Focusing on the ‘felt sense’ and Brainspotting are keys to unlocking trauma, allowing us to go far beyond usual talk-therapy.
The ‘felt sense’ allows us to access a universal quality of being which always accompanies us but is quiet compared to our usual thought patterns and activities, so we don’t notice it. We experience the ‘felt sense’ when we are in flow, when we are unselfconsciously doing what we love, often out in nature or with people we trust. When we experience overwhelm, anxiety or depression, the usual flow of our lives has been interrupted, and we get stuck.
A ‘relational pause’ is often enough to reconnect us with our ‘felt sense’. We are social, relational creatures and when we do this in the company of a trusted person who keeps us company we find we are able to listen in to our ‘felt sense’ to our bodies experience. All of our thoughts, feelings and activities are stored by our body, even things we cannot remember and so are the possibilities of change. Together we will work with what arises in a safe, kindly, welcoming way, paced by your sense of what is best so that whatever has happened can be met from our most connected, loving self. Together we can do so much more than we can alone.
Sometimes the overwhelm causes us to feel too much or too little to contact this ‘felt sense’ directly, in Brainspotting the therapist uses reflexes particularly in the eyes, as well as the face and body, to guide the client to a visual ‘Brainspot’ a place to hold the direction of the eyes which allows clients to access memories, felt-senses and experiences which are subcortical (in the deeper regions of the brain). with these ‘Brainspots’ we can turn down overwhelm and turn up subtle but helpful experiences. The experiences change the way our brains work ‘unlearning the trauma’, give us more conscious choice over events taking place in our nervous system and Clients learn how to do this for themselves between sessions to manage anxiety and disassociation.