Brainspotting Kindle Notes

by David Grand PhD

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7 Highlights | 4 Notes

Highlight (Orange) and Note | Page 11

From there, the rapid left-right eye movements begin. The therapist pauses occasionally to see what’s going on inside the client. The internal experience of the client is called processing, and it is actually a focused, powerful form of mindfulness. The client is guided to uncritically observe, step-by-step, what they experience, including memories, thoughts, emotions, or sensations in their body. When the therapist ultimately brings the client back

to the original image, to see how it and its emotional charge have changed, hopefully the intensity of the memory has been reduced.

Eye movement and a powerful form of mindfulness

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After about a minute, just as my fingers crossed the midline of her nose, her eyes wobbled dramatically and then locked in place. My hand locked along with it. It felt like someone had grabbed my wrist and held it in place! For the next ten minutes, Karen’s eyes remained locked on my unmoving fingers. She watched and reported on a flood of images and body sensations that seemed to come out of nowhere. She watched, wide-eyed, as traumas that had not emerged during her year of intensive therapy now came up and whizzed by.

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With each client that I saw that day, I observed closely as I slowly tracked their eyes across their visual field. Every time I spied an eye anomaly, I halted my hand movement, so they would gaze at my unmoving hand. And then I watched and waited. Virtually every time, the process shifted. With some clients, it deepened, and with others, it accelerated. Some clients didn’t seem to notice my change of technique and flowed along with it.

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The technique was simple, but the response was complex. I also discovered that eye wobbles and eye freezes were not the only reflexes that revealed the presence of traumas held deep in the brain; I observed many other reactions when I stopped my hand movement, such as multiple or hard blinks and eye widening or narrowing.

Any reflex of the face (or ultimately the body) seemed to manifest when the eyes arrived at a position of relevance. I experimented with stopping my hand when I observed a cough, a deep inhale or exhale, a hard swallow, lip licking, a head tilt, a nostril flare, or a change in facial expression.

Any observable reaction may indicate finding any important feeling or thought

Highlight (Orange) and Note | Page 15

Whatever the client was experiencing changed. Images and memories came more quickly. Emotions and body experience went deeper and moved on more rapidly and easily. Clients also got to observe the process while they were in it. The process was fascinating and still is.

Finding the brain spots mattered

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It was like a dance of connection and attunement between client and therapist, much more than a mechanical process. Clients would often ask how I knew to stop my hand where I did. When I asked if they had any idea why I’d stopped, they seemed to have no clue—even when it was their own nodding head that had stopped me!

Their reaction and close attention from the therapist

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activation because it is more generic and all-encompassing. It is not unusual, in therapy, to use terms that do not capture the essence of an internal experience. I selected the term activation