EMDR and Brainspotting: Two Approaches to Trauma That Go Deeper Than Talking
By Sarah Rodgers, LMFT, RDT, SEP
If you've been looking into trauma therapy, you've probably come across both EMDR and Brainspotting. Maybe you've heard good things about one of them from a friend, or you've been reading about trauma treatment and keep seeing these terms come up. They sound a little mysterious, possibly a little strange, and it's not always clear what either of them actually involves or how you'd choose between them.
Here's my attempt at a plain explanation of both, and some thoughts on how the choice tends to get made in practice.
What they have in common
Both EMDR and Brainspotting are approaches to trauma processing that work differently than traditional talk therapy. Rather than relying primarily on narrative and insight, both work with how the brain and nervous system hold traumatic experiences, and both aim to help the system process what's been stuck in a way that conversation alone often can't reach.
Neither requires you to retell your story in detail. Neither is about analyzing what happened or finding the right cognitive reframe. They're both working at a different level than that, which is part of why people who've done a lot of insight-oriented therapy and still feel stuck in the same patterns sometimes find them useful.
EMDR
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) was developed in the late 1980s and is probably the better known of the two. It's well-researched and widely used, and there's a substantial body of evidence behind it.
In an EMDR session, you bring attention to a difficult memory or experience while engaging in bilateral stimulation, usually guided eye movements, though other forms of bilateral stimulation can be used as well. The theory is that this process helps the brain reprocess the experience so it moves from feeling present-tense and charged to feeling more like an actual memory, something that happened rather than something that's still happening.
EMDR has a fairly defined structure and protocol, which some people find helpful. It involves preparation work, identifying target memories and the beliefs connected to them, and moving through phases in a specific sequence. For people who do well with structure and can organize their experience into a relatively clear narrative, EMDR can be a good fit.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting was developed by David Grand, who trained in EMDR and noticed that where a client's eyes rested seemed to correlate with emotional activation. The basic idea is that where you look affects how you feel, and that finding an eye position connected to a particular experience or feeling and holding focus there allows the brain to access and process material that might otherwise be hard to reach.
Brainspotting tends to be a quieter, more internally focused process than EMDR. There's less explicit structure, which can actually be an advantage for some people. For clients who are more somatically oriented, who find it difficult to organize memories into a clear timeline, or who struggle to access experiences verbally, Brainspotting can offer a different way in. It also has some options for adjusting the level of activation up or down depending on what's needed, which can be useful in certain circumstances.
How do you choose?
Honestly, there's no hard and fast rule, and anyone who tells you otherwise is oversimplifying. In practice, the choice depends on a lot of things: how someone processes and organizes their experience, what they're working with, how their nervous system tends to respond, and sometimes just what they've heard about and feel drawn to try.
Some people come in having done a lot of research on EMDR and are specifically interested in it, and that matters. Feeling interested in and ready for a particular approach is actually relevant clinical information. Others have never heard of either and we figure it out together as we go.
What I find is that the most important thing isn't which approach you use. It's whether it fits you, whether you feel safe enough in the room to do the work, and whether your therapist is paying attention to how you're responding and adjusting accordingly. The best trauma therapy isn't about applying a technique. It's about finding what allows your particular nervous system to finally do what it's been trying to do all along.
If you're curious about whether either of these approaches might be helpful for you, I'd love to talk it through. I work with adults in East Nashville and virtually throughout Tennessee and Ohio. Schedule a consultation here.