When Words Are Not Enough: Brainspotting

Your Body’s Language

Have you ever had a car accident and found that every time you drive past the place where it happened you begin to feel anxious? Maybe you’ve unexpectedly run into a best friend from years ago and suddenly experienced a giddy joy in your chest? Have deadlines or negative interactions with people caused tension in your body, stomach aches, and otherwise gotten in the way of you being able to do your best work? This is your body communicating; these are called somatic responses.

Somatic responses are involuntary, that is, you can’t control when or why they happen. Logic doesn’t fix them and neither does trying to talk yourself out of them. That’s why you can’t convince your kiddo to not be scared of storms, why you tense when you hear raised voices, and why you can’t encourage someone out of a panic attack. Talking often provides temporary relief from hard situations, but when the problem is deeper, you can talk and talk and find yourself right back where you started — stuck. Words can only go so far.

Talk Therapy vs. Brainspotting

Talk therapy is what we call a “top-down” approach. It often attempts to use words and logic, our “thinking brain,” to manage big things that are happening below the surface. Brainspotting, on the other hand, is a “bottom-up” approach that engages deeper parts of the brain, the places responsible for your survival and implicit memory, and the body, to untangle the things that are keeping you stuck.

Have you ever been at a party or the park and suddenly found yourself staring off for a second while 100 different thoughts run through your mind? Maybe a friend interrupted and asked, “Hey, what are you thinking about?” Suddenly you find yourself needing 20 minutes to explain everything you thought about in those 30 seconds. This is Brainspotting in its most natural form. Clinicians at Texarkana Counseling Collective use Brainspotting to therapeutically focus something we do naturally to help your brain and body process the things that are tangled up and holding you back.

Going Deeper

Brainspotting helps move past the surface, past language, past all the reasons you’ve told yourself that this thing, whatever it is, shouldn’t bother you anymore. Brainspotting gets down into the implicit, the parts that react without your say so and can’t be convinced by your logic. Your brain wants to fix the things that haven’t had a chance to heal. Your nervous system wants to move past the dysregulation your body has been experiencing.

There are some things that talking can’t fix. And even still

Hope is here.
Healing is possible.