How Brainspotting Can Help You Break Free from Childhood Trauma: A Step-by-Step Guide

Nov 26

Childhood trauma seems to be more pervasive than we expect. Even though you might have survived a rough childhood or some rough moments in your childhood, these experiences can actually affect you into adulthood. It could affect your ability to connect with others, it could introduce people pleasing and perfectionism into your life. You might have bad dreams, avoid situations and people who are actually safe, find it difficult to trust people and ask for help. This could end up causing quite a bit of tension in your romantic relationships as well as work relationships.

The good news is neuroplasticity exists. This means that even though trauma might affect the structure of your brain, as well as your patterns of behavior, with science backed tools like brainspotting you could experience gentle and effective healing. And as a trauma therapist in Houston, brainspotting has been my jam for quite a while.

What Is Brainspotting and Why It’s Perfect for Healing Childhood Trauma

Brainspotting is simply utilizing where you look to target the deep layer of your brain where trauma is stored. Once you’re able to do that, then you can access the trauma, process it and then digest it. Once it’s digested, it has no reason to still sit in your brain.

Think of trauma like a ghost that hides in a closet. As long as it’s trapped in the closet, you continue to fear the closet, and maybe even fear your bedroom. You’re afraid to walk in, you can hear it moving around and making awful sounds. Every night when you go to sleep, you can’t sleep deeply, because there’s activity in the closet.

But once you call in a professional to open up the closet and contain it, you can reclaim your closet, sleep with both eyes closed and finally feel at peace in your own home.

That’s what brainspotting does.

But traditional talk therapy is like a superficial ghost containment service that cleans everything but the closet. Although your room looks and smells clean, the scary closet still goes untouched. So most things look safe, but that ghost is still running around the the deeper layer of your bedroom. Brainspotting makes for deeper and faster levels of healing from trauma.

Step 1: Identifying Emotional Triggers from Childhood

One of the first things you will notice during brainspotting is it uncovers old emotional wounds. However, never fear, because your brain will only bring up what it knows you are ready to process. Unlike traditional talk therapy in which your therapist has no choice but to keep poking around to see what will stick. Sometimes, unbeknownst to your therapist, they can inadvertently retraumatize you during talk therapy for trauma.

No bueno!

As a high performing, highly sensitive woman, one of your biggest complaints is that people don’t get you. You might have been to several therapists who either have never heard of high sensitivity (because we usually aren’t taught about it in graduate school) or they have heard about high sensitivity but have no clue what your needs are.

The great thing about brainspotting is, it completely takes all the guess work out. It is targeted and deep work.

As a high performer, you are so used to being self sufficient, and sometimes it’s really just a way for you to protect yourself after experiencing trauma. With brainspotting, you will most likely get answers to what your emotional triggers are, so that you can begin to work through them and finally find peace.

Step 2: The Beauty of Eye Positioning—How Brainspotting Targets Trauma

When your brainspotting trauma therapist guides you towards a specific eye position, that position correlates to a specific part of your brain that is linked to the specific traumatic or troubling memory you are trying to work through. So we find the location of the trauma in the brain so that you can finally get rid of it. No more ghosts in the closet.

Think of it like using a laser pointer to locate emotional knots. This makes brainspotting such a unique tool for trauma therapy. Talk therapy tends to target the outer layers of the brain, while brainspotting goes deeper. Deeper means more effective.

Step 3: Processing and Releasing Trauma Gently and Safely

When you are in a brainspotting session, the first few times, you might be in your head a lot. You might be worried about things like-

“Is the therapist staring at me?” (My answer is “No.”).
“Am I doing this correctly?” (My answer is “Yes”).
“This feels weird.” (My answer is “Of course it feels weird, because it’s therapy”).

Once you are relaxed and locked in, you will feel like you are playing a video of the event. Your body will take over and you will experience a series of emotions. Sometimes you might cry, other times you’ll be in deep thought. What I love about brainspotting is that it is a safe and non-invasive approach to trauma healing. You feel relief without doing the absolute most. You do not have to ever give me a play by play of the trauma events or experiences.

Even when you feel overwhelmed, sad or anxious in session, you will eventually have moments in which you feel calm, at peace, like you finally have closure.

Back to our ghost example.

When you are trying to get rid of ghosts in your closet, opening up the closet door will cause you to scream or experience fear, but once the ghost is contained, those scary emotions will dissipate. Your room will go from a place of horror too a calm oasis where you can rest.

Step 4: Moving Forward—Building a New Relationship with Your Past

Once the traumatic memories and events are no longer taking up so much space in your brain, you will then have the ability to work through other areas of your life. You’ll be able to work through people pleasing behaviors, you’ll notice irritability will decrease, you will no longer dissociate, and you will be able to work on asking for help, making new friends, inviting safe people into your world, amongst others. You will have the freedom to create a healthier relationship with your past experiences.

In other words, you will feel empowered and more in control of your life after you’re done with the process of therapy.

We won’t delete the events form your brain, but remembering your past traumas will no longer cause you emotional overwhelm. You will be in more control over your temper and emotions once therapy is over. Imagine being bolder, more confident, no longer on the verge of tears and just excited to do life.

Brainspotting is such a powerful tool for trauma healing because in a relatively short time, you can safely and gently heal from years of childhood trauma. All you need to do is reach out.

Ready to break free from childhood trauma? As a trauma therapist in Houston, I can help you find lasting healing with Brainspotting. Book a free 15-minute consultation today to start your path to freedom!