center;gap:14px;margin:18px 0 28px 0;padding:14px 0;border-top:1px solid #E0DAD3;border-bottom:1px solid #E0DAD3;font-family:inherit;”>



By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)

Clinically reviewed July 2026

Brainspotting: An Alternative to EMDR for Trauma

TRAUMA THERAPY • May 3, 2018

Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

The moment you realize talking isn’t working

Brainspotting becomes interesting to most driven women at the exact moment they realize they’re running out of words.

It’s 6:38 p.m. and Malena is in her car in the Whole Foods parking lot, the kind of light-summer evening where everything looks normal from the outside. She’s 44, a product lead, the friend who remembers birthdays and deadlines, the person who can hold an entire org chart in her head. Her phone is open to a notes app with a list titled: “Therapy options.” EMDR. Somatic. Brainspotting. She adds one more line, then deletes it. Her chest tightens anyway.

“I can explain it perfectly,” she tells me in our first session, twisting the silicone ring on her finger. “I can tell you exactly what happened. I can tell you what it means. I can tell you the childhood parts. I’ve read the books. I’m doing the journaling. I’m doing the breathwork. And still, when my partner shuts a cabinet too hard, my body reacts like I’m about to get punished.”

Sitting with Malena, I feel the familiar split I see in driven women every week: the part of her that’s articulate and composed, and the part of her that has been living in the basement of the proverbial house of life™ with the lights off. The words are upstairs. The threat response is downstairs. The work is building a staircase that can hold her weight.

If you’re reading this because you feel like you “know” your story and your body won’t let it be over, you’re not doing therapy wrong. You’re running into a nervous system problem with a mind solution. Brainspotting is one of the tools that can bridge that gap.

This content is psychoeducational in nature and isn’t a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

What is brainspotting?

Brainspotting is a trauma therapy that uses a specific eye position, called a brainspot, to access where the nervous system is holding unprocessed experience.

What therapists call “processing” is the nervous system finally completing something it couldn’t complete in the moment.

When I first read David Grand, PhD, the psychotherapist who developed brainspotting, the line that stayed with me was his observation that where you look affects how you feel. I liked it because it wasn’t mystical. It was practical. It matched what I already saw: eye position can shift access to sensation, and sensation is often where trauma is hiding.

Think of it like a flashlight in a dark room. Your nervous system has rooms it avoids because the contents feel too hot. Brainspotting uses attention, plus a very precise eye position, to aim the flashlight in a way your system can tolerate. Which means in practice, you don’t have to force yourself to “go there.” Your body can lead, and you can stay with what shows up in smaller, safer doses.

Think of it like a file your computer tried to upload during a power outage. The upload didn’t fail because you didn’t try hard enough. The upload failed because the system lost power. Brainspotting is one way of restoring power, then finishing the upload.

When Malena hears a cabinet shut, her body doesn’t respond to the cabinet. Malena’s body responds to an older pattern that never got resolved, and her eyes can help us find where that pattern lives.

How does brainspotting work in the brain and nervous system?

Brainspotting works by combining focused eye position with attuned therapeutic presence so the brain can metabolize trauma that was stored as body activation rather than narrative memory.

When I explain this to clients, I often use a second metaphor alongside the smoke alarm. Unprocessed trauma can act like an unfinished sentence in the body. Your mind keeps trying to complete it through analysis. Your body keeps trying to complete it through sensation. Neither is wrong. They’re just different languages.

Which means in practice, you might notice the processing as a wave: a yawn that won’t stop, a sudden tremble in the hands, a stomach gurgle, a hot flush, tears that show up with no story attached. A lot of driven women worry those signals mean they’re “getting worse.” Most of the time, those signals mean the nervous system is finally moving.

Malena’s first brainspotting session ended with her saying, quietly, “My legs feel like they’re buzzing.” She looked embarrassed, like she was reporting a technical glitch. Her shoulders were down, though. Her breath was lower. “I think I was holding myself in place,” she said. That was the beginning of the sentence finishing.

Here’s the clinical layer. Trauma isn’t only “remembered.” Trauma is encoded in the autonomic nervous system, in implicit memory, in startle reflexes, in the way your jaw clenches before you know you’re angry. Think of it like a smoke alarm that learned to go off during a real kitchen fire and never got recalibrated. The alarm doesn’t care that the danger is over. The alarm cares that your body once needed it.

Which means in practice, you can have the most coherent narrative in the world and still wake up at 3:14 a.m. with your heart racing, replaying a conversation you already resolved intellectually. You can give a flawless presentation at 10 a.m. and then dissociate in your own kitchen at 7 p.m. because your nervous system is still scanning for threat.

In brainspotting, the eye position helps locate the activation, and the therapist’s job is to track the body’s signals with you: breath, swallow, micro-tremors, temperature shifts, tears, numbness, irritation. The point isn’t to perform emotion. The point is to let the nervous system do what it already wants to do when it’s finally safe enough.

I want to name a limit clearly. Brainspotting isn’t magic, and it isn’t appropriate for every client at every moment. But in my experience, for driven women who can talk about trauma without feeling it, brainspotting can be the first time the body gets an actual vote.

Brainspotting vs EMDR: what’s different (and what’s similar)?

Brainspotting and EMDR both aim to process trauma through the nervous system, but EMDR uses bilateral stimulation and structured protocols while brainspotting uses sustained eye position and deep attunement.

EMDR can be profoundly effective, and I’m trained in it for a reason. EMDR tends to feel more structured: targets, phases, bilateral stimulation, a clear sense of “we’re working on this memory now.” Brainspotting tends to feel more like deep listening in the body: the system leads, the therapist tracks, and the processing often unfolds in a less linear way.

Here’s the nuance I keep coming back to with clients like Malena. If the distress you’re carrying is tied to discrete, image-like memories you can name and tolerate, EMDR can move those memories from present-tense to past-tense efficiently. If the distress is more diffuse, more body-based, more like “I don’t know why I panic but I do,” brainspotting can be a gentler doorway.

Many clients need both. The order matters. With Malena, we started with stabilization and resourcing for the first month, because her body was living in constant startle. Then we used EMDR for a few discrete memories she could name, and brainspotting for the wordless body activation that kept showing up between them. The work wasn’t either-or. The work was listening closely enough to choose in real time.

Who is brainspotting best for?

Brainspotting is often best for people whose trauma shows up as body symptoms, shutdown, or “I go blank” moments, especially when talk therapy has created insight without relief.

Brainspotting can be a fit if you recognize yourself in any of these. If you’re nodding while you read, take a breath. You’re not alone, and you’re not the only competent woman whose body is quietly carrying too much:

• You can explain your story clearly, and your body still reacts as if it isn’t over.
• You “freeze” in conflict and then replay the whole conversation for days.
• You don’t feel much in session, then you fall apart on the drive home.
• Your symptoms are mostly physical: insomnia, jaw tension, GI distress, migraines, a tight chest.
• You feel like you’ve to stay composed, even when you’re suffering.

In my work with driven women, brainspotting is also often a good fit for the over-functioner. The over-functioner is skilled at managing emotion. Brainspotting doesn’t reward management. Brainspotting rewards contact.

And I want to say this without judgment: contact can feel terrifying if your system learned early that feeling would cost you something. Malena said it best in one session: “If I feel it, I’m afraid I’ll never stop.” That fear is common. The work is proving, slowly, that the feeling is a wave, not a permanent state.

What does a brainspotting session actually look like?

A brainspotting session usually involves identifying a felt sense in the body, finding the eye position that activates it, then staying with the experience while the therapist tracks and regulates with you.

Most sessions start with a check-in like any other therapy. Then we get specific. We name a target: a memory, a situation, a sensation, a relationship dynamic, or even a single sentence that keeps echoing in your head.

Then we locate it in your body. Where do you feel it right now? Chest. Throat. Belly. Jaw. Hands. The point isn’t to do it “right.” The point is to notice.

We then use a pointer, a hand, or a visual marker to find the eye position that lights up the activation. When we find it, most people can tell. Your breathing changes. Your eyes water. Your stomach drops. Your legs want to move. Sometimes you feel nothing and then, ten minutes later, you realize your shoulders have lowered for the first time all day.

Here’s a real example. Malena once found her brainspot and immediately said, almost annoyed, “Oh. That’s the feeling.” Her eyes filled, and she tried to smile it away. Then her throat tightened. “I hate that this is so small,” she said. “It was just a look. My mom’s look. But it still hits like a punch.”

That’s the work. Tiny inputs. Huge internal responses. We stay with what shows up until the system settles, not because you forced it to settle, but because it finally could.

A second composite story might help. Sofia is 39, a physician, and she came in telling me, “I’m fine. I’m just tired.” The way she said fine told me she wasn’t fine. In brainspotting, her eyes landed on one spot and her whole body went still. “I don’t want to be dramatic,” she whispered, looking at the carpet. “But I feel like I’m going to disappear.”

Here’s the clinical translation. Sofia’s system was in dorsal vagal shutdown, a freeze response that can look like calm from the outside and feel like numbness from the inside. Think of it like an iPhone going into low-power mode. The phone still works. The phone just won’t run the heavy apps.

Which means in practice, Sofia could do rounds and charting, but she couldn’t answer a friend’s text without feeling irritated, and she couldn’t feel pleasure on her one free Sunday. We didn’t talk her into feeling. We tracked the body and moved slowly enough that her system didn’t have to shut down to survive the session.

If you’re doing this kind of work and you want a structured pathway alongside it, Fixing the Foundations™ is where I teach the relational-trauma framework that supports the therapy room.

Both/And: your competence was brilliant AND it can block deeper healing

Your competence was brilliant AND the same competence can keep you managing your trauma instead of actually metabolizing it.

Most of the driven women who find brainspotting are, frankly, excellent at staying functional. They can make the dinner. They can lead the meeting. They can text the friend back. They can keep the house running. They can even go to therapy and say the right things.

That competence isn’t a character flaw. It’s usually a survival strategy that formed early, in the proverbial foundation of your life, where being “easy” or “capable” or “the one who doesn’t need much” was the safest role available.

AND. Competence is also the thing that can quietly block trauma work. Brainspotting asks you to stay with sensation without immediately fixing it. Brainspotting asks you to notice the urge to explain, to minimize, to make a joke, to move on, and to stay anyway.

When Malena started this work, she kept apologizing for crying. “I’m sorry,” she’d say, wiping her face quickly, already trying to regain control. Around session nine she stopped apologizing. She didn’t become a different person. She simply stopped treating feeling as an interruption. That shift matters.

Of course you want to do this well. Of course you want a plan. The part of you that learned to stay composed has been protecting you for decades. We don’t fire that part. We thank it, and we ask it to make room.

The Systemic Lens: why driven women learn to live above the neck

The pressure to stay composed isn’t personal. The pressure to stay composed is patterned, and the pattern has a structural origin.

Driven women are coming of age inside systems that reward intellect, productivity, and emotional containment: late-stage capitalism, professionalized femininity, and an attention economy that turns “self-improvement” into a second job. The mechanism is simple. Those systems treat the nervous system as a resource to optimize, not a body to inhabit.

When a woman like Malena grew up watching her mother be judged for being “too much” and later built a career where being calm is the currency, her body learns a rule: feel later. Feel privately. Feel in the car. Feel when nobody needs you.

You’re not broken for having learned that rule. You’re not weak for wanting to unlearn it. This is what it means to be a competent woman in a world that still punishes women for having needs.

And here’s the sensation test. This is how the system lives in a Tuesday afternoon. It’s your jaw clenching while you’re typing a kind email. It’s the second glass of wine that isn’t about the taste. It’s the way your chest tightens when your boss writes, “Can we talk?” and your body decides you did something wrong before you even open the message.

How to choose the right therapist (and what to ask)

The right brainspotting therapist is someone you feel safe with, who is properly trained and supervised, and who can help you stay inside your window of tolerance without pushing you into overwhelm. Malena’s progress changed fastest once she trusted the room.

If you’re also curious about other nervous-system-based approaches, you might like my guide to somatic experiencing vs EMDR. A lot of driven women read that comparison first, then land here once brainspotting enters the conversation.

If you’re interviewing a brainspotting therapist, here are questions I actually like:

• What level of brainspotting training have you completed, and who trained you?
• How do you decide when brainspotting is appropriate versus another approach?
• How do you handle dissociation or shutdown in session?
• What do you do if a session opens something big and the client has to return to work after?
• How do you integrate attachment and relational trauma into the work?

And here’s the quiet question underneath all the practical ones: Do you feel respected? Do you feel rushed? Do you feel like the therapist is trying to perform expertise, or do you feel like she’s actually tracking you?

In my clinical training, one of the findings I keep returning to is that the therapeutic relationship predicts outcomes more than the specific modality does. Bruce Wampold, PhD, psychologist and meta-researcher in psychotherapy outcomes, has documented this across decades of research. If you want the paper I cite most often, it’s his 2015 review on common factors in psychotherapy (PMID: 26806099).

That’s the Hermione truth. The modality matters. The person in the room matters more.

How do you know it’s working?

Brainspotting is working when your triggers become less intense, your body recovers faster, and you can stay present in moments that used to pull you into panic, shutdown, or compulsive overthinking.

I’ll add one sign that matters in my office. Your relationship to your own reactions changes. You stop treating activation as proof that you’re failing. You start treating activation as a signal you can respond to.

Some signs clients notice, often in small, unglamorous ways:

• You sleep and don’t wake up already braced.
• You’ve a hard conversation and don’t replay it for three days.
• You notice your shoulders drop without forcing them.
• You feel anger or sadness without immediately turning it into productivity.
• You can tolerate closeness without your body deciding it’s dangerous.

Malena told me around month four, “My body doesn’t sprint ahead of me as much.” She paused, like she couldn’t quite believe her own sentence. “I still get activated,” she said. “But I come back faster. And I don’t hate myself for it as much.” That’s an ambiguous but real kind of progress. It’s the kind that lasts.

One more thing I’ll say, especially to the woman reading this at 2 a.m. with six tabs open. You don’t have to earn the right to get help by having the “worst” trauma story. You don’t have to be falling apart publicly. The fact that you’re functioning isn’t evidence that you’re fine. It might simply be evidence that you’re practiced.

Malena is still in the work, as of this writing. She’s not “done.” But she’s less afraid of her own body than she was in the Whole Foods parking lot. That matters.

Warmly, Annie

What if you dissociate, go blank, or “float” away in session?

Dissociation in therapy usually means your nervous system is protecting you, and a skilled brainspotting therapist will slow down, orient you to the present, and help you stay inside your window of tolerance.

Here’s the clinical language. Dissociation is a protective response that can include numbness, spacing out, losing time, or feeling like you’re watching yourself from a distance. Dissociation isn’t the absence of trauma. Dissociation is one of trauma’s most intelligent adaptations.

Think of it like an emergency circuit breaker. When the system senses “too much,” the breaker flips. The lights go out. Nothing is wrong with you for having a breaker. Your system grew one because it worked.

Which means in practice, you might be sitting in therapy and suddenly you can’t find your words, your vision goes a little fuzzy, or you feel oddly calm in a way that doesn’t match the topic. A lot of my clients feel ashamed when that happens. The shame is unnecessary. The moment is information.

When Malena dissociated early in the work, it looked like competence. She’d smile, answer my questions, and then later she’d say, “I don’t remember what we just talked about.” We treated the blankness as a signal, not a failure. We oriented her to the room, we tracked her breath, we moved in smaller doses, and we let her system learn that staying present didn’t mean getting flooded.

What can you do between sessions to support the work?

Between sessions, the most helpful support is gentle nervous-system care: sleep, hydration, less stimulation, and short grounding practices that tell the body it’s safe now.

Driven women often want a high-performance homework assignment. I get it. The impulse makes sense. AND, most trauma therapy works better when between-session practices are small enough that you’ll actually do them on a Tuesday.

Here are a few options I regularly suggest, with clients’ permission and within the limits of what a blog post can offer:

• Orienting: Turn your head slowly and name five neutral objects in the room, out loud. Your brain needs evidence.
• Feet on the floor: Press your feet into the ground for ten seconds, then release. Do it three times.
• One hand on your sternum: Notice the temperature of your hand. Notice the rise and fall of your breath. Let the breath be messy.
• Fewer inputs: After a session, reduce doom-scrolling and heavy conversations for a few hours. Your system is still processing.
• Write one sentence: Not a journal entry. One sentence: “My body felt ____ when we went there.” That’s it.

Malena started keeping a tiny note on her phone after sessions: one body sensation, one emotion, one need. The note was never elegant. It was evidence. And over time, the evidence added up: “tight chest” shifted to “warmth in my arms.” “numb” shifted to “sad but here.” That’s how change often looks.

What if you feel worse after a session?

Feeling worse after a session can be a normal part of trauma processing, but it should still be trackable, time-limited, and held inside a plan that keeps you safe.

Here’s the honest version. When a nervous system has been bracing for years, any shift can feel intense at first. A session can surface grief, anger, fear, or body sensations you’ve been avoiding. That doesn’t automatically mean the therapy is harmful. It might mean the system is thawing.

Think of it like physical therapy. When a muscle hasn’t moved in a long time, gentle movement can ache. The ache isn’t the goal, and you don’t ignore pain signals. You track them. You adjust. You move in the dose that the body can metabolize.

Which means in practice, if you’re leaving sessions and you can’t function for days, you’re having panic attacks you didn’t have before, or you’re dissociating more, that’s not a “push through” moment. That’s a collaborative adjustment moment. A skilled therapist will help you widen your window of tolerance, not blow it open.

Malena had a session early on where she went home and cried for two hours. She texted me later, embarrassed: “I feel dramatic.” She wasn’t dramatic. She was grieving. The difference was that after the crying, she slept. For her, sleep was the marker that the processing was settling, not escalating.

If you’re healing relational trauma and you want a structured pathway alongside your therapy work, Fixing the Foundations™ walks you through the exact framework I use with clients like Malena.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. She is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years, with W.W. Norton.

Work With Annie

AI use disclosure: AI tools may assist with drafting and structural editing. Every published post is reviewed, edited, and approved by Annie Wright, LMFT.

Medical Disclaimer