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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, jump to Brainspotting here.

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 unnecessary pain and overreaction cycles. 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.

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 integrated 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 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 burned out and focused on recalibrating and processing everything. During this time, he began working with a young figure skater with a family trauma history. She had trouble landing a triple axel—without that jump, she couldn’t 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 freeze the moment she went off balance.

As she followed Dr. Grand’s bilateral finger movements, he noticed that her eyes wobbled and locked in place when his fingers were at the midline of her nose and eyes.

She stayed in that position for ten minutes, and Dr. Grand held his fingers in place.

In those ten minutes, his young patient reported a flood of images of past childhood traumas, illnesses, deep wells of frozen grief, and family fights. As she reported what she was seeing, she was processing traumas that Dr. Grand thought were resolved, but that seemed to have resurfaced and then been processed on a deeper level.

They were both astonished by what had happened when she was done, but neither mentioned it. The next day, his client called from the rink excited to inform Dr. Grand that she’d landed the triple axle without problems. And she’d done it again and again and again.

He began to observe his clients on a deeper level, watching to see when or if their reflexes startled, their eyes widened, they gasped, or shifted when his fingers hit a certain point. And he discovered that with every single client, a specific spot correlated to memories and traumas that deepened the work. The clients reported that the session felt different and more powerful.

Dr. Grand called the method Brainspotting (BSP). (It's not my favorite name, but no one has consulted me.)

The method relied on careful attunement to the client’s energy and body, something he’d become an expert at working with 9/11 survivors. When he saw the specific signal, he held his fingers in place, and the deep processing would begin. The client had no idea how he knew where or when to stop. He called this Outside Window Brainspotting.

Later, as clients became used to the method, and he moved his pointer (his fingers couldn’t take it after a while) horizontally across the X axis and then vertically along the Y access, his clients began to direct him to the spot, telling him he missed it, or it was off to the left, or up higher. He called this client-oriented BSP Inside Window Brainspotting (again, no one consulted me).

Brainspotting relies on reflexes, which makes sense since it targets trauma, and the visual images of trauma are stored in the amygdala, which is located in our limbic system and is known as our fear center.

When trauma is triggered, the amygdala is activated.

Brainspotting relies upon primal reflexes, which are the responses in our startle circuit—the amygdala. These responses reveal themselves in our bodies as macro or micro tells.

Dr. Grand discovered that holding a client’s gaze on a specific reflexively activated spot deepens trauma processing.

The exact process occurs in EMDR in BSP.

The invisible work that’s occurring is the integration of the right brain with the left brain. When stuck in our left brain, we are caught up in overly analytical thinking and cut off from our emotions. When stuck in our right brain, we are flooded by emotion and often can’t think straight. What BSP manages to do—more quickly than EMDR—is to integrate the right and left brains so that they are in balance and we can perform more effectively.

Brainspotting uses our field of vision to find where we are holding these traumas in our brains. Just as the eyes naturally scan the outside environment for information, they can also scan our inside environments—our brains—for information. BSP uses the visual field to turn the “scanner” back on itself and guide the brain to find lost internal information.

Hence Brainspotting’s motto: “Where you look affects how you feel.”

Dr. Grand discovered that finding the right spot in which traumas flare unlocks what a year of effective Natural Flow EMDR cannot. By keeping the gaze focused on a specific external spot, we entice the brain to focus on the internal place the trauma is stored, which promotes deeper processing and the release and resolution of trauma.

While this is a young technique, there are now 100 BSP trainers covering every continent around the world and over 30,000 therapists trained.

Read more about Brainspotting in Dr. David Grand’s 2013 book, Brainspotting: The Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change.

I’m so curious to know whether you’d heard of Brainspotting before this. Let me know in the comments!

Until next week, I remain…