Private Practice Development- Why You Should Become Certified In Brainspotting & How To Integrate This Model Into Your Practice
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Brainspotting & Private Practice
When students graduate from clinical psychology and counseling programs, they usually quickly realize that they have learned nothing in terms of technical skills needed to be a successful clinician in the field of mental health. There are a range of techniques that one can choose from: cognitive behavioral therapy; motivational interviewing; dialectical behavioral therapy; rational emotive behavioral therapy; etc. But there is a new technique that is gaining incredible momentum in the field of mental health.
Brainspotting, which evolved from EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is becoming one of the most popular therapy interventions amongst clinicians. For today’s Private Practice Development issue, I am going to review with you what Brainspotting is, how it works, and why/how you should incorporate this into your work with your clients. I will also discuss how clinicians can specially market this for performers. First, let’s explore what Brainspotting is.
Brain Based Psychotherapy
Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy technique that uses the client’s field of vision to identify where unprocessed trauma is stored in the brain. This approach allows clients to directly bypass the areas of the brain that are not involved in regulation and access the areas that are involved with regulation and disregulation. Currently peer-reviewed research is limited on this approach, but when looking at the studies conducted on EMDR, we see very encouraging results from those reviews. This is important because Brainspotting has many of the same concepts as EMDR, but is widely considered to be a more fine-tuned, efficient model of EMDR.
When using Brainspotting with clients, the results can be fascinating. Many clients with complex PTSD have reported experiencing significant benefits from this approach compared to traditional therapy methods that they had tried. Another aspect of Brainspotting that differentiates it from other interventions is that this approach is one of the few that places a serious emphasis on the body. This is critical because emerging literature is very clear that psychological trauma has wide ranging effects on the client’s body, and to continue to ignore that by using therapy modalities that don’t focus on the body is to continue to ignore the science on this issue.
Multi-Use Intervention
The vast majority of traditional mental health interventions are focused on helping individuals identify distorted thinking patterns, and then addressing those distorted thinking patterns with more ‘logic’ based thought processes or reframed ideas. These trainings are usually cheap in price and marketed as ‘evidence-based’ treatment interventions which is why they are so widely used. The truth is that a vast amount of psychological research findings on these interventions are questionable at best and are not rooted in neuroscience.
As you are developing your practice and you are having difficulty deciding what you want to specialize in, ask yourself the following: by using traditional psychological interventions, why would potential clients select me over other clinicians? Brainspotting offers multiple benefits which include differentiating yourself from other therapists, effective treatment outcomes for clients (based on EMDR research outcomes), and finally utilizing neuroscience principles within the intervention’s framework, all of which will excite potential clients.
Brainspotting, Athletes & Sport Psychology
The vast majority of clinicians use Brainspotting for general populations (e.g. depression, anxiety, substance use, etc.). But the field of sport psychology is now emerging as an excellent avenue to become a certified Brainspotting therapist in. Part of the reason for this is that there is a large market of athletes and elite performers that experience ‘mental blocks’ during training and performance. Because it is so crucial for these performers to overcome this issue, the first resource they will seek out will usually be a sport psychologist or Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC) through AASP (Association for Applied Sport Psychology).
There are very few clinicians who specialize in working with athletes because the perception is that there would simply not be enough clients to work with. Again, this is a very serious misperception. There are many youth, collegiate and professional athletes who use sports as a way to develop themselves both personally and professionally. Many other issues arise through this process and and as previously mentioned one of the first types of mental health professionals that athletes turn to are sport psychologists and AASP CMPCs. Marketing Brainspotting to athletes will both benefit the health of your private practice and more importantly offer athletes the needed mental health intervention that they deserve in order to help them accomplish their mental health goals.
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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