How a Therapist’s Intuition Led to a Revolutionary Trauma Treatment
The Story of Brainspotting: David Grand’s Unexpected Discovery
Amanda Stern
August 28, 2024
How a Therapist’s Intuition Led to a Revolutionary Trauma Treatment
Unprocessed memories are the source of our pain. Processed memories are the basis for our mental health.
Today’s piece explores “Brainspotting (BSP),” a modern evolution of Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR).
To understand BSP, here’s a brief recap of EMDR from my post, When the Past Is Present—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).
If you prefer skipping the EMDR background, click here and jump to Brainspotting.
EMDR BACKGROUND
In 1979, Francine Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at NYU, was studying how external events shaped characters in 19th-century literature.
After a cancer diagnosis, her focus shifted to how external stressors affect real people, leading her to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology.
In 1987, during a walk to clear her mind of upsetting thoughts, she noticed her painful memories losing their grip as her eyes darted back and forth watching the birds and squirrels.
Curious, she experimented with replicating the effect using saccadic eye movements, discovering a technique that diminished the emotional intensity of disturbing memories.
Testing it further with friends, she saw similar results, laying the groundwork for a revolutionary trauma treatment.
In the early 1990s, Shapiro tested her method, now called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), on veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), witnessing decades-old traumas dissolve.
She linked the success to the brain's natural Information Processing System, which uses mechanisms like REM sleep to integrate daily experiences into long-term memory.
EMDR manually facilitates this process for unprocessed memories stuck in isolation—those that keep past traumas alive, triggering disproportionate reactions in the present.
By helping the brain digest these memories, EMDR transforms them into neutral, integrated experiences.
Unprocessed memories, left unresolved, trap us in cycles of unnecessary pain and overreaction. EMDR targets these memories, breaking their emotional hold and restoring balance.
It enables the brain to connect past experiences to the library of stored memories, fostering growth and healing rather than perpetual suffering.
Through this method, Shapiro’s accidental discovery has become a cornerstone of modern trauma therapy.
“There are generally about 10 to 20 unprocessed memories that are responsible for most of the pain and suffering in most of our lives.”
In 1993, David Grand was a young psychologist in training, learning EMDR from Francine Shapiro.
He found the method exciting and effective. When he learned Somatic Experiencing Therapy in 1999, he decided to integrate psychoanalysis, somatic experiencing, and EMDR, using eye movements of varying speeds and directions, healing sounds, and different tactile innovations. He called this Natural Flow EMDR.
But the events of 9/11 took Dr. Grand’s work in a new direction, leading to his eventual discovery of what he would call Brainspotting (BSP). Working with first responders, family members, and survivors forced him to relive the experience over and over again, allowing him to stumble upon a much more targeted approach to trauma.
Because Dr. Grand was constantly tuned in to the heightened state of his clients, he consciously and unconsciously absorbed their cues, anticipating what was coming before it occurred.
This attunement created the opening he needed to discover the power of Brainspotting.
In the two years following 9/11, Dr. Grand felt himself burn out, and focused on recalibrating and processing everything. During this time he began working with a young figure skater who had a history of family trauma. She had trouble landing a triple axel—without that jump, she wouldn’t be able to compete.
As Dr. Grand conducted Natural Flow EMDR on this young skater, moving his fingers left to right across the invisible horizon line, he asked her to visualize doing the triple axel in slow motion and to freeze the moment where she was going off balance.
As she followed Dr. Grand’s bilateral finger movements, he noticed that when his fingers were at the midline of her nose and eyes, her eyes wobbled and locked in place.
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