Introduction
As a licensed clinical social worker and the founder of the Center for Mind Body Balance, I have spent more than 33 years working with clients in Bergen County whose trauma has resisted talk therapy alone. Brainspotting is one of the modalities our team uses when something needs to move that words have not been able to reach. Julia Tsakalis, LCSW, our Brainspotting-credentialed clinician, has integrated this work into her practice with notable results.
Brainspotting is a trauma therapy developed by Dr. David Grand in 2003 that uses fixed eye position — a "brainspot" — to access and process stored trauma in the subcortical brain. It is frequently grouped with EMDR but works differently and often reaches material that talk therapy and even EMDR do not. For Bergen County clients navigating trauma that has not fully resolved through other modalities, it is often the missing piece.
What Brainspotting Is and How It Was Discovered
Brainspotting was developed in 2003 by Dr. David Grand, a psychotherapist who had been practicing EMDR and noticed something curious. While doing eye-movement work with a client, he observed that when the client's eyes paused on a particular spot in the visual field, intense emotional and physiological responses surfaced. When he held the client's gaze on that spot — what he came to call a "brainspot" — the client accessed material that years of talk therapy had not touched. Grand has documented the modality through Brainspotting, the international training and research organization he founded.
What Grand discovered, and what subsequent research has begun to substantiate, is that the visual field and the subcortical brain are tightly linked. Specific eye positions appear to activate specific neural networks that hold unprocessed trauma, emotion, and somatic experience. By holding attention on a brainspot while a client tracks their internal experience, the therapist creates a kind of doorway into the stored material — and a way for it to be released.
The premise: trauma is held below words
Brainspotting rests on the same foundational premise as somatic experiencing, polyvagal-informed therapy, and the body of work pioneered by Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine: trauma is not primarily a memory problem. It is a nervous system problem. The brainstem, the limbic system, the body — these structures hold the trauma. The thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, has limited direct access to them.
This is why a client can understand their trauma perfectly and still be unable to stop being triggered by it. The understanding lives in one part of the brain. The trauma lives in another. Brainspotting is one of the most direct ways we have of reaching the second part.
How Brainspotting Differs from EMDR
Because Brainspotting emerged out of EMDR, the two are frequently confused. They share a foundational insight — that the visual field and trauma processing are linked — but they work quite differently.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
EMDR, developed by Francine Shapiro and formalized by the EMDR International Association, uses bilateral stimulation — typically rapid side-to-side eye movements, sometimes tones or taps — while the client holds a traumatic memory in mind. The theory is that bilateral stimulation engages both hemispheres of the brain, allowing trauma to be reprocessed and integrated. EMDR follows an eight-phase protocol with specific stages: history-taking, preparation, assessment, desensitization, installation, body scan, closure, and reevaluation.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting uses a sustained, fixed eye position — not movement — and follows the client's process rather than a protocol. The therapist identifies a brainspot (either by physical noticing of reflexive eye behavior, or by the client's report of where they feel "activation" in the visual field) and then holds attentive, attuned presence while the client tracks what surfaces. The pace is the client's. The processing is largely internal. The therapist talks much less than in talk therapy.
Side by side: EMDR and Brainspotting compared
- Visual field use — EMDR: bilateral movement. Brainspotting: fixed position.
- Protocol — EMDR: eight phases, structured. Brainspotting: follows the client's process.
- Therapist role — EMDR: active guide. Brainspotting: attuned witness.
- Pace — EMDR: therapist-driven phases. Brainspotting: client-driven.
- Best fit — EMDR: single-incident trauma, clients who like structure. Brainspotting: complex trauma, internal explorers.
- Trauma types — EMDR: often discrete events. Brainspotting: complex, attachment, somatic.
Which one to choose
Neither is "better." For some clients — particularly those with single-incident trauma and a preference for structure — EMDR is highly effective and may be the right starting point. For others — particularly those with complex trauma, attachment wounds, or trauma that has resisted prior therapy — Brainspotting often reaches material EMDR does not.
At the Center for Mind Body Balance, Julia Tsakalis, LCSW, is a Brainspotting-credentialed therapist who also practices Internal Family Systems. For clients whose trauma is layered, somatic, or relational, having access to multiple modalities under one clinician is a meaningful advantage.
What a Brainspotting Session Looks Like
A Brainspotting session generally runs 60 to 75 minutes. Here is the typical arc.
The setup
You sit across from your therapist. They use a pointer — essentially a long, thin rod with a small ball at the end — to slowly trace your visual field, left to right, up and down, while you notice where activation rises. Activation can take many forms: a stronger emotion, a physical sensation, a sudden image, a felt sense of "there." When you and the therapist find the brainspot, they hold the pointer in place.
The processing
You then track your internal experience while keeping your eyes on the spot. Your therapist remains present, attuned, often silent — providing the safe relational container in which your nervous system can do its work. What surfaces can be:
- Specific memories
- Diffuse emotion — grief, anger, shame
- Body sensations — heat, pressure, energy moving
- Imagery or symbolic content
- Sometimes nothing visible to an observer, while a great deal shifts internally
Sessions tend to involve long stretches of internal work punctuated by occasional check-ins. You leave the session feeling something has moved — sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly. Many clients describe sustained shifts in symptoms over the following days.
How many sessions
Brainspotting is generally not a brief therapy in the sense of "three sessions and done," but it is often more efficient than open-ended talk therapy for trauma. Many clients experience meaningful change in 6 to 12 sessions, particularly when Brainspotting is integrated with other modalities — somatic work, IFS, or our body-based offerings — at the same practice.
How Brainspotting fits with somatic and talk therapy
At our practice, Brainspotting rarely stands alone. Clients often pair it with somatic work or talk therapy, which together address the layers Brainspotting opens. We have written about how somatic therapy and talk therapy work on different layers of the same person — Brainspotting sits at the intersection of the two, accessing somatic material while still occurring in a relational therapy context.
Who Brainspotting Tends to Help Most
In our experience working with Bergen County clients — Saddle River, Wyckoff, Allendale, Mahwah, and surrounding towns — Brainspotting tends to be especially valuable for the following situations.
Trauma that has not fully resolved through other modalities
Clients who have done years of effective talk therapy or completed EMDR and still feel something unresolved are often excellent candidates. Brainspotting reaches material that lives below language and below the structured protocols of other trauma modalities.
Complex and developmental trauma
For trauma that is layered across many years, originates in attachment or childhood experience, or shows up as chronic relational patterns rather than discrete memories, Brainspotting's open-ended, client-driven structure often outperforms protocols designed for single-incident trauma.
Performance, creative, and athletic blocks
Less commonly discussed but well-documented: Brainspotting has been used successfully with athletes, performers, and creatives to clear performance anxiety, creative blocks, and the residue of past failures that still affect current capacity. Grand himself originally noticed the brainspot phenomenon while working with a competitive ice skater.
Grief that lives in the body
Grief that has not metabolized — that shows up as chronic chest heaviness, exhaustion, or numbness — often responds well to Brainspotting because the felt sense of grief is held in the same subcortical structures the modality is designed to reach. Our team's grief work, including the grief-specific offerings at our affiliated brand Grief Unbound, frequently incorporates Brainspotting alongside other modalities.
When Brainspotting may not be the right starting point
Brainspotting is powerful, which means it is not always the right first step. If you are in acute crisis, actively dissociated, or working through addiction without stable supports, building stabilization first — often through somatic regulation, clinical care, and relational safety — is usually more important than diving into deep trauma processing. A reputable Brainspotting therapist will assess this on the discovery call.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Brainspotting evidence-based?
Brainspotting has a smaller research base than EMDR but a growing one. Multiple peer-reviewed studies — including work by Grand and colleagues and independent research groups — show significant reductions in PTSD symptoms, anxiety, and grief. The Brainspotting research community is actively expanding the evidence base, but the modality should still be understood as "promising and increasingly validated" rather than "as established as EMDR or CBT."
Can Brainspotting help if talk therapy hasn't?
Often, yes — particularly if the unresolved material is somatic or pre-verbal. Many of our Brainspotting clients have done years of effective talk therapy and arrive specifically because they sense there is more underneath. Brainspotting is well-suited to that "more underneath."
Do I need to talk about the trauma to do Brainspotting?
Less than in talk therapy. Brainspotting works on what is activated in your nervous system, which does not require detailed verbal narration. For clients whose trauma is hard to put into words — preverbal trauma, medical trauma, or experiences too overwhelming to recount — this is often a relief.
You've Probably Already Done the Work
Most people who ask us about Brainspotting are not new to therapy. They have done the years. They have the insight. They can narrate their own history with more precision than most clinicians could. What they don't have is relief, and they are tired of paying for understanding that doesn't translate into change.
If that is where you are, the useful question is not whether Brainspotting works. It is whether it is the right next step for you specifically, right now.
That is a real assessment, and it is not one you should have to make from a website. Brainspotting reaches deep material quickly, which is exactly why it is not always the right place to start. If you are in acute crisis, newly dissociating, or without stable supports around you, stabilization comes first — and a practice worth trusting will tell you that instead of booking you.
So the call is genuinely a conversation, not a sales step. Fifteen minutes, no charge. You describe what you have already tried and what is still stuck. We tell you honestly whether Brainspotting is the right door, whether somatic work or IFS should come first, or whether what you need is somewhere other than here.
Melanie answers the phone herself. If Brainspotting is the right fit, she will connect you with Julia directly.
Call (201) 708-8448 or book a free 15-minute call.
About the author
Melanie Struble, LCSW, LCADC is the founder and clinical director of the Center for Mind Body Balance in Saddle River, NJ. A licensed clinical social worker and licensed clinical alcohol and drug counselor with more than 33 years in practice, she specializes in addiction, eating disorders, anxiety, and grief. She founded the Center in 2016 to bring licensed therapy and body-based care under one roof, and she still takes every discovery call personally.