The Taproot Podcast - 🧿Brainspotting Changed My Life. Can it Change Yours? - www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Subscribe to the transformative podcast: 🎧✨ www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com #GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast Discover more invaluable resources on the website: 🆓📚 #FreeResources Experience the life-changing yet unintrusive therapy method: 🧠💫 #Brainspotting Supported by the latest neuroscience, Brainspotting helps reshape your interactions with the world: 🧠🔬 #NeuroscienceTherapy In a Brainspotting session, therapists use a pointer to identify eye positions associated with traumatic events or emotional and physical reactions: 👀🎯 #TraumaHealing Reprocessing with Brainspotting enables recognition and release of underlying emotions, muscle tensions, and stress responses: 💪💔 #EmotionalHealing Remember, the resources provided are not a substitute for mental health treatment. Seek qualified providers and emergency services in your area when needed: 🆘🌍 #MentalHealthSupport For more information, visit Taproot Therapy Collective: 🌿🤝 #TaprootTherapyCollective Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail] The resources, videos and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency to a provider in your area. Our number and email are only for scheduling at Taproot Therapy Collective are not monitored consistently and not a reliable resource for emergency services. Unlock the power of Brainspotting for healing and recovery: 🧠💪 #TransformationTherapy #HealingJourney #Brainspotting #EMDR #TraumaTherapy #Psychology #PTSD #DID #IFS #Anxiety #Alabama #Birmingham #MentalHealth #Recovery

Music Yellow garden spiders have a fat yellow abdomen, slicked with yellow and black stripes. They weave a tiny white squiggle in the middle of their webs. I stare at the faintly milky zigzag as it sways when the wind moves the web and stirs the iris sepals that the web hangs between in my mother's garden. I am biting on the seam of injection molded red plastic in a 1980s baby walker. I ponder the way that Alabama red clay cakes in the grooves of my tennis shoe, and I poke it with a stubby finger and later a small twig. My dreams were a miasma of detailed childhood imagery. I vividly re-experienced half-remembered and seemingly insignificant moments from when I was a toddler in photorealistic detail. When I woke up, my phone rang.

Did you have weird dreams? asked a colleague. Everyone is saying that their dreams are weird. I had just had my first session of brain spotting on my first day of brain spotting training. You learn brain spotting experientially by having the brain spotting process done to you and by conducting the brain spotting process on other trainees. The brain spotting training teaches clinicians to hold a patient's experience without analysis or judgment. Clinicians are taught to turn off the impulse to try and teach the patient anything. Instead, the patient's own experience is what the impulse to try and teach the patient anything.

Instead, the patient's own experience is what the patient learns from. When the clinician can make room to let your experience as the patient just unfold and come up naturally from the subcortical brain. Unlike cognitive models of psychotherapy, brain spotting does not train you to analyze your experience. It teaches your ego and intellect nothing. Brain spotting practitioners are often taught to feel instead of to understand, so that they can better hold the experience of patients who are doing the same thing. Being held here refers to handling a strong emotional or physical response not physically being held but having someone make room for an emotional experience that is scary or overwhelming often an emotional

experience that does not make any intellectual sense brain spotting began as a branch of EMDR and quickly became its own modality. Developed to treat trauma and PTSD, providers quickly discovered that it works for just about everything else as well. The technique itself is extraordinarily simple. A clinician holds a pointer and a patient looks at it. Despite that, the nuances of the technique can be infinitely complex. Brain spotting helps most people get to know and get comfortable with the parts of themselves that they are the most out of touch with. How does brain spotting work? In trauma therapy, patients are taught to let go of their cognitive or thinky brain and experience the feely, body brain.

Our subcortical brain is the oldest part of the brain. It rapidly redirects our use of energy for survival into fight, flight, or freeze responses. This process takes place before we intellectually or linguistically understand what we are thinking or what we are doing. Teaching patients to feel their unconscious emotions and their somatic reactions to trauma is the only way to get to the root of how trauma is affecting the brain. Our ego defends us against experiencing the unconscious parts of our being. It is threatened by the fact that parts of us that we do not understand can control us so deeply the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote that language was the house of being he meant that our words were all that we were language is implied to be a confining a prison in

his statement the philosopher Rene Descartes stated that I think therefore I am his assumption that cognition was the essence of what made us real underlies most of modern medical science. I wonder how the landscape of existential philosophy would have changed if these philosophers had ever experienced a brain-spotting session. Our ego-driven cognition does not want to turn itself off. It does not want to admit that there is a deeper and older part of the brain. Our mid and sub brains are arguably the most important component to our sense of self and our understanding of the world. Sometimes called our lizard brain, they come from our reptilian ancestry and

are responsible for our intuitive and unconscious snap judgments. Put simply, we are not logical or rational creatures. A large component of our instinctual thinking occurs before we are thinking in words, intellect, or learned experience. David Grand, the creator of brain spotting, made the point that our neocortex front brain thinks that it is all of us, but we must teach it that we have a mid and subcortex that are part of us as well. Our brains feel before we think. It is our cognitive neocortex brain

that sometimes forgets to be aware of the powerful energy our feeling and intuitive sensations hold. The reason that trauma therapy is difficult for patients and for providers is that our ego defends us from the experience of the unconscious feeling and emotion. Teaching patients to let go of what they know is hard. Facing younger and traumatized parts of self in the deep brain is not something that our intellect can help us with. Even though we have an intellectual understanding of trauma and how it affects us, that does not help us loosen its effect on our lives.

There is not a formula or even a manual for good therapy. Effective therapy helps you find and face the parts of yourself that you would normally avoid. Brain spotting is amazingly effective at this. Brainspotting strips away our defenses and plunges our awareness into the deepest and most recessed areas of our self. Brainspotting turns our gaze to the places that we most avoid. Brainspotting allows us to repair and rewire the damaged assumptions trauma makes us hold about ourselves, the world, and our relationships. Cognitive therapy can help

us train and flex our intellect, but it cannot help us rewire these connections in the deeper brain. This is one of the reasons that cognitive therapy alone cannot take patients to the deep roots of trauma's effect on the brain. Somatic and brain-based therapies can teach us to feel ourselves again. It is a common phenomena that patients lose language during a brain-spotting session and start to feel a deep emotion and intuitive self. It is normal to realize your body and emotional state is shifting and moving without your permission. Put another way, our physical and emotional selves are able to be experienced without cognition interfering. This is similar to the way that psychedelics reorient our consciousness.

Brain spotting can help us feel the emotional states that are under our lives, that we often run from and avoid. It can help us confront and repair emotional damage and unremembered pain. Carl Jung observed that symbols and metaphors are the language of the unconscious. This is perhaps by when we stir the subconscious brain with brain spotting. It creates highly mythic or symbolic dreams. The two hallmarks of a brain spotting dream are, one, vividly remembering minutiae from childhood in photorealistic detail, and also dreams with highly allegorical or mythological narrative. Patients often remember important or deep dreams that they can't quite explain or put into words. After the dream images from my childhood and my

first brain spotting session, I began to have dreams about shadowy wolf-like figures in the woods they peered through the windows of my Vestavia home to I my children during the brain spotting session I felt myself drop down into a terrifying feeling of inadequacy and inferiority that had always underlain my life I had noticed it or confronted the feeling I I realized that wit, education, learning new skills, and even my career were nothing more than mechanisms for me to turn this feeling off and run from it. Brain spotting was the first kind of therapy that allowed me not only to identify the feeling that controlled my behavior from the shadows, but also to face it and master it. Social workers are often wounded healers. Therapy can become a crutch

when therapists won't do their own work. Therapists can become unconsciously obsessed with giving others the medicine that they themselves need if they have not pursued their own healing. Many brain spotting therapists like myself and David Grand began as EMDR practitioners. EMDR takes patients into the deep brain just like brain spotting. The difference between the modalities is that EMDR immediately makes patients analyze and cognitivize the experience of the deep brain. What you get in the room is what you get with EMDR. In a brain spotting session, a therapist is simply opening the box in the patient's brain. The majority of the processing takes place over several days while the patient's brain decides what to do with all the experiences that are in the box that we have decompartmentalized.

Brain spotting changed my life. I had been in many types of therapy for years and nothing else had this effect. After brain spotting, I was able to notice when I was reacting based on emotion and while I was hiding in my intellect. I was able to feel the way that my body was reacting based on how I felt. I didn't need to hunch my back when I was angry. I didn't need to twist my spine when I was sad. Instead, I noticed the previously unconscious reaction and I chose to do it or not to do it. I was able to stop avoiding the problems in my life and deal with the deepest parts of the emotional root of my own pain. Brain spotting gives us more time and more room in our own head to react to how we are feeling. Brain spotting was the inspiration for the name Taproot Therapy Collective

and the direction of my career and practice. Just like the technique itself, the effects of brain spotting are subtle, but also profound. Before brain spotting, I thought that therapy was about learning information or knowing something new. After brain spotting, I realized that therapy was more than this. Brain spotting changed my life, but afterwards I didn't know anything new. There was no big reveal or discovery. Brain spotting let me feel how big my own soul was and how much work I have to do in the project of finding and becoming my potential. If anything,

brain spotting helped me forget. I forgot the selfish and myopic demands of my ego, and in forgetting, I saw how much my own intellect was stopping me from experiencing who I really was. We absolutely do not exist because we think. We exist despite the fact that we are trying to think ourselves into existing. The mystic Simone Weil wrote that, The smart man proud of his intellect is like the prisoner proud of his jail. Language is not the house of being. It is the house that we are trying foolishly to cram being into. We are so much bigger than we can think.

Trauma makes us feel and act small, but we are all bigger than we are able to know. Outside of our intellect lies a tremendous felt sense of creativity, intuition, and a larger, more whole self. We do not have to learn anything to find it. All we have to do is stop talking, stop thinking, and begin to listen to who we know that we are. I'll end with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, Behold your thoughts and feelings, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage whose name is Self.