A brain-body approach for trauma responses, anxiety, recurring relationship patterns, and specific fears
By Meg Reinis, LMFT | The Hive Therapy & Wellness Boutique
You can understand a pattern completely and still feel your body repeat it.
You may know that setting a boundary is healthy and still feel your throat close when you try. You may understand that your partner is not your former partner and still experience distance as danger. You may recognize that a relationship is not right for you and still feel pulled back toward it. You may know that a plane is statistically safe while your heart races and every part of you wants to escape.
This is not a failure of insight, intelligence, or willpower. It is a reminder that our reactions are not created by conscious thought alone.
Brainspotting is one of the methods I use at The Hive to work with the place where understanding ends and the body’s reaction begins.
Why I Chose to Learn Brainspotting
Before opening The Hive, I spent years working in addiction treatment and at the UCLA Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center. I sat with many women and men who had survived sexual assault and other deeply traumatic experiences.
I saw how much courage it took for people to seek help—and how difficult it could be to describe what had happened. Traditional talk therapy can be enormously valuable, but I also wanted to offer survivors a way to process trauma without requiring them to repeatedly tell every detail of their stories.
For some people, detailed retelling can feel overwhelming, exposing, or physically activating. Others may not have a complete narrative. They may remember sensations, fragments, images, or the way their bodies reacted without having words for the whole experience. A person should not have to produce a perfectly organized account of trauma in order to receive meaningful care.
I learned Brainspotting because I wanted another way to help clients approach what their bodies were still carrying—slowly, safely, and without forcing disclosure. I wanted to help people connect with physical responses that seemed to live beneath words, reduce the reactivity associated with trauma-linked triggers, and begin experiencing greater safety within their own bodies.
Brainspotting does not erase what happened, guarantee that someone will never feel activated, or make trauma work entirely free of discomfort. What it can offer is a paced, relational process in which the client remains in control. A person can share as much or as little of the story as feels useful. We can work with a sensation, emotion, image, belief, or body response without requiring a detailed verbal retelling.
This is why Brainspotting fits so naturally within The Hive. My work is not only about helping people understand their histories. It is about helping the mind and body discover that another response may now be possible.
What Is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a focused psychotherapy developed by psychologist David Grand in 2003. It grew out of his work with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR.
The method is based on a simple observation: where we look can affect what we feel.
During a Brainspotting session, the therapist helps the client identify a point in the visual field that appears connected with an emotionally or physically activating issue. This point is called a brainspot. The client maintains a soft gaze in that direction while noticing thoughts, emotions, images, sensations, impulses, memories, or subtle shifts in the body.
The therapist does not tell the client what the experience means or push it toward a predetermined conclusion. Brainspotting is often spacious and minimally directive. The therapist provides attunement, grounding, and careful support while the client’s system follows its own associations.
A session may include conversation, silence, emotion, physical sensation, changing breath, an unexpected association, or a gradual decrease in activation. There is no correct way to experience it and nothing the client must perform.
Why Would Eye Position Matter?
Our eyes do more than create visual pictures. Eye position and orienting are connected with attention, threat detection, balance, movement, and the way the brain maps what is happening around us.
When something captures our attention—a movement nearby, a threatening expression, or a reminder of a painful experience—the eyes, brain, and body orient together. This can happen before conscious reasoning has caught up.
Brainspotting proposes that a particular gaze position may provide an attentional access point to sensations, emotions, and memories associated with an issue. By holding that gaze while remaining connected to present-time safety and an attuned therapist, the client may be able to stay with the experience long enough for emotional processing, new associations, or a reduction in activation to occur.
Researchers have proposed possible roles for the midbrain, superior colliculus, sustained attention, interoception, and networks involved in threat and orienting. These are proposed mechanisms—not settled scientific conclusions. No scan can currently show that a therapist has located a discrete trauma “spot” in the brain, and it would be inaccurate to say that trauma is literally stored at one eye position.
What we can say is that emotional learning involves the brain and body together. Experience can shape attention, muscle tension, autonomic arousal, avoidance, and expectations of danger. Brainspotting combines focused visual attention, mindful body awareness, relational safety, and emotional processing in a way that many clients experience as different from ordinary conversation.
What Does It Mean to Feel Safe in Your Body?
After trauma, the body may react to reminders before the thinking mind recognizes what is happening. A tone of voice, facial expression, physical sensation, relationship conflict, medical procedure, place, smell, or moment of uncertainty can activate an old protective response.
That activation may feel like:
- A racing heart, tight chest, or held breath
- Nausea, heat, trembling, numbness, or dizziness
- Tightness in the jaw, throat, shoulders, or stomach
- An urge to escape, appease, argue, freeze, or shut down
- Mental blankness, tunnel vision, or feeling far away
- Hypervigilance and scanning for what may go wrong
- Difficulty recognizing or communicating personal boundaries
These reactions are not evidence that the body is broken. They are protective responses that may have become linked to particular cues, expectations, memories, or relationship dynamics.
Feeling safer in the body does not mean never becoming anxious or activated. It means developing a greater capacity to notice what is happening, remain connected to the present, recognize choices, recover after activation, and distinguish a current situation from an earlier danger.
During Brainspotting, we do not try to overpower the body or demand that it calm down. The client notices what is happening in manageable amounts while also remaining oriented to the therapist, the room, the present moment, and personal choice. Part of the person can be in contact with difficult material while another part knows: I am here now. I have support. I can pause.
Over time, clients may notice that a sensation changes intensity, an emotion rises and passes, an old belief no longer feels completely true, or a familiar trigger becomes less capable of taking over the present.
Brainspotting Without Telling Every Detail
One of the reasons I value Brainspotting is that the client does not have to narrate every aspect of an experience for us to work meaningfully.
A client might simply say, “I notice fear in my chest,” “I feel frozen when someone is angry,” or “There is something about that experience I am not ready to describe.” We can respect that boundary.
The client may silently hold the issue in mind while tracking sensation and emotion. They can tell me what they notice without explaining why—or choose not to verbalize the internal content at all. My role is to stay attuned, watch for signs of overwhelm or disconnection, support grounding, and help maintain a pace that feels workable.
This does not mean Brainspotting can never feel intense. Trauma therapy requires careful assessment, consent, preparation, and pacing. It may not be appropriate to approach highly activating material when someone is in crisis, significantly dissociated, medically or psychiatrically unstable, or without enough support outside the session.
The goal is not to dig for memories or force a cathartic release. The goal is to create enough safety and choice for processing to unfold without taking control away from the client.
What Can Brainspotting Help With?
Although Brainspotting is often associated with trauma, it can be used to explore a much wider range of concerns—especially when a person understands what is happening but continues to experience a strong emotional, physical, or automatic response.
In my practice, Brainspotting may be incorporated into work involving:
- Trauma and trauma-linked triggers
- Generalized anxiety, panic, and chronic hypervigilance
- Health anxiety and obsessive-compulsive symptoms
- Specific phobias, including fears related to flying, driving, medical procedures, needles, or enclosed spaces
- Relationship patterns that continue despite insight
- People-pleasing, overfunctioning, avoidance, anger, or emotional shutdown
- Fear of abandonment, rejection sensitivity, and attachment wounds
- Perfectionism, performance anxiety, and fear of making mistakes
- Shame, grief, and difficult experiences that feel unresolved in the body
- Patterns of behavior that feel difficult to interrupt or change
Brainspotting is not a single-method cure for any of these concerns. It is one tool that can be integrated into a larger treatment plan based on the client’s needs, stability, goals, and preferences.
For obsessive-compulsive disorder specifically, Exposure and Response Prevention, or ERP, remains the most established psychological treatment. Brainspotting should not be presented as a replacement for ERP. It may sometimes be used alongside established treatment to explore trauma, shame, fear, bodily activation, or other emotional material that intensifies the obsessive-compulsive cycle.
What connects these different concerns is often the gap between knowing and reacting: I know I am safe, but my body sounds the alarm. I know this behavior is not helping me, but I feel compelled to repeat it. I know what I want to say, but I shut down when the moment arrives. Brainspotting gives us a way to slow down that gap and work with the response as it is happening in the mind and body.
How Can Brainspotting Help With Recurring Patterns?
Brainspotting is not only used for events we traditionally label as trauma. It may also help explore protective patterns that developed in response to earlier relationships and experiences.
Avoidance may once have prevented conflict. People-pleasing may have protected connection. Emotional shutdown may have helped someone survive an overwhelming environment. Anger may have protected more vulnerable feelings. Overfunctioning may have created a sense of control when other people were unreliable.
The difficulty is that these strategies can continue after the original conditions have changed.
Someone may repeatedly:
- Choose emotionally unavailable partners
- Become highly activated by distance or delayed communication
- Avoid necessary conversations and later feel resentful
- Become angry when underneath they feel afraid, powerless, or ashamed
- Shut down when a partner needs emotional engagement
- Overwork, overprepare, or assume responsibility for everyone
- Abandon personal needs to preserve connection
- Freeze when asked to speak, perform, advocate, or decide
- Know what they want intellectually but feel unable to act on it
Talk therapy can help identify the pattern, understand its history, and develop different choices. Brainspotting can be added when the pattern carries a strong physical charge or happens faster than conscious thought.
Instead of asking only, “Why do I do this?” we can also explore, “What happens inside me at the exact moment this pattern begins?”
The throat tightening before a boundary, the stomach dropping when a partner pulls away, the rush of anger during conflict, or the compulsion to fix everything can become an entry point for deeper work.
Brainspotting for Anxiety and Specific Fears
Anxiety is not only worry. It is also a state of preparation in the body.
Brainspotting may be used to explore the trigger beneath a recurring anxiety response: fear of disappointing someone, losing control, being seen, making a mistake, experiencing conflict, or being abandoned.
Potential areas of work include:
- Panic reactions and fear of another panic attack
- Social or performance anxiety
- Health-related fears
- Anxiety connected with driving, flying, medical procedures, or public speaking
- Relationship anxiety, rejection sensitivity, and fear of abandonment
- Perfectionism, overcontrol, and fear of mistakes
- Anxiety following a frightening or destabilizing experience
Clinicians may also use Brainspotting as part of treatment for specific phobias. Brainspotting-specific research on phobias remains limited, while exposure-based cognitive behavioral therapy is among the best-established treatments. Depending on the person, Brainspotting may complement gradual exposure by addressing a frightening memory, reducing the intensity of activation, or helping someone prepare for real-world practice.
Good treatment is not about allegiance to one method. It is about selecting and integrating approaches according to the person, the problem, the evidence, and the client’s readiness.
What Does a Brainspotting Session Feel Like?
A session usually begins with conversation. We identify the issue, notice what feels most activating, and establish enough grounding and support to approach it safely.
You may be invited to rate the current intensity from zero to ten and notice where you feel it in your body. Using a pointer or another visual guide, I slowly move across your field of vision while you notice whether certain positions feel more connected to the issue.
Once we identify a spot, you hold a soft gaze there. You do not have to stare rigidly, suppress blinking, make anything happen, or force yourself to remember.
You might notice:
- Sensations that intensify, move, soften, or disappear
- Memories, words, images, or unexpected associations
- Tears, anger, grief, relief, or no strong emotion at all
- Yawning, swallowing, warmth, trembling, deeper breathing, or muscular release
- A realization that feels different from an intellectual insight
- Periods when very little seems to be happening
Quiet can be part of processing. So can uncertainty. I remain present, monitor pacing, and help keep the experience within a workable range.
Afterward, some people feel lighter, calmer, clearer, or less emotionally charged. Others feel tired, tender, quiet, or temporarily more open. Some notice no dramatic shift in the room but later discover that a familiar trigger produces a different response.
What Does the Research Say?
Brainspotting is a relatively new therapy, and its research base is much smaller than those of cognitive behavioral therapy, Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure, and EMDR.
A 2022 study found that one session of Brainspotting, EMDR, or body-scan meditation helped healthy adults process a distressing memory, with differences among the interventions in subjective distress and physiological measures. Earlier comparative and pilot studies have also reported reductions in PTSD, anxiety, and depressive symptoms.
The first randomized study comparing five Brainspotting sessions with treatment as usual enrolled 63 people but had only 27 completers. Both groups improved, and the Brainspotting group appeared to have better follow-up outcomes on some measures. However, the small final sample, high dropout rate, diagnostic uncertainty, and inconsistently defined comparison treatment substantially limit the conclusions.
The early findings are encouraging, and many clinicians and clients report meaningful experiences. But current science does not establish Brainspotting as superior to well-studied trauma treatments or confirm its precise neurological mechanism.
That does not mean the method has no clinical value. It means it should be offered transparently, skillfully, and as one part of an individualized treatment plan.
When the Mind Understands but the Body Still Reacts
Brainspotting can be especially meaningful for insightful people who continue to experience reactions that understanding alone has not changed.
The goal is not to silence the body, extract a memory, or treat a protective response as irrational. It is to listen closely enough to understand what the body has learned—and help it discover that greater safety, choice, and flexibility may now be possible.
Sometimes healing begins with the story. Sometimes it begins with the body. Often, we need both.
About The Hive
Meg Reinis, LMFT, is the founder of The Hive Therapy & Wellness Boutique. With more than 20 years of clinical experience—including work in addiction treatment and at the UCLA Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center—she works with adults and couples using relational, trauma-informed, somatic, and nervous-system-focused approaches, including Brainspotting.
This article is educational and is not medical advice or a substitute for individualized mental-health treatment. Brainspotting may not be appropriate for every person or at every stage of treatment. A qualified clinician can help assess fit, pacing, risks, and alternatives.
Research Referenced
- Corrigan F, Grand D, Raju R. Brainspotting: Recruiting the Midbrain for Accessing and Healing Sensorimotor Memories of Traumatic Activation. Medical Hypotheses. 2013. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23570648/
- Corrigan FM, Grand D. Brainspotting: Sustained Attention, Spinothalamic Tracts, Thalamocortical Processing, and the Healing of Adaptive Orientation Truncated by Traumatic Experience. Medical Hypotheses. 2015. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25665861/
- D’Antoni F, et al. A Comparative Study Between EMDR, Brainspotting, and Body Scan Meditation in the Processing of Distressing Memories. 2022. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35162166/
- Horton LM, Schwartzberg C, Goldberg CD, Grieve FG, Brdecka LE. Brainspotting: A Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. International Body Psychotherapy Journal. 2023–2024. https://ibpj.org/issues/articles/Horton, Schwartzberg, Goldberg, Grieve, Brdecka – Brainspotting.pdf
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD. First RCT of Brainspotting. CTU-Online. August 2024. https://www.ptsd.va.gov/publications/ctu_docs/ctu_v18n4.pdf