Brainspotting is a mind-body therapy that uses your visual field to help access and process difficult emotions and experiences. It can offer another way to work with trauma when words alone don’t feel like enough.
Brainspotting is based on the idea that where you look can affect how you feel. During a session, your therapist helps you identify specific points in your visual field—known as brainspots—that may be connected to emotional or physical responses.
Rather than relying entirely on talking through an experience, Brainspotting allows you to notice what emerges internally while your therapist supports the process. This approach can help you explore emotions, memories and body-based responses that may be difficult to access through words alone.
Brainspotting may be worth exploring if you’re experiencing:
Sometimes you understand why you feel a certain way but still find yourself reacting automatically. Brainspotting can help you explore what may be happening beneath conscious thought and create space for deeper emotional processing.
Brainspotting provides a focused way to explore difficult experiences while paying attention to the connection between your emotions, brain and body.
What Brainspotting May Help With:
Brainspotting can be particularly useful when emotional reactions feel automatic or difficult to explain. Futsi’s current approach connects this work with survival responses such as fight, flight and freeze and recognizes that past experiences can continue influencing present-day emotional and behavioral responses.
Brainspotting is a therapeutic approach developed by psychologist David Grand that uses points within your visual field to help access emotional and body-based responses. It is often used as a way to process trauma and other experiences that may be difficult to address through conversation alone.
Your therapist helps you identify a point in your visual field that appears connected to what you’re experiencing emotionally or physically. You then maintain attention around that point while noticing thoughts, feelings, memories and body sensations that arise, with your therapist supporting you throughout the process.
Both Brainspotting and EMDR can be used to process trauma and distressing experiences, but they use different methods. EMDR typically follows a structured protocol involving bilateral stimulation, while Brainspotting uses specific locations within the visual field and sustained attention to facilitate processing. A therapist trained in both approaches can help determine which may be more appropriate for you.
Brainspotting is often used when working with trauma and PTSD, anxiety, panic, grief, stress and emotional triggers. Therapists may also use it to address self-esteem concerns, relationship difficulties, performance anxiety and creative blocks. Futsi currently uses Brainspotting across many of these concerns.
