Brainspotting
Link to Brainspotting books
or staring at some spot on the floor or wall or ceiling? Have you noticed yourself looking away or up or somewhere else when really thinking about something you are saying or want to say, particularly when the subject is loaded emotionally? As a therapist, I notice this all the time. Clients often become unnecessarily self-conscious about it and force themselves to make eye contact with me. While their gaze continues to drift back to these spots, they do not allow themselves to hold the spot. What they don't realize is that rather than avoiding eye contact, they are intuitively helping themselves to process by accessing deep neural connections and memories in the subcortical brain.
Brainspotting is a powerful tool for therapy to help process traumas, negative cognitions, difficult emotions, and upsetting events by focusing your visual field on a spot that stimulates processing. It is a "physiological approach with psychological consequences" that allows us to access our self-healing potential via bypassing the thinking of the neocortex and "promotes organization and integration through coalescence of hitherto separated information files"; "a Brainspot is a stored oculomotor orientation to a traumatic experience which has failed to integrate" (Corrigan & Grand 2013).