Brainspotting therapy integrates everything we know today about the brain and the body to help individuals deal with trauma and addictions. Brainspotting is a client-led therapy that uses your eye position to locate, down-regulate, and process traumatic emotions, while creating safety in a highly attuned relationship with your therapist. Brainspotting can be used to treat behavioral or substance addictions.
How Do Addictions Start?
Addictive behaviors may result from some combination of early emotional dysregulation, attachment breakdowns, genetic predisposition, intergenerational traumas, or adverse childhood experiences. Our resourceful brains discover and attach to behaviors or substances that make unbearable thoughts or feelings disappear, albeit temporarily. Once we learn ways to get relief, we repeat the cycle over and over again, to our own detriment.
Who Developed Brainspotting for Addiction Treatment?
Dr. Roby Abeles from Australia, a 30+ year trauma and addiction therapist, applied Brainspotting therapy to addiction treatment and developed a “Crocodile Set Up”™ that helps people build new neuro-pathways to connect urges with consequences and support their addiction recovery.
Jeff Ryan in the US spent many years working with substance abuse and developed his own way of integrating Brainspotting therapy into addiction treatment. Jeff’s model integrates advanced Brainspotting skills and strategies, and leans on the neurophysiological perspective, recognizing separate processes involved in cravings, withdrawal, and euphoric recall.
How Does Brainspotting for Addiction Work?
Brainspotting therapy for addiction is a multi-stage treatment model that acknowledges traumatic and dissociative experiences as important components. Treatment stages include:
- Stabilization skills development,
- Emotional self-regulation practice,
- Addiction recovery treatment,
- Unresolved pain and trauma processing, and
- Post-traumatic growth.
Part of the treatment involves connecting the sensations in our bodies linked to cravings with feelings of negative consequences, and later expanding our exploration of the future without the addiction.
Brainspotting for Addiction with Elaine Korngold
I am a Certified Brainspotting therapist and an Approved Brainspotting consultant. I trained in Brainspotting for Addiction with Dr. Roby Abeles and in Brainspotting for Substance Abuse with Jeff Ryan, and would be happy to talk to you about the treatment process. There is no need to continue to struggle. Please text or email me for a free 20-minute phone consultation.