feelings of anxiety about an upcoming job interview tomorrow. We will ask you where you are in the moment on a scale of 10-0, with 10 being the worst you could feel, and 0 being the issue is resolved and you feel fine. So, you will give that number, say for example, a 4 to start with. Then we will ask you were in your body you feel that “4 activation level” the most, or where it seems to “live” in your body or come from. If you can, you’ll identify that area of your body. No problem if you can’t do that – we can still work to find the brainspot. Your therapist will start to move a telescoping pointer first left, then center, then to the right, and you will follow that pointer with your eyes to see if the activation feels more to your left, center or right. When you identify which area has the resonant feel of the issue, we will move the pointer quite slowly horizontally to find the point of activation, of that 4 on a 10-0 scale, and on you will gaze at that place and do the Brainspotting session from there.

What seems to happen for people is that the number from 10-0 either goes up or down in the beginning of the session, and then starts to come down. There are a lot of theories regarding why this is so which include thoughts about the various areas in the brain we may be harnessing that help those regulatory networks to come online and be effective.

When you reach a low number or a 0, and as the session time is coming to a close, you will end the gaze on the brainspot. It is OK if you don’t reach a 0, the processing continues on and most people feel relief after the session if they leave the session at a higher number.