Trauma overwhelms the brain’s capacity to process and integrate our experiences. This means that traumatic experiences can become trapped. When your brain is overwhelmed and unable to integrate the trauma, it does the next best thing it can: it bubble wraps that trauma so you don’t have to feel it all the way.

If you’re living with trauma, then you know that this protective “bubble wrapping” doesn’t entirely protect you from the memories, nightmares, fears, sadness, anxiety, or other aftershock from that trauma. It still shows up.

Brainspotting uses the field of vision to find out where we are holding these traumas in our brain. Processing from this “Brainspot” is like unwrapping a bandage and treating the wound directly.

Just as the eyes scan the outside environment for information and signals, they do the same in our inside environments, scanning inside our brains for areas where trauma is stored. Essentially, when we talk about trauma, the brain scans itself to reveal where that trauma is being held. Reflexive cues—seen in the eyes—tell us when the brain has found something important. Brainspotting notices and follows these cues to find where the brain pointing to—where that trauma is stuck. This place is called a Brainspot.

What this looks like in process