A colleague of mine from Atlanta wrote about offering Brainspotting treatment to a client with a traumatic background and ADHD who was coping by analyzing and intellectualizing.
“Sara came to me for Brainspotting after years of therapy. She states: ‘I am a mess. I keep having a melt down. My family doesn’t know what to do with me anymore. I am thinking I need to go away but I can’t take the time to do so. I’ve been in therapy for years. I am on too much medication and I am not even sure it is working anymore. Can you help me?'”
“She was flooded with anxiety filled with many negative beliefs and generally overwhelmed. Sara is a mother of two active in her church community and has been diagnosed with ADD. The more I have gotten to know her the more she and I realize how capable she is. She has had a very negative image of herself and has not had much support to view her self any other way. Sara is the youngest of four in her birth family and has been very attached to her analytical story of what happened to her and why she is the way she is. She wants a way out and was told Brainspotting can help her. She had some experience with EMDR that was helpful but still reported overwhelmed and anxious.”
“Brainspotting is a a powerful new treatment modality to help in trauma. We are wired for survival and when we are in trauma our body and mind go into survival mode. Sara was in a strong state of survival that she was in a sense ungrounded. She could not connect to the here and now, she was being triggered by her past.”
“Dr. Robert Scaer speaks of the importance of attunement in his book ‘8 Keys to Brain Body Balance’ stating, ‘The attunement activates the mirror neurons between the cingulate and the OFC (Orbital Frontal Cortex), creates an empathic environment and inhibits the amygdala. This sacred face-to-face empathic attunement, is a critical environment for trauma therapy to work, just as it is in maternal-infant bonding. .. and this state of presence is essential for healing.'”
“Brainspotting is a grounding process, which I believe is critical to trauma work. In trauma our survival mechanism ‘kicks in’ and we respond with the flight-fight-freeze. Excess adrenaline and cortisol is released and our ability to process implicit memory (anything the sensory systems of our body detected during the event) into explicit memory (declarative memory – autobiographical story) is thwarted.”
“After the trauma, if the mind and body’s protective response doesn’t normalize and the restorative process remains thwarted, the effects of trauma become fixated/traumatized. ‘Even though the event is over and we survived it, the entire external and internal world remains a reservoir of somatic cues for what is perceived as an imminent traumatic event,’ Scaer, Pg 101. The key to healing trauma is in our physiology, and developing some grounding for the person to regain homeostasis.”
https://rockymountainbrainspottinginstitute.com/brainspotting-as-a-trauma-treatment
Elaine is a Certified Brainspotting Therapist and has additional training in advanced Brainspotting approaches. She also had the honor of being a presenter at the 2021 International Brainspotting Conference.