There are dozens of therapeutic approaches to support you in your recovery from an eating disorder, and it’s worthwhile to investigate and explore different modalities to find the best fit for your recovery. Kindful Body therapists Jasmine Dunckel, Ashley Ellis and Juliana Glaser, practice brainspotting therapy online with their clients. They all love using brainspotting for eating disorder therapy and overcoming body image issues and healing trauma and they encourage everyone to try a session.
What is brainspotting?
Brainspotting (BSP) is the idea that “where you look affects how you feel.” Our visual field is connected to the parts of our brain that process memories and emotions. Brainspotting is a method of accessing unprocessed trauma. It is a way of bypassing the frontal lobe, where all of the thinking, planning, judging, and criticizing takes place, and getting straight to the emotions.
What happens in a brainspotting session?
In dance, “spotting” is the technique of choosing one fixed point of focus while turning to maintain control and prevent dizziness. Brainspotting is similar. When a client is sharing a story in therapy, a clinician can take notice of where they are looking to find brainspotting. That point is the anchor to whatever it is the client wants to process. Brainspotting is a lot like mindfulness in that it requires a lot of awareness.
In a brainspotting session, the client is in control. They can be completely silent, or talk throughout. The therapist will not be driving the conversation. Clients share what they want to work on and how it is affecting them. During the brainspotting process, clients are asked to notice sensations, emotions and memories as they arise in the body while they focus in on their targeted concern. In brainspotting therapy, clients are not obligated to share what they are processing.
A brainspotting session ends whenever the therapy session is over, or when the client decides they would like to stop brainspotting.
Does Brainspotting really work?
Anyone who is open to trying brainspotting will benefit from it.
While Brainspotting is often applied as a trauma therapy, it also has been used for anxiety, perfectionism, and eating disorders.
Brainspotting therapy is especially effective for clients struggling with perfectionism
because it is largely unstructured. There are no rules and no compliance required beyond agreeing to brainspot.
For clients with eating disorders who may have hypervigilance and constant worry about food and how it is affecting their bodies, brainspotting therapy can help pinpoint those anxious feelings and obsessive thinking.
A brainspotting therapy intervention is successful if the client’s feelings have shifted in any way from when they walked in to the end of the session.
Brainspotting can be paired with other therapy modalities such as CBT and IFS. After a brainspotting session, a therapist might ask, “Is there anything that happened in your brainspot that you might apply today?” so that the client can integrate that processing into their talk therapy.
If you are interested in trying brainspotting therapy in your healing journey in California, contact us for a 15-minute consultation.
