Written by Victoria Ellis, LMFT Associate
You’ve probably heard it before: “You just need to process it and move on. Stop thinking about it. It’s been so long, why can’t you move on? Can’t you just accept it’s over? Why would you even consider Brainspotting in Flower Mound?”
Our culture is fast paced and focused on efficiency. We believe we should be able to reason through anything, out think our feelings, and put emotions and thoughts into their proper place. Even the way we talk about healing has become boiled down to “processing.” What the heck does that even mean anyway?
Unfortunately, if you’re here, reading this, it’s probably because you or someone you love has realized that some things can’t be reasoned out. Emotions are sticky, and they don’t always like to be wiped off with the cool, damp cloth of logic. They linger in our bodies, trying to keep us safe by reminding us of history we want to forget.
We are used to thinking of our brain as floating in our heads. Our thoughts happen in our heads, right? Memories sit in our heads. And our brain sends out signals to the body that carries it to make us move and dance and play and work, right?
However, it is far more accurate to say that the brain weaves itself throughout the entire body.
Your bone, sinew, and muscle was woven around the brainstem and nerves. Your brain ends at the tips of your fingers, the ends of your toes.
When something traumatic happens, the brain creates a memory of how we survived and engraves that in our muscles and skin – into our very cells. “This is what danger feels like,” it tells us. “This is what we need to run from.” The body can’t afford for us to sit and logic through whether the attacking bear is coming in for a hug or the kill. It needs us to bolt first and think second.
Due to the fast-paced, stressful life most of us live, we have learned to be disconnected from our body. Sensation is irritating, or something to be shut down. Similarly to how the body shuts down the hunger pangs when you’ve gone too long without food, the body shuts off our ability to hear our emotions and memories when the sirens have gone ignored for too long.
Thankfully, through cutting-edge techniques like Brainspotting (available in Flower Mound), we can now access the parts of the brain that are making those kinds of decisions and actually heal those things we’d rather forget. Brainspotting uses neurological hacks to help the client sink into the parts of the brain that are holding the trauma. Where we point our eyes lets our brain know where to store our memories.
You’ve probably heard of the thousand yard stare, or seen someone staring into space as they think. In truth, that person is using the direction of their eyes to stare into their brain, allowing their subconscious to rise up to help process and organize memory. They’re accessing their internal filing cabinet.
When guided by a skilled trauma professional, this natural phenomenon allows us to organize and let go of the beliefs, pain, and learned responses that trauma ingrained into us. Instead of a stack of unruly papers that just go flying around, we can put things in the proper filing cabinet. Because it is a whole body, bottom-up way of processing, memories that have been “stuck” in a loop or have become trauma-focused muscle memory can finally be released and properly filed.
If you have sticky memories, struggle with emotional highs and lows, or have long term, treatment-resistant trauma, then Brainspotting might be an excellent choice for you. There is hope.
At the Journey and the Process, we offer Brainspotting in in Flower Mound, TX (in person), and Wake Forest, NC (virtual) with Victoria Ellis, LMFT Associate (supervised by Tabitha Westbrook, LMFT-S). Victoria can help you reprocess memories that have been stuck for years.