Where you look affects how you feel.
Brainspotting is a foundational psychotherapeutic clinical intervention for individuals healing from past trauma — physical, emotional, and environmental. Developed in 2003 by psychotherapist Dr. David Grand, it uses precise eye positions to reach the subcortical brain, where unprocessed trauma is actually stored — the place talk therapy can’t always get to.
No forced retelling. No reliving. Your gaze finds the spot; your nervous system does the healing.
Deep processing, without reliving it.
Sessions with Dr. Paige are quiet, focused, and paced by your nervous system — not by a script. Most of the work happens internally, in stillness, while she holds the dual attunement frame: relational attunement to you, neurological attunement to what your brain is doing underneath the words.
- Length60 minutes
- FormatVirtual
- ApproachNon-verbal friendly
- First stepDiscovery call
Four movements of a Brainspotting session.
Locate the activation
You bring the issue — a memory, a block, a body response that won’t settle. Together we rate the distress and track where it lives in the body, because in Brainspotting the body reports what the thinking mind can’t.
Find the brainspot
Using a pointer, Dr. Paige guides your gaze slowly across your visual field. A brainspot is the eye position that connects to the subcortical region where the unprocessed experience is held — found by watching reflexive cues: blinks, swallows, yawns, shifts in breath.
Hold the gaze, let it process
With your gaze held on the brainspot, focused mindfulness does the work. No forced retelling, no reliving. The nervous system processes the stored material at its own pace while the therapist stays in dual attunement with you the entire time.
Integrate and re-rate
Activation comes down. The memory stays, the charge doesn’t. Sessions close by re-rating distress and grounding — and the processing often continues quietly for days after the session ends.
Built for trauma. Applied far beyond it.
PTSD & past trauma
Brainspotting was developed for trauma processing. Early pilot work showed significant PTSD symptom reduction, and negative beliefs tied to the trauma eased alongside it.
Performance blocks
The yips, the freeze before the big moment, the injury that still plays on loop. Where you look affects how you feel — and how you perform.
Anxiety & chronic activation
A nervous system stuck in high alert. Brainspotting works below the cortical level, where the survival program actually runs.
Somatic & body-held stress
Tension, pain patterns, and body responses that talk therapy can’t reach — accessed directly through the brain-body connection.
Grief & unresolved loss
The losses that never got processed — a career ended, a season lost, a person gone — held and completed at the nervous-system level.
Expansion & performance states
Not only for clearing. Expansion Brainspotting installs and strengthens resource states — flow, confidence, calm under pressure.
When the survival program stands down, the body changes too.
Trauma doesn’t only live in memory. A nervous system locked in survival mode runs the body on emergency settings — elevated cortisol, chronic inflammation, disrupted metabolism. Clearing the underlying activation lets the body come back to regulation.
Sports performance
The same mechanism that clears trauma clears performance blocks. Injuries, errors, and high-pressure moments are stored as sports traumas in the subcortical brain — surfacing as the yips, slumps, hesitation, and performance anxiety. Brainspotting releases the stored charge and, through expansion work, installs the flow states the athlete wants to fire on demand.
Autoimmune conditions
Chronic sympathetic activation keeps the immune system inflamed and the body defending itself. Many clients carrying autoimmune diagnoses are also carrying unprocessed trauma. Brainspotting is not a medical treatment — it works the nervous-system layer, downshifting the survival chemistry that keeps inflammation switched on, alongside the care of your medical team.
Metabolic health & fat loss
A defended nervous system holds weight. Chronic stress chemistry — cortisol, disrupted sleep, emotional eating patterns wired to self-soothe a triggered system — works against every diet and training plan. Clear the trauma driving the defended set point and the metabolic work you’re already doing finally has room to land.
Twenty years of clinical use, a growing evidence base.
Developed by psychotherapist Dr. David Grand in 2003 while working with trauma survivors, combining EMDR, somatic experiencing, and psychoanalysis. His book Brainspotting: The Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change laid out the method.
Proposed the mechanism: the visual field gives reflexive access to the midbrain — recruiting subcortical regions where traumatic sensorimotor memories are stored, beyond the reach of top-down talk therapy.
In a clinical pilot study, clients receiving Brainspotting reported significant reductions in PTSD symptoms and in the negative beliefs tied to their trauma — suggesting a potent addition to trauma treatment.
A comparative study of single 40-minute sessions found Brainspotting and EMDR comparable at reducing subjective disturbance from distressing memories — both more effective than placebo.
Case evidence of reduced PTSD and depression symptoms, described as converging evidence for a paradigm shift in trauma treatment built on the EMDR lineage.
More than 6,000 clinicians are trained worldwide. The evidence base is young — pilot and comparative studies are promising, and larger controlled trials are still needed. We present it honestly: an emerging, fast-growing clinical intervention.
Your nervous system already knows where the spot is. Let’s go find it.
Book a discovery call with Dr. Paige to talk through what you’re carrying and whether Brainspotting is the right door in.
Are you a clinician trained in Brainspotting seeking certification consultation? Email Dr. Paige directly.