Brainspotting is a method of treatment that can help you access, process, and overcome trauma and pain. With this short-term therapeutic approach, you can develop the ability to open and close your feelings in a controlled manner to assist you through recovery.
What Is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a therapeutic technique that can activate a psychological response to a situation based on the focus point of a patient’s visual field. The goal point of activation is the spot where the patient’s visual field aligns the most with their response to a specific stressor. By working to establish new responses when that memory is triggered, the response that influenced their addiction can be diminished. This is how brainspotting can help patients heal from trauma.
Who Might Benefit From Brainspotting?
While this technique is most commonly used to help individuals overcome trauma, it can be beneficial to use for patients in addiction recovery if the case fits. If a patient feels the desire to use a substance when a certain memory arises or they are reminded of past traumas, brainspotting can help them overcome the response and use it to their advantage in recovery.
Brainspotting can be extremely beneficial for patients working to overcome an addiction, especially if they are dealing with trauma as well. For individuals with co-occurring disorders, especially those who experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this form of psychotherapy can be greatly beneficial.
How Does Brainspotting Work?
Brainspotting works by helping patients access, process, and overcome automatic responses to certain memories. Often those memories will be of trauma, but they might be positive memories connected to addiction.
Accessing Memories
When beginning the treatment process, patients may have a build-up of past traumas that reinforce their addictive tendencies. Accessing or identifying the prior experiences that may have brought about these feelings of trauma can help you to understand the effect it has on your recovery and addiction, as well as help you to overcome the trauma.
Brainspotting can be an effective way to access the situations that reinforce these trauma responses. When overcoming an addiction, people may discover their substance use is often correlated with a form of trauma response. The use of brainspotting can associate this response with an aspect of a patient’s visual field. As the brainspotting continues, this association can slowly desensitize the patient and lessen the severity of the response.
Processing Memories
As you work to access the memories and triggers that influence the decision to engage in substance use, take the necessary precautions to process these factors. It can be overwhelming to identify a core memory that leads to an undesirable response. However, encouraging your patient to process these emotions in healthy ways can reinforce their positive coping skills and overcome their negative automatic responses.
Discussions and therapy sessions are often utilized during this time. As brainspotting takes multiple sessions to accomplish the end goal, patients may find it stressful to deal with these emotional responses in the meantime. Encouraging your patients to talk about their concerns and process their emotions with you can help ease this obstacle.
Overcoming Memories
The ultimate goal of brainspotting is to help a patient overcome trauma. After observing the triggering factors and processing the correlated emotions, your patient can begin to adjust their mindset and natural responses related to their memories. By releasing the negative reaction, they can redirect their thoughts and establish a healthy response for the future.
Benefits of Brainspotting
Changing a patient’s immediate response to a triggering memory is the aim of brainspotting. However, it is not the only benefit of this therapeutic technique. Brainspotting can also increase a patient’s body awareness and improve their recollection, which can be useful in helping them practice mindfulness.
Greater Body Awareness
As well as helping patients overcome trauma, brainspotting can help your patient become more aware of their bodies, emotions, and needs. By learning to access emotional memories and handle them on their terms, they develop coping skills they can use to their advantage in other situations.
It can be helpful for patients to increase their awareness of their physical state during recovery. A deeper sense of awareness of their physical body can help patients understand the physical pain they are feeling and find healthy ways of managing it. As their awareness increases, you can work with them and their doctors to help them learn ways to reduce pain in their physical bodies.
Brainspotting is also highly efficient in helping individuals learn how to handle their emotions. As many patients experience high levels of emotions throughout this process, they have many opportunities to practice their skills to cope with the emotions and turn them into something more positive. This can be a great skill to use throughout life when managing heightened emotional states.
Improved Recollection
It can be frustrating for people to reflect on a traumatic experience. Because of the heightened emotions the event caused, many individuals struggle to retain the memories and specific details of the situation. Brainspotting can improve rates of recollection and strengthen the knowledge gained from the experience without feeling like they are reliving the trauma.
Being able to recall specific details of a past occasion can sometimes help a patient better understand their emotional response. When their natural response is understood, it becomes easier to change that response and use it to their advantage.
Brainspotting is a common form of psychotherapy to help patients overcome traumatic experiences and process the emotions related to these experiences. Because addiction often begins after a traumatic event, brainspotting may help your patient through recovery by helping them overcome their trauma. If trauma is a main cause of addiction, the body’s response to triggering factors may greatly influence the decision to continue engaging in substance use. Addressing these concerns in a healthy environment can help your client understand their responses and learn how to properly manage them. By working to alter these responses, the patient can decrease their desire to continue using the substance. Brainspotting not only can help your patients overcome trauma; it can also increase their level of awareness and help them recall forgotten details of memories. To learn more about the benefits of brainspotting on addiction, reach out to Dream Recovery at (949) 732-1960.