Unlocking Potential: How Brainspotting Transforms Lives – Podcast

In this episode, we chat with Dr. Amy Huang about the therapeutic technique known as brainspotting. Dr. Huang shares her extensive background in social work, psychology, and mountaineering before delving into her journey with brainspotting.

She compares it to EMDR, describing how it involves guiding a client’s gaze to access and release trauma stored in the brain, often more quickly and effectively than traditional talk therapy. Dr. Huang also discusses the technique’s flexibility in treating various conditions, including trauma, anxiety, depression, and even enhancing positive qualities like creativity.

The conversation highlights how brainspotting can be a groundbreaking tool for emotional and psychological healing.

Nicholette Leanza:

Welcome to Convos from the Couch by LifeStance Health, where leading mental health professionals help guide you on your journey to a healthier, more fulfilling life.

Hello everyone. Welcome to Convos from the Couch. I’m Nikki Leanza and I’m excited to be talking with Dr. Amy Huang, and she’ll be telling us about brainspotting. So welcome, Dr. Amy, great to have you on.

Dr. Amy Huang:

Thank you. I’m really happy to be on, and this is my first podcast, so I’m really excited.

Nicholette Leanza:

Forward. Like I said, we’re excited to have you on for sure. So tell us a little bit about yourself and what got you interested in brainspotting.

Dr. Amy Huang:

Sure. So I have a Doctor of Social Work degree from the University of Sydney. I’m the type that I like to go full on and I love challenges, so always interested, and my studies have also taken me to psychology, counseling, and social work. And so my last major happened to be in social work, and I’ve worked in Philadelphia, worked with rape survivors also, I’ve worked in the college setting, worked in schools, I’ve also worked overseas in Australia. I lived in Australia for about five years.

Nicholette Leanza:

Wow.

Dr. Amy Huang:

Studied there in grad school and I worked as a social worker there. I worked with families who were carers of people with mental illness and who are frail and elderly, and also people with schizophrenia. And then I came to work in California. I went back and got an MSW in California and also got licensed, as well as having that doctorate from the University of Sydney.

I also do mountaineering, so I love, I’ve been up to Kilimanjaro.

Nicholette Leanza:

Oh my gosh.

Dr. Amy Huang:

Chimborazo, which is the closest mountain to the closest point you can get to the sun from the equator.

Nicholette Leanza:

Wow.

Dr. Amy Huang:

So I really have done that in Ecuador. And then I’ve done Mount Fuji and Kinabalu in Borneo in the rainforest. I love adventure and I still go on these. So I’ve been doing that for about eight years. I’ve also rock-climbed up Mount Kenya, which is also in Africa, and I’ve attempted Aconcagua in Argentina, and the highest mountain in the Western Himalayas, or I’m sorry, the western America that’s not part of the Himalayas. And then attempted Mount Elbrus.

Nicholette Leanza:

Gosh, that is amazing. Quite the adventurer and you really have been everywhere and with lots of great experience, too.

Dr. Amy Huang:

It has. And then New Zealand, I had the opportunity to try it was, is it skydiving? Skydiving down from on the Franz Josef Glacier, and then bungee jumping over Franz Josef Bridge where bungee jumping was invented. So I like to do these thrill things, as well. And I’m into rock climbing and a lot of snow climbing with the ice Axe and crampons.

Nicholette Leanza:

Oh wow, gosh. So with all that, what led you to an interest in brainspotting?

Dr. Amy Huang:

Yeah, so believe it or not, I had really gotten into EMDR, the eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapy. And I have a colleague that I did my EMDR class with and he had been one of my consultants, because I was providing him EMDR consulting and he asked me if I knew of any brainspotting trainers and I thought I would ask my associate because she was in brainspotting. At first, I didn’t really know what brainspotting was, I just assumed it was staring at a spot to relax and ground somebody, but it was a lot more to that. She said, “Where you look influences how you feel and where it is located in your brain.” And it got me fascinated. And then I also felt a bit competitive and I felt like I had to take the class before he did, so I did, and I ended up getting really hooked.

And so I took phase one through phase four, and now David Grand, who’s the founder of it, is going to do phase five, which is the highest level of it. I went to a week of intensive brainspotting where we got it done to us for two and a half hours.

Nicholette Leanza:

Oh, wow.

Dr. Amy Huang:

Also did it with our colleague and we got feedback from experienced brainspotting consultants. And then I’ve also had the six consultations to become certified in it, and I’m hoping to become a consultant in brainspotting as I am a consultant in EMDR. So really excited.

I like how brainspotting is a lot different from other therapies. Just like EMDR, there’s a focus on eyes, but the thing is you focus your gaze on a particular point. And the thing is, I wouldn’t be in any of these therapies if I didn’t find that it worked, but in the first practice, I was skeptical. I had no expectations and I was surprised how quickly and how intensely it worked just staring at what my partner had found, the gaze where I had a lot of my trauma and I felt very frozen and felt a lot of feelings come back from when I was little, and it was just amazing how all of that came out. And then I was processing it in a safe place that my partner provided with me and I wanted to do the same thing for my clients. And I found really great things happening with my clients doing it and they said it’s therapy, they’ve unlikely done anywhere else and they really like it.

Nicholette Leanza:

Oh my gosh. What is brainspotting and how does it work?

Dr. Amy Huang:

Work? Okay, so how it was founded was David Grand, by the way, he’s got a good book about brain spotting and the revolutionary therapy that he wrote to explain it. It was a very interesting read and a fast page turner. And so what he found while he was doing EMDR was that he was working on a figure skater and found that she couldn’t do a triple loop and she had a lot of trauma regarding her training. And there was one point when he was doing the eye movements that something told him to just freeze where he had his hand because her eyes started wobbling, and then it did that for 10 minutes and he said that the most processing he ever got from her, even stuff that he thought was resolved in EMDR came out during this process.

And then later she reported that those 10 minutes where he had just held the gaze for her and then she had just stared at that fixed point was the most therapy she ever received. And she was able to do the triple loop and she was able to resolve how her parents had been divorced and how her mom had blamed her skating on the divorce and how traumatic it had been just to become a professional figure skater. And so that’s how then he founded brainspotting where what happens is the person, you find the gaze of where that trauma was stored and it releases the trauma capsule in a person, and the person listens to, it’s called bilateral music, where it needs to be headphones or earphones because it’s not going to be effective outside if it’s just playing. And this music goes in one ear and out the other, pendulums back and forth. It relaxes the mind so you can go more into the subconscious unconscious.

So when you had a car accident, your conscious mind is all, I got to get the person’s insurance, I got to be able to call the police. Whereas your emotional mind just reacts with no rhyme and reason. So the reason why we have the music in brainspotting is to calm down the watchdog, because when we’re traumatized, we have hyper vigilance. So we need to quiet the watchdog with that bilateral music before then the deeper level of processing can happen. And then the gaze holds and releases that trauma capsule where it’s stored in the brain. And it’s amazing because a lot of people are right-brained and emotional, that’s where their emotionality comes from, and sometimes where they’re gazing on the left because the right side controls the left side, sometimes people’s where they’re holding the gaze is on the left side where their trauma is stored. Sometimes it’s on the right side and the left brain is controlling it, but it’s just amazing how it works that way.

So it’s a way to get into the deeper and it’s more effective than talk therapy. And what I found, you get the most bang for your buck. I know I sound like I’m marketing it. But really, somebody starts processing and talking on a deeper level, whereas sometimes it would take 40 talk therapy sessions to get to one session in brainspotting where somebody’s able to share on a very deep level very quickly.

Nicholette Leanza:

It sounds so simple, if I can make that statement.

Dr. Amy Huang:

But it’s actually not because the interesting thing is the technique is catered to, unlike EMDR, which you read from a script, you actually cater it to the person’s individuality and it’s all on the basis of uncertainty, which I love. So there’s no such guiding of the client or suggestion. You allow and you safe with allowing the client to direct the session with it and also bring up what they want to bring up with. And you can just show yourself there as an attuned guiding presence, and then they go by that, and it’s called following the tail of the comet. You follow their lead wherever they take you. It’s like they show you a frame and you are trying to see the frame of how they see it through their lens.

Nicholette Leanza:

Got you.

Dr. Amy Huang:

So mostly based on that attunement and that uncertainty principle and just trusting that somebody’s brain will be able to heal itself just like when we get a cut, and without having to think our bodies naturally heal itself of making it a scab and then turning it into skin again. It’s just like our brains and our healing when it comes to trauma.

Nicholette Leanza:

So how else does it differ from other types of therapy and what conditions does it treat?

Dr. Amy Huang:

Sure. So complete, the good thing is it targets every kind of possible therapy. You can do grief with it, you can do depression, anxiety, you can do even expansion, things that you think are the solution of the problem, you can focus and expand on positive qualities somebody might want, such as confidence, creativity, tap into the artist within that’s always wanted to come out. It can also be used for positive aspects. A lot of it’s been used for performance for athletes and being able to enhance performance or enhance other types of performances. You can use it basically for everything, even dissociation, which is often considered very hard to work with EMDR.

So where we’ve been in dissociation, we might have been in a freeze state, meaning that our impulse is to freeze or we might, for example, if we are hyper aroused, meaning that we’re overly stressed or we’re numb or we’re depressed, even those kinds of dissociation. The great thing is there’s different techniques you can do with brainspotting. You can have them process on something called a resource spot, which is helping them get grounded, or an expansion spot, which helps them with the positivity if they’re more fragile clients. And so that it’s even possible for clients who are dissociated to be able to benefit from brainspotting, as well.

And so it’s for all kinds of clients which are really like, and there’s no rhyme or reason or that you can’t do it on a certain type of person. Even with suicidal clients, you can do it with all types of clients with all types of conditions and chronic conditions. I’ve had people who said they’ve tried so many other things and they were really glad to try brainspotting because it was very unique and different and they said it got them in a meditative state, too. Focusing on something and they’re much more comfortable and safer and then they’re surprised, sometimes they instantly start crying because that spot releases something in them that they’re reacting to. Sometimes you can go on different spots and they can get different angles or aspects of the issue when they’re focused on each of the different spots regarding the issue.

Nicholette Leanza:

So what does a typical brainspotting session look like?

Dr. Amy Huang:

Good question. So we usually start with, when we work with a client, I would usually ask them what they would like to heal from. They would tell me and then I’d ask them what the worst part of it is to try to make them emotionally charged or really get it into their memory about it. And then I’d ask them how they feel about it. I’d ask them what their subjective units are of how activated they are or emotionally charged they are regarding it. And then I would say where they feel that in their body and they would tell me, and then I would just, the interesting thing is I would run a pointer and usually I’ll have a crystal on it, on the end of it, so they can try to focus so like this, and watch for any twitch in their eye, any moving with their mouth, any facial expression change. I’ll stop it there. I’ll ask them what they’re experiencing and then they’ll usually tell me whether they’re feeling something or not. Then I’ll ask them if they want to continue.

I also preface it with telling them that they’re the boss and they can let me know what they need and that they don’t need to force anything. Whatever comes to their mind, they can say or choose not to say, the processing is all how they do it. And then another method I can do after I’ve seen them for” for example, with let’s say your father physically abused you, “do you feel it more on this side, in the middle, or on this side?” They tell me and then I’ll fine tune it.

So let’s say they say it’s on this side, I’ll scan this side, they’ll tell me it feels most here. Then I’ll ask them what happens if I raise it? Does the feeling get more less intense? They’ll tell me and then I’ll lower it, and I’ll say, “How about this?” And then we’ll fine tune it where they get the most activation or emotional charge and then they’ll process on this spot. Or if they’re more fragile, we might find a spot that is where they feel most grounded to be able to process on.

Nicholette Leanza:

So some things someone would be able to do on their own?

Dr. Amy Huang:

Occasionally, but it’s mostly rarely, I’ll get people who are non-responders, they’ll say they don’t feel anything. And usually I’ll try and resolve that before we continue the process. Usually they have doubts about the therapy or doubts of how it works or they have a lack of trust in their therapist, so I’d have to build that trust with them. And so usually it’s those things. But David Grand, the founder, said, there’s no such thing as a non-responder. It’s usually something that they’ve allowed to get in the way or it’s usually their belief in the therapy that needs to be resolved before doing the therapy. It’s almost like you have to let your subconscious unconscious have a safe place for it to then just fully be able to come out as however it wants to come out.

Nicholette Leanza:

Now is this a type of therapy someone could do on their own?

Dr. Amy Huang:

Yes. So to be honest, you can in some ways, because let’s say if we found some client’s creativity point. I had a client who needed more creativity and inspiration to be able to write some articles. And so we would encourage clients for a homework assignment. They can look at that particular spot that we found their creativity spot whenever they’re needing more creativity, and the client was saying that she had a special spot that she bookmarked on her computer where she looks at whenever she’s having struggling with her writing and it helps her. So it is a part of therapy that clients can do on their own.

Another thing that I forgot to mention too, is in the therapy sometimes you’ll find the client talking and if they’re gazing at a particular area continuously when they talk, it’s likely that’s an important spot and you would invite them to look there. And then that’s another way of finding a significant spot rather than using the actual pointer. Just like where they’re naturally gazing and where they’re naturally fixing their gaze when they’re talking about the particular topic.

Nicholette Leanza:

Any other takeaways you’d like to share?

Dr. Amy Huang:

What I like is I apply it to life. That life is very uncertain. So just like the therapy is uncertain or whatever journey you’re going on with the client is uncertain. I like the principle of embracing that uncertainty and trusting the client knows what to do and what their body needs to do to be able to heal itself. And just the power of having that relationship with the client to really help them feel safe and comfortable working with you and being able to trust the therapy and trust that it’ll get them to develop potential insights or see things that they haven’t seen before. And sometimes I have them recalling things that they hadn’t thought of in a long time or associate particular memories just from doing this. And I’ve also found clients realizing sometimes the theme of something or why something happened when they were in this type of therapy because they feel like they’re in such a relaxed state and they’re comfortable and they’re able to think more clearly.

Nicholette Leanza:

My gosh. Thank you, Dr. Huang, for sharing all your information with us about brainspotting. I didn’t know much about it. Now you definitely have me interested in diving into a little bit of a deeper understanding of it.

Dr. Amy Huang:

Great.

Nicholette Leanza:

So thank you. Thank you for sharing.

Dr. Amy Huang:

Yeah, you’re welcome.

Nicholette Leanza:

I’d also like to thank the team behind the podcast; Jason Clayden and Juliana Whidden with a special thank you to Jason who edits our episodes. Thank you for listening to Convos from the Couch. Take care everyone.