Brainspotting Therapy and Chronic Pain

In his book ‘Unlearn Your Pain’ Howard Schubiner describes the ‘paradoxical method’ of treating neuroplastic pain, which basically amounts to leaning into the pain and fearlessly daring the brain to turn up the pain volume.  Some people may wonder ‘Why would I want to lean into the pain and try to amplify it?’  It may sound counter-intuitive, but when we consider how neuroplastic pain is produced when the brain interprets normal and safe sensations as danger signals, it makes sense.  When we really lean into a pain sensation and tell the brain to ‘bring it on’ – instead of avoiding the pain through a fear response we can instead move toward it.  Intentionally ‘moving toward’ a perceived fearful stimulus teaches the brain that there is literally nothing to fear in the sensation itself.  A move toward cuts the pain-fear-pain cycle that fuels the brain’s ongoing production of pain.

Brainspotting (BSP) is a useful tool for retraining the pain-fear-pain cycle.   Using fixed points in a client’s visual field that coordinate the optic nerve with pain/emotional circuitry in the mid-brain, clients can access – and retrain – neuroplastic pain circuits more directly.  When leaning into the pain with intention, curiosity, and openness clients quickly experience the pain differently: as a process with a beginning, middle, and end.  During a BSP session, when clients experience the ‘middle’ amplification of pain as entirely manageable, fear of the pain subsides, which depletes the brain’s pain fuel source.  In the process clients learn that the best the primitive brain can do to produce more pain is not that much at all.  Clients learn that they have more control of their pain process than previously imagined, and many breakthroughs in the pain recovery journey can then follow. 

Often, 4 to 5 hour BSP intensives are a useful way to break through pain-fear-pain cycles and accelerate neuroplastic pain recovery.