Rethinking Trauma - Amazon S3 · 2018-06-22 · Rethinking Trauma rainspotting: An Evolving, Healing Science for Trauma ... almost like they are doing a soliloquy, but to a spot in

Brainspotting: An Evolving, Healing Science for Trauma David Grand, PhD - Main Session - pg. 1

Rethinking Trauma

Brainspotting: An Evolving, Healing Science for Trauma

the Main Session with

David Grand, PhD and Ruth Buczynski, PhD

National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine


Rethinking Trauma: David Grand, PhD


Table of Contents

(click to go to a page)

A Brain-Based and Body-Oriented Approach to Trauma ......................................... 3

Brainspotting and Visual Mapping .......................................................................... 4

How the Idea of Brainspotting Developed .............................................................. 5

Using EMDR, Visual Cues, and Creativity ................................................................ 8

How to Activate around a Specific Cue ................................................................... 12

Blinking: The Most Ubiquitous of Cues ................................................................... 14

The Processing that Happens after a Blink ............................................................. 15

Using Biolateral Sound to Enhance Brainspotting ................................................... 17

The Body as a Resource Model .............................................................................. 18

Finding Relevant Brainspotting through Gazespotting ............................................ 21

Brainspotting and the Dual-Attunement Frame ..................................................... 22

Why Brainspotting Works ....................................................................................... 23

About the Speakers ............................................................................................... 27


Dr. Buczynski: Hello everyone and welcome. I am Dr. Ruth Buczynski, a licensed psychologist in the State of

Connecticut and the President of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.

Tonight we will be talking with David Grand. He is a licensed clinical social worker with a PhD from

International University, and, more importantly, he is known for some very groundbreaking discoveries

where he has integrated some really important ideas.

I was very excited as I was preparing for this webinar, and I think you will be as you watch.

So, David, first of all, welcome. It is good to meet you and have you participating in this session – thanks for

being here!

A Brain-Based and Body-Oriented Approach to Trauma

Dr. Buczynski: I am going to attempt to introduce this by saying that you have worked on finding a way to

combine a brain-based approach with a body-oriented approach – a talking-treatment approach – sort of a

therapeutic cocktail.

We will take this piece by piece, but to just look at it as a whole, you use the patient’s visual field as a window

into their brain and into their unprocessed trauma. Can you just give us the big picture of what you mean by

that?

Dr. Grand: In brainspotting the watchword is “where you look affects how you feel.”

Every therapist who sits with their client is unconsciously observing everything about the client, and also

observing where the client looks when they speak. But generally

speaking, the therapist doesn’t consciously note it or consciously

make use of it.

Where we look is very much related to the orienting response and

Rethinking Trauma: David Grand, PhD


“You use the patient’s

visual field as a window

into their brain and into

their unprocessed trauma.”


the orienting reflex – literally we are constantly orienting in our visual field to our environment all the time.

Not just humans do this; all animals do, so this is a very primal sort of response.

Where we look at different times is not random – in fact, I believe it is never random. We are searching on

the outside as we are searching on the inside, so there is sort of a dual-orientation process that goes on

where we are orienting to our environment as we are also orienting to our

internal environment.

We could say that is true experientially, but it is also true neurobiologically.

With brainspotting, we look for relevant eye positions – and I say relevant eye positions in contrast to

random eye positions.

You could have a person look at any spot and start to process off of it, and just the focus of looking at that

spot would give some focus to their processing.

But we look for relevant eye positions: eye positions where we see reflexes in

the client’s eyes, or face, or even body.

These are eye positions where they just feel it the most – eye positions where a client just gets locked on it as

they are talking to us – almost like they are doing a soliloquy, but to a spot in space.

In all three cases, we see this as relevant, as opposed to just random.

Brainspotting and Visual Mapping

Dr. Buczynski: I just want to check: is it similar to Freud, where a candlestick means certain things and you

would say that if they look over here it means one type of thing and over there it means another type of

thing? Or is it all idiosyncratic to that particular patient?

Dr. Grand: First of all, we are looking to drop from the neocortical awareness into subcortical awareness.

Symbolism doesn’t exist in the subcortical brain, so it wouldn’t be that something represents something.

Something might have a literal meaning to that person and might look like an object that somehow is

associated with an experience or possibly a traumatic experience. In NLP – neuro-linguistic programming –

“Where we look

at different times

is never random.”

“With brainspotting,

we look for relevant

eye positions.”


there are more specific maps of where a patient looks, and NLP, as we know, is very valuable and successful,

but with brainspotting, it is different – each person has their own map, and this is a no-assumptions model.

We don’t go into it saying, “Well, if they’re looking up over there, that’s what

it is,” but it is, “If they’re looking up over there, I want what that is.”

So it is a completely open way of using the visual field, and in that context we

look for specifically not only the map of that client, but the map of the client at that time – because it

changes from time to time.

Dr. Buczynski: I am glad you said that, because that was my next question. Is it just this time and the next

time the person might look in the same direction, but you would explore

it all over again and it might mean something entirely new?

Dr. Grand: When you expect something, in our field you usually get

surprised, especially if you are open to the fact that patterns are always

changing.

If I am expecting a client – to find him in the same spot he did four

sessions in a row, it is probably going to be over here!

How the Idea of Brainspotting Developed

Dr. Buczynski: Now, you mention in your book that a lot of your work was developed after 9/11 with

survivors of that traumatic event. You actually live fairly near that part of New York City and you saw people

who were involved. Can you tell us about that?

Dr. Grand: 9/11 happened in 2001, and the discovery of brainspotting happened a few years after that.

Now you cite the fact that in my book, I write that there was a connection there, but it is important to note

that I didn’t make that connection until about a year ago while I was writing the book.

There is so much that happens for us on an unconscious or subcortical basis that either we never find out

about, or we find out about it days, weeks, months, or even years afterwards.

When you expect

something, you usually

get surprised, especially

if you are open to the

fact that patterns are

always changing.

“With brainspotting,

each person has

their own map.”


When I was writing the book, I started to just process – I processed a lot as I was writing – but one of the

things that I realized was that my discovery of brainspotting was dramatically affected by my exposure to

survivors of 9/11.

I live on Long Island – I have a Long Island office and a Manhattan office. Even from Long Island – and people

who live in the Tri-State area know you could see the towers burning from all directions – but I was on Long

Island on 9/11.

Five o’clock in the morning, I was driving into Manhattan because they asked me to be on television to

comment on the experiences there. I came in right in the middle of the night, and as I was driving over the

Queensboro Bridge, I saw in the darkness the smoke still rising

up there. It was a traumatic and transcendent experience for me

– just having that direct exposure.

In the year after 9/11, I did work with survivors – about 25 percent of my practice was volunteer work with

survivors. I had been doing humanitarian work around the United States and the world, and here it was in my

own backyard. So it was very, very personal for me.

I became connected to the Lutheran Disaster Response of New York, and they had so many firefighters and

police, and also contacts with other people who were in the buildings or around the buildings, so that I

started to make myself available.

What I actually saw in front of me was how the processing went – and

this happened after I’d been in practice for about 25 years, so I was a

seasoned therapist. I saw things I had never seen before: certain things

going so fast, certain things going so slowly, or going off in different directions.

Every pattern that I had seen and come to accept as the way human beings are was challenged.

And it wasn’t just for that year – it was for the years afterward as I continued to work with a lot of 9/11

survivors. In fact, occasionally, I still get someone who has never had any treatment who was right next to

the building or who lost a family member.

The experience so profoundly affected me – the exposure to these survivors and watching their treatment

process. Seeing things I had never seen before, I think, opened me up to possibility in a way that I hadn’t

been before.

“Every pattern that I had

seen and come to accept

as the way human beings

are was challenged.”

“My discovery of brainspotting

was dramatically affected by my

exposure to survivors of 9/11.”


When I was working with the ice skater, all of a sudden I saw this – I was a different person than I had been

the day before 9/11. A lot of my notions had been challenged, and on a deeper level, I was ready for it.

Dr. Buczynski: You refer to the ice skater – how about if you tell us about

the ice skater and what that experience led you to?

Dr. Grand: The story of my discovery of brainspotting with the ice skater is

more about the fact that the treatment had been successful as opposed to leading me to the idea. That the

treatment had been successful is what really caught my attention.

The ice skater was sixteen years old when we started. She was a championship-level ice skater, great in

practice but in competitions would fall apart.

What we always find with athletes is that traumatic experiences, on and off the field – or in this case the ice –

undermine an athlete’s performance.

In her case, that was very much so – she had had a lot of family strife, and her parents had divorced. Her

mother said to her, “The reason our family broke up was because of your ice skating,” which was deliberately

traumatizing.

Her mother never went to her practices or to her competitions.

With falls and physical injuries and things like that, she had lots of traumas on the ice as well.

I had been working with her for a year – every week in 90-minute

sessions – and I was combining a resource-based version of EMDR

with somatic experiencing and relational work all together.

She had pretty much worked out all of her problems, except for

one – a jump called the triple loop. Now, for championship

skaters, this is not that big of a jump – it is not that challenging, relatively speaking. For us, we couldn’t even

conceive of it, but for her, it was well within her ability.

She was just stuck on the triple loop, and I was doing some slow eye movements with her – I had her be

aware of just that point where she felt herself going off in the triple loop and what she was feeling in her

body at that instant.

“Traumatic experiences

undermine an athlete’s

performance.”

“I had her be aware of just

that point where she felt

herself going off in the triple

loop and what she was feeling

in her body at that instant.”


Just when I got right over here, her eyes started to wobble, incredibly

powerfully and then it just froze. When I hit that spot and I saw that, I

just got mesmerized by what was happening. It was like a hand grabbed

my wrist and held my finger in place.

For ten minutes – with that eye-lock and directly looking right at my

finger – she started to process in a way I’d never seen before – and I had seen some very intense processing

at that point.

There were two things that happened. One is that her traumas on the ice and personally that had never

come up in that year of intensive work came up and processed through – it was just one after the other after

the other like going through a flip chart.

But what really got my attention even more is that the traumas that we had worked to a zero-level SUDS

(Subjective Unit of Disturbance Scale) activation level reopened and

processed through to a deeper level.

That really got my attention because we had done some great work. I

thought those traumas had been resolved, but I came to understand that

we had only gone so far in her brain – in that subcortical brain – and there

were other remnants left behind.

Something about this eye position, this incredibly active eye position, helped her reach these deeper

traumas, bring them up and then process them through.

The next morning, she called me from the skating rink. She was very excited when she said, “I did a triple

loop with no problem, and I went out and I did it again and again and again, and it is just getting better and

better.” All of that caught my attention.

Using EMDR, Visual Cues, and Creativity

Dr. Buczynski: Now, for the people who aren’t familiar with your work, you just referred to something that

we haven’t really introduced yet, and that is some kind of visual cue that you are giving the patient. That is

not done in other treatments that I can think of.

“With that eye-lock and

directly looking right at

my finger – she started

to process in a way I’d

never seen before.”

“The traumas that we

had worked to a zero-

level SUDS activation

level reopened and

processed through to

a deeper level.”


What exactly is that visual cue and why do you do it? How did you come about doing that? It sounds like that

kind of cue wasn’t new in your work with her.

Dr. Grand: EMDR makes use of left-right stimulation, and the original and primary one is eye movements.

It is taught usually very fast and close to a client’s face – neither of which I find to be efficacious.

So, one of the things that I did in creatively modifying EMDR is that I slowed down the eye movements.

Instead of like this, I made it very, very smooth and more parasympathetic, as

opposed to sympathetically activating. Because it is such a powerful process,

you don’t need clients to get anymore activated than necessary.

But that was only what I was doing when I discovered brainspotting.

In brainspotting, we don’t use eye movement; we use eye fixation or eye focus.

The only time we move with a client is when we are looking for a brainspot – when we are looking into their

eyes or the client is observing their own felt sense, to see where the intensity really climbs up.

It is not so much the movement. The only reason we move is to find the spot. Once we find the spot, there is

no movement.

Some people ask, “What’s the difference between brainspotting and EMDR?”

There are many differences, but from a visual point of view, the difference is that EMDR works with eye

movement, and brainspotting works with no eye movement – it works

with eye fixation.

What we find is that when somebody is looking at a spot, especially a

spot that holds some resonance for them, whether it is visually or

emotionally or somatically, when they focus on a spot like that, the

processing is less active and dynamic, but is quieter and deeper, and it goes deeper and deeper.

It really becomes much more somatic without even trying to make it somatic.

This makes sense because our theory is that it is bypassing the neocortex and it is dropping down into the

subcortical areas of the brain – the limbic brain and the brainstem.

“EMDR works with

eye movement, and

brainspotting works

with eye fixation.”

“When they focus on a

spot, the processing is less

active and dynamic, but is

quieter and deeper.”


At that point, there’s no language and there’s no story – it is just all felt sense and body experience.

Dr. Buczynski: You are looking for visual cues – that’s the purpose of any eye movement, and those visual

cues are more like reflexes?

Dr. Grand: First of all, again, eye movement is not a part of brainspotting – I want to make that very clear.

You can’t find a spot without moving. That’s the exploration process. We are not looking for the movement –

we are looking for the spot, and once we find it…

Dr. Buczynski: What I am asking is what are you looking for?

Dr. Grand: In the first year of brainspotting, I tried to replicate the original experience.

After I had this feedback from the skater, I started to look, as I went slowly across the visual field, for similar

eye anomalies.

The original one was that wobble and the freeze, but I started to notice a universe of reflexive responses in

the eyes as we went across.

Any time I’d find one, I’d stop at it, and I would just encourage the client to mindfully observe their internal

process.

I saw that every time I did this, there was a different quality to the processing than with the eye movement.

With the processing, they seemed to get stiller and to go deeper and

deeper and deeper.

This original way was looking for reflexes in the eyes, but also what I

noticed – it is not just the eyes – it is the whole face.

I’d get to a point and the person would lick their lips, or tilt their head, or

sniff – any reflex like that, and I would stop and I would see something changed when I stopped directly

where the eyes were looking as that happened.

Even beyond that, I would see reflexes in the body or in the hands – it is kind of hard to watch somebody’s

feet and face at the same time, but sometimes our peripheral vision can pick this up.

I had a client who, when I went across like this, would cue me with his fingers. Every time his fingers wiggled,

I would stop and then he would go into this deep processing.

“The original was that

wobble and the freeze,

but I started to notice

a universe of reflexive

responses in the eyes.”


The original version started with observing reflexes from the outside – that is why I call it outside window,

because we are looking into the client’s eyes – but it expanded from the reflexes of the eyes to the face, and

then to the whole body.

Dr. Buczynski: We do it in many different therapies – going from a focusing perspective into a felt sense, or

from a sensorimotor processing you are looking for a directed mindfulness to what they are experiencing and

getting curious about that…

Dr. Grand: Yes, brainspotting is built on the shoulders of giants…

somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, focusing, and

ultimately back to psychoanalysis – which is the ultimate in the

listening process.

Dr. Buczynski: There’s also Wilhelm Reich – and really it sounds

very similar to when we were doing Gestalt therapy years ago. We would get past the story and what people

were talking about and into their body, asking them to get curious about something and staying with it. So it

is nice to hear you say that it is built on the giants.

Dr. Grand: At my trainings, I get people with all kinds of backgrounds, and when they say to me, “Oh, this is

like hypnosis,” or, “Oh, this is like bioenergetics,” I take it as a compliment.

If it is something I haven’t studied and they are seeing a similarity there, then for me that is a reinforcement

or enhancement of just what I have developed and continue to develop.

Dr. Grand: There is one point I want to make: I do a lot of work with creativity – I study creativity, and

creativity is not coming up with something new.

Creativity is coming up with one or two different things that are out there that have never been put together

before and seeing how they go together and what happens differently from that.

In that context, it’s more of a creativity sort of experience – I took a variety of things – it wasn’t even

consciously – and put them together and found something new.

“Brainspotting is built on the

shoulders of giants: somatic

experiencing, sensorimotor

psychotherapy, focusing, and

ultimately back to

psychoanalysis.”


How to Activate around a Specific Cue

Dr. Buczynski: To go on, you talk the person needing to be activated around a particular cue. What do you

mean by that?

Dr. Grand: In brainspotting, we have developed our own language so that we can have specificity for what

we are doing. The language has to match the procedures.

In other techniques, they talk about distress or disturbance. In brainspotting,

we use activation – that’s the word for it.

Activation is a generic word – sometimes one person can be activated and

you say, “Are you feeling distressed?” and they say “No” because it doesn’t fit their lexicon of the moment.

We want it to be as generic as possible for anything that a person is experiencing.

Activation is also a brain-body word; it is not just an experiential term – it has to do with, “How much are you

feeling it in your body right now?”

There are some clients who can’t articulate what they’re feeling and

they’ll say, “I don’t know what it is, but I’m feeling it.” We want to

make sure we catch this activation.

Brainspots, or the relevant eye positions, are different depending on if a person is activated or is not

activated.

When a person is activated or activates themselves – and I will talk about that in a moment – literally the

configuration of brain-body activity is different than when they are not activated.

We know this from MRI scans. If you do an MRI scan and you take

the baseline and then you have them think about the trauma, you

see certain areas of the brain light up when they think about the

trauma, and other areas are very quiet.

When we ask a person if they are activated, or when we use that term, literally, we are looking for that same

activation that shows up on brain scans, and when they find that eye position, it correlates to that specific

activity in the brain which is felt in the body.

“In brainspotting, we

use activation – that’s

the word for it.”

“We want it to be as generic

as possible for anything that

a person is experiencing.”

“When a person is activated,

the configuration of brain-

body activity is different than

when they are not activated.”


When a person who is dissociated is talking about an issue, you want to make sure that when you go to find

the eye positions that they are activated. If that’s the case, we will ask them, “Are you activated around this

issue now?” Most of the time people will say yes, but sometimes a person says no.

Dr. Buczynski: So you must have to teach your language to people. I mean, if you asked me that before

today, I would have said, “Excuse me?”

Dr. Grand: Yes, oh yes. Psychoeducation and brain education are very essential to brainspotting.

If a person says they are not activated, we give a simple instruction

and say, “I want you to go inside, around this issue, and do anything

you can to activate yourself.”

When a person says, “What does that mean?” I say, “We spend all of our lives trying to avoid the things that

make us feel lousy, but now I want you to go right at it and make yourself feel lousy.”

They then understand go inside – usually they will close their eyes – and they activate themselves.

Again, we look at everything as neurophysiological – in doing it, they are activating the neural networks and

the body experience that are associated with whatever it is that we are working on.

Dr. Buczynski: Is there any other way that you can determine this, other than asking the patient if they are

activated? Do you just go with what they say?

Dr. Grand: With brainspotting, we always go with what the client says.

Brainspotting is very client-centered. If I observe clients and they look activated, but they say they are not,

then they are not. It is not my impression from the outside – it is what the client is feeling from the inside.

Sometimes clients will look as cool as a cucumber, and you will ask their activation level, their SUD

(Subjective Unit of Disturbance) level from zero to ten, and they will say it

is a nine. In some other techniques, there are different things to watch for

such as skin color.

I have found that the internal universe of the client is very different from

what it looks like from the outside.

“Psychoeducation and

brain education are very

essential to brainspotting.”

“Brainspotting is very

client-centered.”

“I have found that the

internal universe of the

client is very different

from what it looks like

from the outside.”


Blinking: The Most Ubiquitous of Cues

Dr. Buczynski: You believe that blinking can be one of the most ubiquitous of cues. Can you tell us more

about that?

Dr. Grand: First of all, there has been a lot of study of the blinking phenomenon, so this is not just my

observation – we know this from the science.

There is a Japanese neurophysiologist who did an exhaustive research study about what happens when a

person blinks.

Blinking is very much related to what’s going on in the brain, and especially if a person is activated, then

there is more blinking – more relevant blinking.

When I was looking for all these eye positions, I would notice the clients

blinking and I would notice how they blinked.

Sometimes it was just a regular blink; sometimes it was a double blink; sometimes it was a hard blink;

sometimes I saw what I call a baby blink where the person’s eyes don’t completely close….

I am a natural experimenter – it is part of my science and creativity coming together. After doing

brainspotting for some months, the idea just came to me: “Stop on a blink.” So I went across, the client

blinked and, lo and behold, the processing seemed to go deeper and further.

I was teaching a training session in Germany, and there was a woman

who volunteered for the demonstration of outside window – again,

reading reflexes from the outside.

She had profound trauma issues with the fact that her father had been a member of the SS and her mother

was one-quarter Jewish…and it popped into my head to try this out.

I said to this woman and to the students there: “I am going to stop at the first blink that I see. Then we are

going to see what happens from there.”

She was activated – it was clearly a nine or a ten – and went across like this, just a blink, right like that –

stayed there for twenty minutes. The processing that happened off of that blink spot was unbelievable.

“The client blinked and

the processing seemed to

go deeper and further.”

“Blinking is very much

related to what’s

going on in the brain.”


When she finished, she was at zero SUD activation – and not just that, but she had had certain insights. She

felt like she had integrated the experience and found even positives in her father, who again, was so crucial

to her healing process – he wasn’t totally a monster, which she needed to feel for herself. That was just off of

one blink.

Now, you might ask, “Why would a blink be so profound?” People think that you blink because there are

irritants in your eyes, or you blink to lubricate your eyes – and that is part of it.

But when we blink, we go from eyes open to eyes closed to eyes open again. Because it is so fast, we don’t

give much relevance to the fact that a person momentarily has their eyes closed.

But there’s a tremendous difference in the brain when the

visual stream is coming in and when the visual stream is not

coming in – when the eyes are closed.

When the person opens their eyes again, after the blink, they

are literally at a different place than they were before.

So you can see how a blink could be a cue for this. It goes along with how film editing happens. When you

watch a well-edited film, you never notice that the film goes from cut to cut to cut to cut to cut.

A blink matches that same process: every time we close our eyes in a blink,

it is like a film editing cut.

Our brain is editing things out just to keep it organized and to keep it

flowing. Blinks, I found, are profound manifestations of where things are in a person’s visual field.

The Processing that Happens after a Blink

Dr. Buczynski: Tell us a little bit more about the processing that goes on after the blink.

Dr. Grand: In brainspotting we have a setup process. The person identifies what they want to work on –

usually it is trauma-based. The person determines how activated they are – zero to ten – and where they feel

the activation in their body. After that, we look for the brainspot or the eye position.

“Every time we close

our eyes in a blink, it is

like a film editing cut.”

“There’s a tremendous difference

in the brain when the visual

stream is coming in and when the

visual stream is not coming in.”


So with a blink, a person would have gone through all those steps – and I am going to bring out my pointer

here, because this is what we use in brainspotting – you can’t hold your finger up that long.

Let’s say I found a blink, just like I did with this German therapist; from there, we just guide the person to

observe their internal process – it is mindfulness essentially, and brainspotting is a mindfulness-based

approach.

Brainspotting is what we call focused mindfulness – a person is activated, they are aware of where they are

feeling the activation in their body, they know what the issue is, and they

are on a spot that has some activity there.

All the focusing that leads to that point means that the mindfulness is

more focused as opposed to being more open.

We just have the person observe wherever things go and, as in

mindfulness, wherever it goes is where it goes. We trust the brain – we

trust the person’s instincts.

We know that by doing this, they are dropping down from their neocortical awareness into subcortical

awareness and subcortical processing.

We also know that trauma is held more in the deeper areas of the brain, so brainspotting gives us a chance to

locate and process, in a focused way with focused mindfulness, the deeply buried traumas that are usually

held in a state of dissociation.

Dr. Buczynski: So far we have been mostly indicating a horizontal cueing. Do you ever use a vertical or…?

Dr. Grand: Technique is something that needs a lot of study and a lot of refinement. So far we have been

talking about outside window, where you are really looking for reflexes.

We have to be time-efficient in what we do. If we were to explore the full visual field – horizontally the X axis,

or vertically the Y axis and looking for those spots – we’d be doing it for

the whole session.

So we do that more in what we call inside window. In inside window,

we are looking not for where we see that activity or reflexive activity,

but where the client feels the activation the most.

“In inside window, we are

looking not for where we

see that activity, but

where the client feels the

activation the most.”

“Brainspotting gives us

a chance to locate and

process, with focused

mindfulness, the

deeply buried traumas

that are usually held in

a state of dissociation.”


We will say, “Is it more to your left? Or is it in the middle or more to your right?” When we find it on the

horizontal plane, that’s when we start to explore, “Do you feel it more above eye level? Or is it at eye level or

is it below?”

That is a lot more time-efficient because, since the client is identifying it from the inside, you can find it more

quickly and with more specificity.

Using Biolateral Sound to Enhance Brainspotting

Dr. Buczynski: This might be a good place to talk about biolateral sound. What is that? How did you find it,

and is that something you started using and then stopped? Or are you still using it?

Dr. Grand: When I studied EMDR and really developed myself into an expert in EMDR, I was surprised that

biolateral sound was as effective – or it appeared as effective – as bilateral eye movements or eye tracking.

The only way that it was delivered in EMDR at the time was

through a sound box that a person put on and they’d hear tones –

annoying, metronomic tones going back and forth from ear to ear.

Again, as an experimenter, I figured I would try it out – and I saw it

was effective.

Then very soon afterwards, I thought that if this is effective, imagine if we had, drawing from sound therapy

and sound healing, soothing sounds, nature sounds, and gentle music, and instead of just metronomic, we

moved it across, panning it left and right.

So, I went out and made my first – not a CD back then – but an audio cassette (that sort of dates it in time). I

went into a sound studio with a musician, we recorded different music until we got it right, and then hand-

panned it back and forth. It was not metronomic – it was all done by hand.

The sound was also slower and gentler. I had always felt that EMDR needed to be slowed and gentled down –

and we found that this sound was very effective for processing.

I’ve developed this over the years, made eight different CDs, and they are used around the world.

So this is the main way I was doing EMDR when I discovered brainspotting. Actually, for some reason I was

“I had always felt that EMDR

needed to be slowed and

gentled down – and we found

that this sound was very

effective for processing.”


working with the skater without the sound, and once I discovered brainspotting and started using it, I didn’t

have the clients listen to the sound anymore.

After a while, a couple of my clients said, “David, why can’t I listen to the sound?” I thought “Oh, okay” – the

client is always right. They put the headphones on, kept it low volume

as we did the brainspotting, and it was even more effective.

Something about the sound seemed parasympathetically grounding,

and it brought some of that biolaterality into brainspotting. We kept the

volume low so that it was like background.

With most of our clients, unless they are extremely reactive and highly, highly dissociative, it tends to be an

enhancement to the process.

When I have my CD player and headphones out and the client comes in, before we start working, they’ll put

the headphones on and we’ll go through all the steps – find the brainspot and process.

The Body as a Resource Model

Dr. Buczynski: You came to an idea or an approach that you refer to as the resource model. Can you tell us

what that is and how you discovered that you needed to add that?

Dr. Grand: I had been developing that while I was studying EMDR.

In fact, I met Peter Levine and he critiqued EMDR as being too activating. The first time I heard that from him,

it was a bit of a surprise.

He was very generous with his time – I was at a conference where we were both teaching and in that

context, I not only tried to gentle things down, but really started using the body as a resource.

In EMDR, the concept is: all the steps and the protocol lead to where you feel that in your body – but that’s

body activation.

Then, you go into the eye movements, and that tends to be very activating.

So I took from Levine the idea of a body resource. After having the activation in the body identified, then I’d

“The sound seemed

parasympathetically

grounding, and it brought

some of that biolaterality

into brainspotting.”


identify where the person felt the calmest and most grounded in the body.

For a lot of clients who just got too activated too fast by EMDR, they

were now able to not only use EMDR but use it effectively.

So that was part of my developing a resource model for EMDR and a

creative application of resourcing.

For me, creativity and healing go absolutely together, and it fits naturally that a person’s creative abilities and

body experience are a resource – the body and creativity go together.

Now, with brainspotting, I found that most of my clients didn’t need to use

the resource model or body resource, but some of them did.

In that context, instead of saying, “Where do you feel the activation in your

body?” we’d identify, “Where do you feel the calmest and most grounded in

your body?”

From there – as we do with inside window – we find the eye position that goes along with the calm,

grounded feeling or the body resource they are feeling.

When the person is aware of where they feel the most grounded in their body, you find the spot, the eye

position, where they feel the most grounded.

Putting this together was very effective for the clients who got too overwhelmed too fast.

I just want to make one observation about brainspotting: we look at the psychological concept of the window

of tolerance.

When you do therapy with trauma survivors, especially people with

childhood trauma, early trauma, and repeated trauma, it is crucial, as we

all know, to work with that client in their window of tolerance.

What I have found with the focus of brainspotting as opposed to movement or anything else – is that literally

being locked on a spot in space helps to widen and strengthen the window of tolerance.

Clients were able to do all kinds of work with brainspotting that they couldn’t do with other therapies.

“A person’s creative abilities

and body experience are a

resource – the body and

creativity go together.”

“Being locked on a spot

in space helps to widen

and strengthen the

window of tolerance.”

“We find the eye

position that goes

along with the calm,

grounded feeling or

the body resource

they are feeling.”


A brainspot is an enhancement or a support to the window

of tolerance.

But diagnostically – and we all know that there are some

clients who just have severe attachment disruption and

dissociation coming from early in life – the basic model of brainspotting does not keep them in the window of

tolerance – even the expanded, strengthened window of tolerance.

That’s where the resource model comes in.

We do this diagnostically of course. You take a person’s history

and you get a sense of who they are and how they react to things

– but as they are processing, you will see some clients just don’t

need anything else, and they just go straight into it and right through it while others sometimes find it much

more challenging.

The biggest marker is the post-processing: if a client leaves a session, and then for the next two/three/four

days, they are still overwhelmed and they haven’t been able to contain themselves, diagnostically that tells

us that the client needs more grounding, needs more of the resource model – the body resource and the

resource spot.

Dr. Grand: We use it a lot, and what’s interesting is that there are some clients who you think are solid –

their foundation is solid and they have a high level of functioning

and you hit a brainspot with them, and they fall apart. It is the

exception but it can happen: the person you think can tolerate

activation with no problem really can’t.

On the flipside of the coin, you will find some clients who have horrendous histories who show all kinds of

dissociative symptoms, and when they go on the spot – even an activation spot – they just organize around it

and come together.

The diagnosis doesn’t end with the discussion – the history taking and the symptom evaluation; we really get

a much clearer diagnosis once a person starts processing off of a spot.

“Clients were able to do all kinds of

work with brainspotting that they

couldn’t do with other therapies.”

“It is the exception but it can

happen: the person you think

can tolerate activation with

no problem really can’t.”

“We really get a much clearer

diagnosis once a person starts

processing off of a spot.”


Finding Relevant Brainspotting through Gazespotting

Dr. Buczynski: Let’s talk about gazespotting. That is something that you write about in your book as yet

another way to go beyond the tools that you had started with. Can you tell us what gazespotting is and how

you developed it?

Dr. Grand: We have three main ways of finding relevant eye positions in brainspotting: outside window with

reflexes, inside window with felt sense of the client, and the third way which is gazespotting.

Now, gazespotting is the one I discovered last and it the one I should have discovered first because it is the

most obvious.

Again, I am a trained psychoanalyst, so back in my own analysis I would lie on the couch, and there was a

crack on the ceiling that I would look at – but I didn’t look at the whole crack; I looked at one spot. The whole

time I was in analysis, I was on that one spot.

I was gazespotting while I was in analysis, and I found that out 25 years

later! But with all humor aside, wherever a person looks, it is not only

relevant, it is highly relevant.

Sometimes people notice this in another person – and sometimes we will notice it in ourselves – a person will

be talking – or we’ll be talking – and we’re talking to a spot on the wall instead of looking at the person we’re

talking to.

People can be talking very passionately, and they are talking as if there is somebody or something over there.

Or sometimes you will just be in a state of contemplation – just like in the statue of The Thinker. You just see

that you were looking at a spot on the carpet, and when you come out of it after ten minutes or so, you say,

“Why was I looking over there?”

That is a neocortical question. It is like, “There can’t be any reason; there’s no reason why I looked at that

spot on the floor.”

But it is an issue of orienting – we are visually orienting to our environment all the time.

Sometimes a given spot in space will give us access – it will help us to feel connected, and that feeling is all

deeply unconscious.

“Wherever a person looks

is highly relevant. We are

visually orienting to our

environment all the time.”


I was doing therapy with a client, and he was working on issues having to do with his relationship with his

wife that were clearly going back to his relationship with his mother.

He was just talking to this spot, like this. After about five minutes, I realized, “He’s just been talking to this

spot for five minutes,” and I said to him, “You know what? Could you see that spot you’ve been looking at?

Continue looking over there. Don’t speak for about a minute, and let’s just see where things go on the

inside.” He just went into a very deep, unique kind of processing.

So gazespotting, from that moment on – as I tried it with other clients and found good results – is another

way to look at how we orient to our visual field.

Gazespotting is spontaneous, and that means more subcortical –

right brain, limbic, brainstem.

In working with clients, we are noticing where they look, and

then we are guiding them to just stay fixated on the spot. There is something about that spot that gives

access to the deeper neurobiology and helps to process with greater focus.

We talked about activation and resource – and gazespotting is somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t usually go

along with that sense of groundedness in the feet or the body, and it usually doesn’t have that higher level of

activation that you find with outside or inside window spots.

Gazespotting is like a different way of entering into the same network – that is why we use it as a separate

form of brainspotting.

Brainspotting and the Dual-Attunement Frame

Dr. Buczynski: Let’s talk about your best sense of why this works.

Dr. Grand: I’ve developed a concept called the dual-attunement frame. Brainspotting is always in a state of

evolution and I’m evolving with it.

I’ve trained many people, so we now have many experts, and we are all kind of evolving together.

But at a certain point I realized that it was the relational attunement at the same time as the neurobiological

“In working with clients, we are

noticing where they look, and

then we are guiding them to

just stay fixated on the spot.”


attunement through the field of vision – these two attunements coming together – that created the frame in

which a client could heal.

In brainspotting, we put the relational attunement first, and this is one

of the things that is unusual about brainspotting.

Most technical approaches do not identify the relationship – maybe it

is assumed that you know how to form a relationship and attune to

your clients, but most other technical approaches – somatic, neurotechnical – do not put the primacy on the

attunement to the client in the moment.

But in brainspotting, we do – we identify it, and from the first moment of our phase one training, when

people walk in, that is what we point out.

Therapists, like all people, are attracted to shiny objects. When you start getting into this kind of work, it is

very fascinating, and it brings out the child in us who likes to play and experiment.

But the moment you think that, “This is what’s doing it” as opposed to your presence with that person, and

attuning in an empathic, mindful way, you have lost your way.

Brainspotting is meant to help focus and deepen that relational

attunement. That is why we call it the dual-attunement frame.

This is what we believe happens in brainspotting. The therapist

doesn’t have the knowledge, the therapist doesn’t have the information, and the therapist doesn’t lead the

client into healing – the healing happens inside the client’s brain and body, and we set this dual-attunement

frame to the ideal so that that self-healing can happen spontaneously.

Why Brainspotting Works

Dr. Buczynski: But, David, there are a lot of practitioners, very much attuned to their patient, who don’t use

any technical approach.

What does brainspotting add? What do you think makes brainspotting work?

“The relational attunement

at the same time as the

neurbiological attunement

created the frame in which

a client could heal.”

“Brainspotting is meant to

help focus and deepen that

relational attunement.”


I understand and I am happy to hear you say that the relationship, the attunement to the relationship is a

large part of it, because I think that’s true. In regard to other things that seem to work, I think, “Well, that

could be the relationship that’s making the difference, but is there any more to it than that?”

Dr. Grand: I’ll tell you a story: Last week I was seeing a client who I’ve seen for about four months, who does

great with brainspotting.

She came in and she started to talk to me, and I started to attune to what she was saying. Instead of going for

the eye position, it was a good, attuned, talk-therapy session.

About five minutes from the end of the session, she said to me, “How come you didn’t use the pointer?” I

said, “Well, you just kind of went on a roll and I went with you.” She said, “You know what? I don’t think I got

as much out of this session as when we use the pointer.”

That wasn’t the first time that happened to me. Now, remember, I have been a therapist for many decades,

and I am well-trained and very experienced, and I’ve been very successful using the talk-therapy modality.

But what she identified – and this was far from the first time it has been identified for me – is that with

brainspotting, something happens for a client.

In their own experience, they just go further and deeper, and they get a different kind of resolution that they

don’t get just by the talking.

So for me, it is the research of my own office. I am always trying out different things and experimenting, and I

wonder sometimes, if I am not using a brainspot, is the client missing something from their experience.

Not every time are they missing something, but a lot of the time – perhaps most of the time – they are. So

there is something about brainspotting, and what is it?

We are constantly orienting to our environment, and we

orient left-right, up-down, and close-far.

In the wild, animals have to be attuned to potential

predators. The predators may be more on this side or they may be on that side, and if they are far enough so

that the animals can run or escape, then that distance or proximity is okay.

But once the predator encroaches to a certain level into their environment – in that orienting response – the

“With brainspotting, they just go

further and deeper, and they get a

different kind of resolution that

they don’t get just by the talking.”


animal starts to feel it in the body. Their limbic system starts to go and they just take off – and if one takes off

running, they all take off running.

There is something very powerful about the orienting

response for all humans, especially in the context of trauma.

Trauma usually happens from one direction or another. A lot

of times for someone who was abused as a child, the most

activating spot is looking up, because that’s where they

looked at the father who was screaming at them or about to hit them.

Or if people have been in a car accident, I’ve seen them just go into the position of how they were at the

point of impact.

So there is a very physiological way of looking at and understanding human experience as it has been

registered in the memory systems of the brain, and brainspotting appears to be a way to access it.

I want to say one more thing: I teach the uncertainty principle. That’s from Heisenberg and physics – which is

that, as therapists, we need to know that we are working in a state of uncertainty all the time and the

moment we think we know why something is happening or what we should do, we go off, we fall out of

attunement – because we can’t know. The brain is too complex – it is inside of the person and most of it is

subcortical and unconscious.

So when you ask me a specific question like this, my ultimate answer is we really don’t know for sure. We are

looking at this clinically, we are looking at this scientifically, and we are looking at the brain to try to

understand this.

I am pretty convinced that there is a part of this that we are never

going to fully understand.

What we know just really comes in the tracking, the following, and the

attuning to our clients, wherever they go. And a lot of that is even in a

black box that we don’t have access to – or we may have access to with eye position and attunement, but we

don’t have any conscious access to it.

Basically, we follow the client, wherever they go. I like to use the metaphor that the client is the comet, and

“There is a very physiological way

of looking at and understanding

human experience as it has been

registered in the memory systems

of the brain, and brainspotting

appears to be a way to access it.”

“What we know just really

comes in the tracking, the

following, and the

attuning to our clients,

wherever they go.”


the therapist tries to get in the tail of the comet to follow wherever

the comet goes.

When we are in that tail, we are attuned. But when we lose

attunement, we fall out of the tail of the comet and we have to

work our way back into it. So that’s the way I look at it.

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks! I am afraid we are out of time. I know you are continually working on this, and it is so

exciting to hear about it and to know that you and your colleagues didn’t just develop it, but that you are

modifying and working on it more and more as you go along – it is not finished, but something in process.

I just want to thank you for your work, and also for bringing it here and sharing it with us.

Dr. Grand: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

“The client is the comet, and

the therapist tries to get in

the tail of the comet to follow

wherever the comet goes.”


David Grand, PhD is a psychotherapist, writer,

lecturer, performance coach, and humanitarian famous

for the discovery and development of the

internationally acclaimed Brainspotting method which

brings about lifechanging breakthroughs at “Warp

Speed.” Grand is renowned for his groundbreaking

discoveries and advancements in the arenas of healing

trauma and enhancing performance and creativity. His

Brainspotting method and BioLateral Sound are now

used by thousands of therapists on every continent

seeking to break through the limitations of talk therapy.

Dr. Grand has a roster of clients that include many successful television, film and stage

actors, professional athletes, business leaders, and survivors of profound traumas (including

9/11,Katrina and Iraq/ Afghanistan combat veterans) who have sought out his powerful

methods as a means to realize personal, professional and creative breakthroughs.

Ruth Buczynski, PhD has been combining her commitment to mind/body medicine

with a savvy business model since 1989. As the founder

and president of the National Institute for the Clinical

Application of Behavioral Medicine, she’s been a leader

in bringing innovative training and professional

development programs to thousands of health and

mental health care practitioners throughout the world.

Ruth has successfully sponsored distance-learning

programs, teleseminars, and annual conferences for

over 20 years. Now she’s expanded into the ‘cloud,’

where she’s developed intelligent and thoughtfully

researched webinars that continue to grow exponentially.

About the speakers . . .

Documents

Rethinking Trauma - Amazon S3 · 2018-06-22 · Rethinking Trauma rainspotting: An Evolving, Healing Science for Trauma ... almost like they are doing a soliloquy, but to a spot in