The Taproot Podcast - 👁️‍🗨️Does Brainspotting work? What to do when Brainspotting doesn’t work?

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Read More at https://gettherapybirmingham.com/blog/   Brainspotting is not a scam! It is an incredibly effective evidence based practice. I try to make videos about the most common phone calls we get at Taproot Therapy Collective. One of the calls that I get is that Brainspotting with a clinician in a another state or country just isn't working. There are thousands of BSP techniques. Patient's call because there clinician is not doing what I do in my videos, and that is fine! One of my favorite things about the BSP approach is that it is so open ended. I think that all of that freedom can be little overwhelming to new BSP clinicians. Especially clinicians coming from EMDR backgrounds. If you are a patient or a clinician having trouble processing with BSP these are some suggestions to help the process along. #Brainspotting #trauma #dualatunement #chaostheory #uncertaintyprinciple #EMDR #tailofthecomet #EMDR #therapy #PTSD #psychotherapy #cptsd #mbti #did   More resources @ https://gettherapybirmingham.com   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.

Hey guys, it's Joel and this is a video about what to do if brain spotting does not work. I talk about brain spotting a whole lot. A lot of people are into it and then they come and try and get the brain spotting because they've seen some of the videos or content about trauma and the different approaches to treat trauma on our website. So just so you'll know, I'm only licensed to practice in Alabama and I'm in Birmingham, Alabama, which is a lot of drive from some places, even in Alabama, but I cannot see you if you're out of state. I don't see anyone via teletherapy and some therapists at Taproot do, Sarah Smith does, and christy wood does but i also i'm happy to talk to you i'm happy to uh point you in the right direction for where you can get uh resources to help trauma wherever

you are or tell you what to look for in a clinician or find people and i do that all the time but a lot of people call from out of state when they see these and they ask for how to get brain spotting i can't see a out of state unfortunately um but uh also a lot of people come and they the really the most common question that we get is i saw your resources brain spotting sounded super cool and i went to do brain spotting and when i did it didn't work or i wasn't sure if i was doing it right and the therapist is doing stuff that is not what you did. They're just kind of holding the pointer. And so I get that phone call a lot and I talk to people and I'm happy to do that. But I made a video so that maybe this will help therapists who are getting going with brain spotting

have some new technique and approach and also or just a different perspective. And then also patients who are trying to figure out if brain spotting is right for them if it's being done right or if it's not a good fit or they need to talk to their therapist more so the big thing is like communicate with your therapist if you don't think something's working if you need more guidance you know whatever tell them I don't know if I'm doing this right so the big question is like am I doing brain spotting right? There's not a right way to do it. But the things that are going to interfere with the processes working is you thinking. So everyone does this, but you'll have these protective parts that pop up.

I'm going to say like, you know, who, what is this? How does this work? Is this working? Am I doing it right? What is he thinking? All of that stuff. And everyone has those. Some people have more of them as a protective part that's going to rev up a whole lot more. And the thing that you want to do is not try and just like when you're meditating, the thing is to not kill them or try and get rid of them because then they'll overwhelm you and you can't. It's to notice it. Okay, I'm wondering what the therapist is thinking. And then come back to the body. Okay? Because the goal with brain spotting is to get into the mid and the subcortical brain. That's where the processing happens. And a lot of other therapy things too, this is relevant to other approaches that treat trauma. But to get there, you have to be feeling your body. It is

a different kind of thinking. And it's why over time you get better at doing brain spawning because you're, you're just learning how to turn on that kind of felt intuitive sense that a lot of people, uh, are not good at because we have to give up our ego and a lot of our protective parts in order to get into that. Um, and so that's why you go deeper and deeper in successively. With brain spotting, a lot of times people are kind of scratching the surface for a little bit and the next session they go further in. And then you go really deep in and you maybe lose time and think that the 25 minutes you were under took five minutes or something.

Those deeper processing moments are usually going to happen further on because you're learning, your brain is learning how to feel this way and it You know if you want to look at an MBTI there there are Myers-Briggs type tests There are certain kinds of things that most people who are gonna have a hard time not getting into their head with brain spotting They're gonna score very low on that part and then as they slowly do more brain spotting I've actually done this then you'll notice that you know thinking as something comes down my score is not way high there feeling and intuition usually go up usually a way to be more of a perceiver less of a judger is going to your score is going to change and you you're teaching your brain to think in a different way.

So one of the things that people say when they come in is, hey, my therapist like held the pointer like this. And they were like, what do you feel here? What do you feel here? What do you feel here? And I was like, nothing, nothing, nothing. Or I don't know, my back kind of hurts. You know, there wasn't anything that was dramatic that was happening. And that's how they train you to do brain spawning in phase one.

When the people call and they say, like, hey, how do I go to do therapy with somebody who's doing this the way that you do and talk about it? I don't know. There are certain things I can look for. But the short answer is, like, probably nobody does unless you're one of the people who works for Taproot that has worked with me or is in supervision with me which you're welcome to do if you would like to I actually can do that out of state I can't legally supervise you in another state but I can do training online and I can also if you want one of the things we do is work with you for a couple years before you come to Taproot to help take you into private practice do do supervision with people. And that's a good way to learn trauma treatment. But when you have a therapist that's going like, you know, what do you feel here? What do you feel here? What do you feel here? And you're like, I don't know, I'm not

sure what to do. And they're not really giving you a lot of guidance. And you're being like, am I doing it right? You know, whatever. And they're like, no, just keep feeling, just keep feeling. That is the way that they're trained in phase one. And I came to brain spawning a little bit differently. I was an EMDR clinician. So you're moving the eye during EMDR. I didn't agree with all of the EMDR scripting. So I had my own. And what I did is I had a trauma map and the trauma map was how we mapped, how does this trauma want to move you? You know, when you feel the bad feeling, what does your spine want to do? What do you notice in your body? You know, what are the protective parts that pop up in your

thinking and cognition? How do your fingers want to move? Do you want to curl up into a ball and hide something? Do you want to just let go and sink into the carpet? Do you want to stand up and fight? You know, when I feel trapped, when I feel sad, when I feel whatever the feeling I can't feel is, what does it do to my body, how does it want me to move me? And I'd have people actually move and would do the EMDR. And while I was doing that, I started noticing that the pupil in the eye kind of jumped over a spot. Like people are trying to track my eye, you know, my finger with their eye.

And then they would see like the pupil kind of like, whoop, jump over these spots where it didn't want to be unconsciously because, you know, it's moving quickly. People aren't doing that consciously. It's just an involuntary movement. And so I started moving my fingers to that spot while we're doing the trauma map. And then people would dissociate. They would go like way deep into processing. Cause I work with very complex trauma patients. And so patients liked this and they were requesting it and they were saying this works better than CBT or EMDR or whatever, but I didn't really know what I was doing. And some patients were experiencing like repressed memories, like things that parts of a traumatic event that they hadn't remembered before or different, you know, parts. And I noticed that the Z axis was really important too, like not just left and right,

but how far or up and down, but how far back was I? You know, sometimes if I hit a spot, then I would just see the pupil explode. So I'm watching the pupil a lot more than the way that people are trained to do brain spawning in the training. I mean, they tell you to look for the dilation a little bit, but I'm really reading it more than I think most clinicians do based on what I'm hearing from people that have had it with other clinicians, including people in my family. So one of the things that like,

I think that the clinicians need to do more of if you're a clinician is like, look how the eye is dilating. Cause I had been a clinician for three months. I didn't know what I was doing and I was not doing EMDR anymore. And I kept paying for more EMDR supervisions to say like, Hey, people like this, I don't know what to do.

EMDR is incredibly manualized and scripted. So everybody kept telling me, Oh, you just do 15 movements and then you stop, Don't stop and do what you're doing. And I knew that it was working. People were asking for it. Somebody said, hey, that sounds like brain spotting. I Google it. I paid $400 to talk to David Grand for an hour, who's the inventor of brain spotting. David was great. And I felt like he was the first person who listened to me and understood what I was saying and was open to what I was noticing. And he told me, go do brain spotting and you're going to see what this feels like. And then I did that and I pivoted my whole practice towards it because I think it was

one of the most effective tools that's out there. But they don't necessarily train you to do it the way that I do it. So if you're stuck with your therapist or you are a therapist and you want new techniques, I mean, here's just stuff to consider. So first off, EMDR is very restrictive. A lot of brain spawning clinicians were previously EMDR clinicians. And so there's a ton of rules. You do this amount of movement, then you go back, then you stop. Well, what if the person has dissociative identity disorder and they bark like a dog? Well, what if the person is crying in a puddle? Oh, well, you either stop it and you wait or you just go back and you do the movement. There's no way to insert yourself as a clinician. I mean, a limited amount there is, but the people who are certified in it, they're very like tight

and very inflexible and it's very manualized. And so David Grand was also an ex EMDR clinician. I don't know, but I think my guess would be that brain spotting is kind of like way open-ended and open to the patient's experience, kind of as a reaction to the way that EMDR is. And I don't think that's bad, but I also have a different perspective than I think a lot of the EMDR people, the brain spotting trained people have, and that's fine. I don't think they're wrong. This is just a different take. I think that when they train clinicians to be so open to absolutely anything happening, sometimes you leave patients without enough information to go into processing. And also,

sometimes you don't give patients enough information to know what is going to maybe come up during processing. And David's whole thing is that like, if you're trapping people within this conception and you're being too analytical and you're trying to help them understand it, you're stopping processing from happening. I absolutely agree with that. That is true, right? But what happens is that sometimes what people take away from the training is that all they have to do is say, what do you feel here? What do you feel here? What do you feel here what do you feel here what do you feel here move the pointer around not look at the patient's eye you know and not look at what the patient's doing not give the patient a prompt and I just don't think

that works there's an idea with brain spawning called staying in the tail of the comet and the training they will repeat that to you over and over again as a clinician and what they're saying is that you're not supposed to be in front of the patient trying to conceptualize the experience and get in front of their experience and help them into it. You're supposed to just let the experience happen, and you are in the tail of the comet. You're behind that, okay? And you're just waiting for it to come up and seeing if it comes up. And that's true.

When a patient is processing, you need to be quiet. You need to watch. Even if you have the most brilliant conception in the world, you don't need to talk. But if your client is not processing, you're not in the tail of the comet, man. Like you're watching the comet from earth. That's not being in the tail of the comet. And that's what a lot of clinicians do is they just keep waiting for processing to happen. And you do have to push people into it. There are people who I absolutely could not have helped if I did not break the training or you know deviate from what they tell you in those trainings and one of the things that I

do that a lot of clinicians don't is that I move the pointer. I mean what they will tell you in brain spawning training is that you find the spawn in the person's eye if you're doing outside window where the clinician is looking for where they see the blinks and the dilation and the involuntary muscle movement and they wait there. So a lot of therapists they just are like, oh do you feel anything here? Even though they see something and the patient says no and then they just move. Okay, well everybody's different, right? You want to be in the tail of the comet and that means that not everyone is gonna have the ability to feel what is happening in their body right away. I mean one, this is a weirder treatment.

They may just not think that it works. So like, I will tell people, hey, just hang out here a minute. You know, we're going to wait here. I know you're saying you don't feel anything, but I see their face getting tight. I see their eye dilating. I know that this is a brain spot. I am the one who does this all the time. I'm not an expert. You know, I'm not the expert in taking away autonomy from you, but I know that you're going to go into processing here because that's how people work I'm being open to your experience and your experience is that you cannot feel your experience right now and so I'll hang out in a spot for a minute and I'll tell the person to wait and they'll keep saying they don't feel anything and then what they'll do a lot of the time is they'll start moving their head so I say look at the pointer

which is the eye position and then they move their head because they'll scratch or they'll get fidgety and they're getting restless because I'm seeing the brain spot work the the fight or flight spot the fight or flight system is activating people are getting fidgety but because they move their head now they're not on that spot anymore and the brain spotting training will tell you not to move the pointer in phase one and phase two i don't do that if you moved your head you're in a different spot now and i'm going to keep chasing you to it and hitting that spot where I see the dilation. Even if you go and move over here, then I'm going to move the pointer to the left. If you move your head to the left, I'm going to find it again, and I'm going to keep doing that until you start

processing. If you are resistant, if you have a lot of resistance to this, maybe you don't believe it. I'm going to help you feel it so that you can feel that this works and have a little bit more faith in the process. And if you're just moving the pointer and saying, what do you feel here? What do you feel here? What do you feel here? For 10 sessions, you are not giving people reason to have faith in the process because you're not giving them any experience with processing. So like, yeah, they're not going to think it works. I think that you have to push people a little harder than a lot of the trainings say. So I moved the pointer left and right up and down based on how the person moved their head. And sometimes people move their head like, you know, really far to the left because they're trying to get away from me. And we're

looking at the back room and their perception is that I'm moving the pointer. They're like, well, you were wanting me to turn that way. And I'm like, no, I'm only moving it when you turn your head. Do you see how when I hit this, you want to move? And now I'm bringing that into awareness a little bit. And they're like, oh, wow. Yeah, OK. And there's more buy-in from the patient. And they're a little bit more aware of what's happening when we're going.

So I think that's important. I also move the pointer on what's called the Z-axis. I move it towards their face and away from their face. And you'll notice that there's individual spots on that axis, right? So like maybe I pass over this spot that's about a foot from the face and I get a little bit of blinking or I see dilation. Well, then I pass by it a couple more times because I want to see, is that just, you know, like, is that just something that came up out of nowhere or is that a real part of the spot? And when I see the blink in the same spot a lot of times on that Z axis, I creep up to the spot. And that usually pushes people a little bit deeper into

processing. That's helpful. That's another way. So, you know, if you're a therapist, I would do that. Or if you're a patient who's moving your head in therapy, I would, you know, be aware of that. Another thing that the phase two clinicians have learned if they've taken phase two of brain spawning is there's these glasses that you can wear. One covers the left eye, one covers the right eye. And there's something in brain spotting called, and the words are different. I think like in Britain, they call them trigger spots or something. The way I learned, which I mean, or like anxiety spots, like people have different language.

But the way that I learned and the way what most of the training say is there's activation spots and resource spots. The activation spots turn anxiety up, they help you process the trauma. The resource spots kind of bleed anxiety off and help you calm down and regulate and soothe. There's also an activation eye that speeds processing up and makes it more intense. And there is also a resource eye that slows processing down

and makes you calmer. So if you go on the resource eye to a resource spot as a clinician, you're really going to calm that person down. So one of the things that I noticed, because I'm looking for dilation more than they teach you, is that when I know I'm on a brain spot, when I see it, and that spot is, I call it like a wibble, it really wants to open. It's like the lens of the camera is trying to dilate open, but then I see it getting pinched shut. You know, it's like, well, no.

What's happening in their head, because I know that. I've recorded my eye doing this. I have that video up, and I've seen what my eye is doing when I'm feeling it. And same thing with the patients. What's happening is that they're thinking. You're starting to feel yourself go into a scary place, and then the patient's like, hell no, I'm not going to go there. is that they're thinking you're starting to feel yourself go into a scary place and then the patient's like hell no i'm not going to go there and then they're thinking so you're watching somebody being pulled back up into thought and when you have when you start to say hey i'm seeing a spot here but i'm noticing that you're right on the edge you go into

the processing you're kind of feeling something scary that maybe you know it doesn't really fit into words but you're kind of feeling a scary thing or need to move like you don't like this position and then you're thinking about something. What is that? And then they're like, oh my God, because like you just read their mind. There's more buy-in to the process. You're not conceptualizing it and telling them what to think. You're making room for their experience in a way that just being like, what do you feel here? What do you feel here? What do you feel here? It does not make room for, um, because they're going to trust you and they're going to have faith in this process. in this process and you know that it works this way

so you can help them do that. A lot of clinicians don't. So then you can tell them, notice the thought, or if you're a patient, you can just do this. Notice the thought, it's a protective part. It's trying to protect you from this scary place that I'm trying to pull you into. It's like we're running on a treadmill

and eventually you're just gonna get too tired to run anymore and the treadmill's to pull you into. It's like we're running on a treadmill and eventually you're just going to get too tired to run anymore and the treadmill is going to pull you down there. But it's going to take a little while. But if a thought pops up, notice it, come back to the body. Because the deepest part of the emotion is the physical response in your body. So feel the emotion and then find where it is physically. And it's okay for this to move. We may start off thinking about your heart and your heart's the black hole and it's sucking. And then that pops open, and now my back is tight. Well, don't make patients think,

well, you have to just be thinking about your heart the whole time. Notice your whole experience and what's happening. That now notices it's in your neck. So when a patient is processing, be quiet and let them go. But if they're not, you haven't really done your job yet as a clinician and this you know Maybe is a little bit pushy or has a different perspective than some of the training and I don't think that I'm totally right Or this works for everybody, but if you're bumping into this problem, these are some ways around it One thing is that you notice body responses and brain spotting and so a lot of times people aren't even aware that like I'm jerking

My knee or I'm moving my hand and if they come out of processing and you're trying to get them to go back into it by being aware of the body, you know, if they're out of it, you can talk. If they're in it, let them go. But if they're coming out of it and they're not really there, I'll say, you know, notice your hand, notice your foot. And a lot of times they're like, oh, I'm not moving that. And then they realize that it's tight or something. And you see the eye open back up and they go back in. So you can't always see what's happening, though. Some people are way out of touch with their body. And some people have like muscle tension in their back where you see their backs locking up.

But you can't really touch the patient. You know, if they're saying like, I don't feel anything, I don't feel anything. You can't just like dig in behind their clothes and say, look, OK, Your back's tight right here, right? Like that isn't our role as a therapist But there's people who I work with that help the process a lot with brain spawning They don't work at Tenebrute, but we refer to them Some people do something called myofascial release and some people do something called Rolf massage. R-O-L-F R-O-L-F F Rolf. And those are, those are neat. Um, there are kinds of massage that are not like, Oh, this place is sore. I'm going to rub on it. It's not structural as in like, Oh,

your cartilage in your leg is weak, move this exercise and it'll go back. Most of these people are physical therapists. And, um, so they're doing a different thing than normal PT, but it's less structural. Um, but myofas myofascial release, and I'm not a massage therapist, so I'm quoting them. I don't have the expert on. We don't have the expert. One day I want to have them on the podcast and I'd like for them to speak for themselves, but we haven't been able to have time because we're so busy. So these myofascial and these Rolf massage people, they can really help bring stuff into awareness that you're just not going to be able to notice or get out of patients if they're overwhelmed. Now, when people say like, I don't

feel anything there, a lot of times what they mean is I'm feeling too much. I don't know what it is. I don't know how to label this stuff. I don't know how to feel it. It's not that you're not feeling, it's that you're overwhelmed. And the Rolf and myofascial people, which I hope work more with therapists in the future, because it's, we need to be more integrative. They're able to say things like, hey, it feels like your posture is trying to curl up into a ball and, and kind of like disappear. But at the same time, you want to like stand up and be heard and seen and be loud, but you're, you're this muscle's tight and that muscle's tight and they're pulling in different things and it's making pain here. You know,

I don't know all that stuff. I'm getting better at understanding how posture informs this because I work with them and the patients tell me what they say. And I have an ROI to talk to the provider and the provider has an ROI to talk to me. But, you know, like those things really help brain spotting. They help you get unstuck or give you some tools to go deeper into it. You know, I had a patient who she, I felt like I was seeing anger, but she couldn't get there. And the provider said, well, you've got a response where you want to fight, but then you also want to give up. So there's a, and then, you know, the eye just exploded. She went right into the processing. It really dilated. And like, we got some good work done. So that's like another thing

that you can bring into it. If you're having a hard time getting stuck with the stuff. I think the trauma mapping, I talk about that a lot on here. I'm not going to go through it. More people should do that when they're having a hard time pushing the patient into the feeling. The brain spawning thing, again, it's kind of too open. They're like, what do you want to work on? They don't even say a lot of times like where is that in your body? Find that feeling.

You know, if somebody knows exactly what they want to work on, they go into processing, fine. Stay in the tail of the comment, right? But if you want to really help someone and they're coming in 10 times and they haven't processed anything, you need to kind of start bringing this into awareness to help them feel it to find the brain spot. I do something called tapping. I get something cold, like a rock or uh not pretty rock not like a dirty one there's uh crystals and a little brass column different things but i tell the person to concentrate on where it hurts or where they think feel the thing in their body and just tap it and

you and you'll see their eye kind of dart to the spot when they tap it because their body's associating with that thing brain spotting's is built, I think, on the body-brain associates this eye position with this past experience that's kind of stuck and undealt with. And you can also do gaze spotting that they teach you to do in phase two, where people are looking in the room when they're talking about, every single time I feel trapped and my dad does this, where is their eye going? If it's going to the same spot and there's nothing there in your room, then notice that and maybe just start there and trust yourself as a clinician, even if the patient's saying for the first couple minutes, I don't feel anything here. If you're seeing movement, go with it and help them process stuff.

Don't just wait for them to do everything. That's also not being in the tail of the comet. If you're just assuming that if you ask, well, what do you feel? What do you feel? Then eventually, or feel, feel, just feel. Eventually, they're just going to go into processing and your job is just to do that it's not your job is to do more than that we talked about like when people are thinking too much and they they can't get out of their head and that's one of the reasons why i think what clinicians need to do more of is look at what the eye is actually doing because you kind of intuitively learn to know if somebody's processing or not sometimes if the person's iris is real dark, it's very hard to see the difference in the black and the dark brown. You know,

somebody with blue eyes, it's a lot easier to see that or somebody with, you know, light green eyes or something. But you can still see, I mean, especially with some of these, when somebody's pretty deep in processing, I mean, the iris is very active. The pupil is doing like weird things. I mean, sometimes like stuff you don't see unless somebody has like a concussion or something. I mean, I've had severe dissociative disorder patients have their pupil look like a strobe light. I mean, it's going from like, you know, an F-16 dilation on a camera to like an F-1, like huge. So I think it's important to read that. And, you know, I'd said before, like that when the pupil is like starting to open you know every time you hit that spot you're

seeing it start to bloom but it's not going into processing it's kind of pinching back off and then the person doesn't look like they're kind of feeling anything uh profound or anything that is like you know when people go into their body there's kind of a a dreamlike face or like a look of awe or, you know, you see muscles twitch or there's a look of discomfort. You know, you're seeing a spot, but nothing is happening. A lot of times, you know, they're thinking. And so talking about the thoughts that are coming up, learning to map those is helpful, but sometimes they're just not ever going to be able to think their way out of that or it's going to take a long time to think through it. And so in the phase

two brain spotting training they teach you to use the glasses to use an activation eye to speed things up or a resource eye to slow things down and so if you use a resource eye so you find the eye that makes you calmer and then you use the resource spot you're gonna pull a ton of anxiety off so if you've found like an activation spot where you need to process that trauma, but you can't get into it, or it's just taking multiple sessions,

sometimes brain spotting works better over like two hours, three hours, honestly, for certain kinds of people, you know, you wanna be open to how they're coming in. But unfortunately, insurance doesn't make a ton of sense, at least in Alabama, most states, they will pay for one session a day, but you can come seven days a week. You know, we're really, you know, two hours a week all at once is probably going to save them more money and get people better. Most people don't want that other hour to be private pay. So, you know, this is a way to kind of open that up faster without just waiting.

Bleed all the anxiety off with the resource side and the resource spot if somebody's having trouble thinking or calming down. And then you go to the activation eye, you know, and then you go to the activation spot and you try and go in that way. And now I'm able to process because my thoughts are not roiling of like, what is this? Why am I here? Does this work? Do I look stupid? What's happening why am I here does this work do I look stupid what's happening am I doing it wrong can I ever get better you know all of that stuff is a protective part that doesn't want me to just drop down in and feel the bad place and it's all popping up and roiling and sometimes you can bleed that off with a resource spot and a resource uh thigh and then you can go in and do processing on an activation spot. That's one technique that I use a lot.

Another one that I think doesn't get talked about enough is metaphor. The bottom part of our brain, when cognition during brain spotting, cognition is off and the prefrontal cortex is not terribly active and really deep processing, you're very deep in the mid and the subcortical brain. It's this place where like emotion is tied to physical expressions of emotion so it's very pure emotion and then where that emotion is in your body and what it's doing and kind of the way that jung said that the bottom levels of the

brain and its language was metaphor it wasn't language and i think that we respond and that you know dream is is like that you know, dream is like that, you know. Dream is kind of when the ego or consciousness is turned off and you're making, you know, essentially a symbol of how you feel or a symbol of this thing that your unconscious is chewing on because you don't have the ability to think about it literally. You know, when you're trying to help somebody feel something, because that's the key to going into brain spotting and most kinds of effective therapy is, can I make you stop thinking about this, analyzing it, intellectualizing it and just feel it? Metaphor is helpful, you know, and not everyone's going to respond to that. Definitely be open. You know, none of this is saying that the uncertainty principle of, you know, David Grand and the trainings is wrong, but you can be open to all of that and still say, you know, from in your head, maybe, you know, most people this happens.

So if this doesn't work, I'm going to try this. I mean, I don't think that's violating the uncertainty principle. I think that's trying things until something works. You know, sitting with the uncertainty of everybody is different. I'm not going to do the same thing for everybody. But some people think in a metaphorical language, and it helps them feel so you may have a strong thinker type that's like, No, maybe this is when I was two. I don't know. It can't be when I was two, because I had a good life then. And, you know, my back hurts sometimes, but not right now. And you're like, Okay, just feel the back, though. No,

no, no. And you just see them them every time you suggest the body they zing back up into their head you know maybe say okay when you're sitting with your neck you said you felt tired what is that tired like you know do you feel like you're just a mountain climber that's climbing up a mountain and you have to achieve this great thing and you're worried that you can't you know is it more of like a fear of not being able to do it or do you just feel like you were in the middle of the perfect storm on a sailboat and waves are smashing and it's, you're fighting and fighting, but it's completely hopeless. You just, you're hopeless. You cannot, you cannot win because you're, you're go up in a sailboat against an Eflin tornado and you're trying so hard, but deep down, you just don't

really feel like you could do it. Or, you know, is it, um, you know, an exhaustion, like you just can't even muster up any muscles, you just want to turn into slime and drip through the floor right here, okay? So, like, I didn't just ask a thinker type there, hey, do you feel hopeless or do you feel afraid of not accomplishing something or do you just feel exhausted, right? I'm offering them into a felt experience of being tired to really figure out what that means and where that is in their body. That isn't saying, what do you feel? Where is it in your body? Or just feel, you know, I'm trying to offer them a gateway into that experience. And I think that you have to keep trying something until something works.

And the people that I do hear from online, it's where the clinician is just doing the same thing. And I have total respect for the uncertainty principle and the idea of dual attunement that brain spotting uses a lot, that it's two people together feeling something. But you're not sitting with dual attunement if you're not watching the eye. You're not sitting with dual attunement if you're not noticing the way somebody thinks. You're not sitting with dual attunement unless you're really paying attention to things about them they may not notice. Instead of just asking them, what do you feel? What do you feel? You need to realize what they feel, you know? Sometimes you'll be able to realize that better than the patient and then help

them experience that too. That's dual attunement, okay? The uncertainty principle is not doing the same thing every time. It's sitting with the uncertainty of, yeah, let's see what comes up, but this doesn't seem to work. So let's try something else, you know? And sometimes I think people take the uncertainty principle language to mean like, oh, you just talk about the uncertainty principle and say, well, we have no idea what's going to come up. But no, I think what it means is that like you keep trying new things and because you need to be able to sit with your own uncertainty to not have a script, to not have a formula, to be innovative, to be uncertain, to have doubt and to innovate. And a lot of times I hear clinicians like talking about the uncertainty principle, like in, you know, groups or something or online. You know, there's some things, but then it doesn't really seem like they are willing to let themselves sit in uncertainty. They just want to talk about uncertainty. So this stuff is not a

criticism of the way brain spotting works. It's a different perspective and it's, you know, a way of thinking about it differently. So hopefully we can get to a different place with our patients. So, yeah, I mean, and again, I don't want it to sound like I'm criticizing the brain spotting training. I think that a lot of times you know You're playing the telephone game with David writes a thing with his students which gets written down which trained this person trained that person And maybe we just lose the spirit of it. He's I'm sure that he's a great clinician They're all the people doing the trainings or or wonderful clinicians when you're in the room with them They're probably doing great work

But I do hear this stuff over and over and over people call and they say I don't think spawning works. That's not good for the profession. Like it's not good for the modality. So it's important for people to be able to try and help people go into processing if they're having a hard time by putting them in the subcortical brain. What are you smelling? What are you tasting? What are you feeling? How does your body want to move? Where's the tension? What does it feel like? Not just hot, the tension? What does it feel like? Not just hot, cold, tight. Does it feel like TV static? Does it feel like the color green?

Like make room for anything. What do you feel outside your body? Do you feel heavier than the room, lighter than the room? You're saying that your chest feels heavy. Is it heavy like pushing down? Is it heavy like you're struggling to hold it up and your legs are tight? Is it heavy like it's pulling you to the floor or pushing down on your chest? All those questions help people go, what? I hadn't

thought about that. And then they're experiencing more and it is your job to help them learn to think this way so that they can process this stuff. And the language of brain spawning is really like the training sits based, I'm guessing, I haven't asked David Graham this, but it looks like he's very into existentialism and chaos theory, which, if you've read the Jurassic Park book way back when, it's the little propeller thing that Michael Crichton threw in there to give it some spiritual thematic depth. But this idea that, like, we can never know anything, that everything is just so complicated that one change can make this butterfly effect, and, you know, I'm not an expert on any of that. I'm a little bit more mystical, like I'm using more Jungian language

about like going down to face the places underneath your life that at the time you didn't think you could survive. But when you go back into it to face them, that you can't take everything you know with you, you can't take the ego with you. When you go back in, you might be two or you might be four and you don't have the protection of your intellect and all the things that you know now. Neither one of those is right or wrong. But I think in the existential kind of chaos theory language that he's using when he writes those trainings about like that you want to push people

and you want the provider needs to just be open to anything happening absolutely be open to anything happening but if nothing is happening that's not being open if you're doing the same thing over and over and over again and the person is not going into processing or if you're trying to get somebody to process that's not being open another thing that I do which is probably a little bit against the rules as I said you know the glasses have an activation spot and they also have and there's an activation eye and there's also an activation spot, right? Well, sometimes when somebody is just telling me I can see the spot, but they're not considering it, they're like, I don't feel anything. This doesn't work. You know, it's a very resistant person who

needs to be sold on this because it is weird. I didn't believe this worked until I did it. I mean, you know, you're, you're fine to doubt it. You know, there's, I can see them feeling a little bit, but they're moving their head. I will put the activation glass on and then I will hit an activation spot, which makes the little trauma response too strong, right? I'm not saying just dive in and do this to somebody, okay? But there are people who have needed help feeling that this is a real thing and they need help validating this themselves and I'll put that on for just a second and then whoa okay just a second like when I've turned that spot up to 11 and you're really strongly feeling that then that means that you're able to accept that it's real we're not fighting about

whether or not this works anymore because you just felt it and then okay that looks like it's a little bit too strong is that a little bit too strong well then let's take the glasses off and do it slower maybe we need to use the resource glasses but we're no longer you know debating if it's real or not you've already felt it you understand that it's working and now we're rolling um i don't do that with everybody usually the activation i activation spotting is when somebody's processed it so much and we're really trying to squeeze the limit and get everything up out of the spot it's already come down so much what the distress was and we're just trying to get the last little bit sometimes i'll do that i don't recommend processing that way i'm not saying that you just

turn it up to 11 use the activation spot with the activation glasses and then you know make somebody just process way too much that's just much. But if somebody's having a really hard time feeling it or admitting to themselves that this eye position actually is activating a trauma, sometimes that's a good way to sell this procedure because they'll immediately feel it. And then I think that will lead them more into feeling and more into trusting you in the process. And then you can follow the comment and see where it goes. So I don't know if y'all have questions or anything, let me know. But those are the things that if you're a therapist or if you're a client, you may want to think about doing or asking your therapist for. Because I just, I don't know,

I've got a lot of brain spotting videos and podcasts on the internet and I get phone calls on our voicemail from people who are out of state, out of the country sometimes, and all the time that I hear that the brain spotting is not working and they're asking me, how do I get this to work? Because they're not doing what you say you do on there. What they're describing is somebody who's just holding the pointer, encouraging the patient to feel while the patient's not feeling. I mean, that's too structured. The person is getting upset there. You need to be a little bit more open and do some different things or suggest to your therapist. I mean, I see a brain spotting therapist and I said, hey, I bounced the pointer this way. I'm having a really hard time going into processing. Could you try and do this? And she was open to it. She did it with me. It worked great.

So that would be some of the biggest barriers I see to when brain spotting does not work. I do think the process works, but I don't think that it works for everybody. And when it doesn't work, the majority of the time, what I see is that the clinician is just having a hard time getting the person into processing because they took away from the training that as long as they just wait it out, the person will just start to process eventually. They don't have to move the pointer. They don't have to change what they're saying.

They just encourage you to feel and ask you if you feel what, where. And then eventually after session number 30, you'll just start going. I don't think that's right. One, that's just too much time. Most people are going to leave. And then two, I don't think that by doing the same thing, you get a different result. So I hope that that was helpful and I will see you in brain spotting.