Everything You Need to Know About Brainspotting

If you’ve never heard of brainspotting, you’re not alone. It’s not as widely talked about as CBT or EMDR, but for a lot of people, it’s become one of the most powerful tools in their healing toolkit. It’s worth understanding what it actually is, how it works, and who it tends to help most. This is everything you need to know about Brainspotting.

What is Brainspotting?

Brainspotting is a brain-based therapy that was developed in 2003 by psychotherapist David Grand. It’s built on the idea that where you look affects how you feel. More specifically, that certain eye positions correlate with specific areas of activation in the brain, and that by finding and holding those positions, the brain can access and process trauma and emotional pain that’s stored below the level of conscious thought.

“Where you look affects how you feel” is the phrase that Grand coined to describe this technique. It sounds almost too simple, but the neurological reasoning behind it is solid, and the results speak for themselves for a lot of clients.

Where It Came From

Grand discovered brainspotting by accident while doing EMDR with a figure skater who was struggling with performance anxiety. He noticed that when her eyes landed on a particular spot, something shifted. Her processing deepened in a way that standard EMDR wasn’t producing. He started paying closer attention to eye positions across his clients and eventually developed a whole framework around what he was observing. Brainspotting has grown significantly since then and is now practiced by thousands of therapists around the world.

How a Session Actually Works

A brainspotting session doesn’t look like traditional talk therapy. You might start by tuning into something that’s been bothering you, a memory, a feeling, a physical sensation, and noticing where you feel it in your body. Your therapist will then use a pointer to slowly move through your visual field while you track your internal experience. When your eyes land on a spot that activates something, that’s your brainspot.

From there, the therapist holds that position while you process, which often happens internally and doesn’t require much talking at all. Bilateral sound, usually delivered through headphones, is often used alongside the eye positioning to support deeper processing. Sessions can feel quiet and internal, and a lot of people describe the experience as unlike anything else they’ve tried.

What It Helps With

Brainspotting was originally developed for trauma, and that’s still where a lot of the evidence base sits. It’s been used effectively with PTSD, childhood trauma, sexual abuse, and single-incident traumas like accidents or medical events. But its applications have expanded over the years. It’s widely used for anxiety, depression, grief, chronic pain, and even performance issues in athletes, musicians, and public speakers.

Because it works at a subcortical level, it can reach material that talk therapy sometimes can’t, especially when someone knows intellectually what happened but still feels stuck in their body or their nervous system.

How It’s Different from EMDR

People often ask how brainspotting compares to EMDR since both involve eye positioning and trauma processing. The biggest difference is that EMDR uses bilateral stimulation through back-and-forth eye movements, while brainspotting finds a fixed point and stays there.

Brainspotting also tends to be less structured and more client-led. There’s less of a protocol to follow and more space for the brain to go where it needs to go. Some people find brainspotting feels more gentle or more tolerable than EMDR, though both are effective, and the right fit depends on the person.

Is It Right for You?

Brainspotting therapy isn’t the right fit for everyone, but it’s worth considering if you’ve felt stuck in more traditional talk therapy, if you have trauma that lives more in your body than your thoughts, or if you’re someone who finds it hard to access or articulate what you’re feeling verbally. It also works well for people who are already doing other therapeutic work and want to go deeper.

Curious about whether brainspotting might be the missing piece in your healing? Working with a trained brainspotting therapist is a great place to start.