What To Know About Brainspotting Therapy
About the Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns 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!
Introduction: What To Know About Brainspotting Therapy
When athletes go to work with sport psychologists, it is usually to either overcome a mental block or achieve peak mental performance. Most sport psychologists focus on using interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy or motivational interviewing because they believe that when athletes present with negative thinking patterns, the solution is to overload these thought processes with more logic-based thinking or better insight. However, a vast majority of mental health research strongly suggests that these issues are not due to lack of insight.
Because this is the case, many athletes have been frustrated with the field of sport psychology and what it has to offer. However, there are some sport psychologists who have begun to implement trauma-informed psychotherapy approaches into their work. One of these interventions that has gained significant traction within the sports world is Brainspotting. Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy intervention that utilizes the athlete’s field of vision to process and resolve issues such as trauma & even sports-related mental blocks. Let’s dive deeper into what this approach is and how it works!
Part I. Benefits Of Brainspotting Therapy
Brainspotting is effective for a wide variety of emotional and somatic issues. Brainspotting is particularly effective with trauma-based situations, helping to identify and heal underlying trauma that contributes to anxiety, depression and other behavioral conditions. It can also be used with performance and creativity enhancement. Brainspotting gives the therapist access to both brain and body processes. Its goal is to bypass the conscious, neocortical thinking to access the deeper, subcortical emotional and body-based parts of the brain. Clients often fall into two categories. The first being those who are seeking therapy for the first time. The second are people who have been in therapy before who are seeking a therapist with new techniques. With focus and precision, one can find with eye positions (Brainspots) where the trauma, anxiety, depression or behavioral problems are held in the brain. This allows the brain to process from the inside out and from the bottom up.
Because all of my clients are athletes that compete at all levels of sports such as NASCAR cup series drivers, IndyCar Drivers, WRC Rally drivers, NFL players, youth/college baseball players and collegiate endurance athletes, almost all of the individuals have sought my services to either overcome the Yips or achieve peak performance flow states. Of all the sport psychology-based interventions I have used with these populations over the years, I have found Brainspotting to be the most effective. Specific examples of mental training achievements through the use of Brainspotting include but are not limited to the following: overcoming the Yips (golf, baseball, and gymnastics Twisties), clearing trauma, stopping over-thinking, eliminating muscle guarding that was a result of sports injuries, achieving flow states and hyper focus. But as important as it is to know about the potential benefits, we also need to understand how this mental training intervention actually works.
Part II. How Brainspotting Therapy Works
Brainspotting is a powerful, focused treatment method that works by identifying, processing and releasing core neurophysiological sources of emotional/body pain, trauma, dissociation and a variety of other challenging symptoms. Brainspotting is a simultaneous form of diagnosis and treatment, enhanced with Biolateral sound, which is deep, direct, and powerful yet focused and containing. Brainspotting functions as a neurobiological tool to support the clinical healing relationship. There is no replacement for a mature, nurturing therapeutic presence and the ability to engage another suffering human in a safe and trusting relationship where they feel heard, accepted, and understood. Brainspotting gives us a tool, within this clinical relationship, to neurobiologically locate, focus, process, and release experiences and symptoms that are typically out of reach of the conscious mind and its cognitive and language capacity. Brainspotting works with the deep brain and the body through its direct access to the autonomic and limbic systems within the body’s central nervous system. Brainspotting is accordingly a physiological tool/treatment which has profound psychological, emotional, and physical consequences. In summary, the reason this intervention is so effective is because of how it is rooted in a trauma-informed perspective. To better understand this, we can refer to one of the leading experts in the world on trauma & PTSD who provides an excellent description of the trauma-informed perspective by explaining the process of how the brain stores trauma.
In the book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk provides the following explanation: the emotional brain has first dibs on interpreting incoming information. Sensory information about the environment and body state received by the eyes, ears, touch, kinesthetic sense, etc. converges on the thalamus where it is processed and then passed on to the amygdala to interpret its emotional significance. This occurs with lightning speed. If a threat is detected, the amygdala sends messages to the hypothalamus to secrete stress hormones to defend against that threat. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls this the low road. The second neural pathway, the high road, runs from the thalamus via the hippocampus and anterior cingulate, to the prefrontal cortex, the rational brain, for a conscious and much more refined interpretation. This takes several microseconds longer. If the interpretation of threat by the amygdala is too intense, and/or the filtering system from the higher areas of the brain are too weak, as often happens in PTSD, people lose control over automatic emergency response, like prolonged startle or aggressive outbursts. Because Brainspotting training is rooted in teaching clinicians the mechanisms of the brain’s defense systems, Brainspotting therapists can more efficiently guide the therapy to directly target the trauma through the proper neuropsychological mechanisms rather than trying to exclusively ‘talk client’s through’ their problems. As previously mentioned, while Brainspotting can work for many client populations, lets dive deeper into why this is a good fit for athlete mental training.
Part III. Where You Look Affects How You Feel
Because I believe so strongly in this intervention and more specifically the positive impact it can have on athlete populations, I decided to write a book about how my training in Brainspotting transformed both my perspective on psychology and the way I chose to work with athletes. In my book Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I focus on discussing what many consider to be one of the most mysterious mental health conditions known throughout the sports world: the Yips. The Yips is a psychological phenomenon when athletes suddenly and unexpectedly can no longer perform even simple sport movements despite no current presence of a sports injury. Most sport psychologists and neurologists assess this to be a random muscle spasm that athletes experience…but this is not the truth.
In Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns, I explain what the Yips is, what causes it, and why Brainspotting offers athletes the best chance to overcome this issue. I review more of the in-depth science, the history of Brainspotting, and I also provide actual athlete case studies where individuals who were suffering from the Yips were able to overcome the issue. Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns also reviews how a Brainspotting-informed perspective helped these athletes achieve peak mental performance and flow-state experiences in their sport. If you would like to learn more about the book or new developments in the field of Brainspotting sign up below for my newsletter to receive the latest updates on the book and new research on sport psychology related issues!
