Why We Don't Need to Talk about Trauma

What if I told you there's a trauma healing modality that creates fast, permanent results — and you don't need to talk about what happened? Most of us avoid trauma healing because we think it will take forever and the outcomes are uncertain. We tell ourselves that we're doing fine enough, as we are, and that it's better not to rock the boat.

“Just don’t think about it,” we tell ourselves. “Why go there?”

But what if you knew there was a highly effective, research-backed modality that could shift you out of overwhelm, anxiety, numbness, and despair, back into the joy in life you used to have or always wanted?

I was at a dinner party the other night, explaining the neuroscience of this modality to friends, when I realized this might be something you want to hear about, too. After all, if I know a shortcut that could save you months and even years of time, money, and effort on your healing journey, it's my responsibility to share it.

Trauma Lives in the Body, Not the Mind

The approach I'm talking about is called Brainspotting, and it recently emerged from an evidence-based trauma resolution approach called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. If you've heard of EMDR, you know it's a recommended treatment for processing traumatic events, no matter how long ago they happened.

Have you ever noticed that, when you’re talking to someone about something upsetting or important to you, your eyes tend to look away from them and towards a fixed point, for as long as you are talking about the topic?

That’s a “brainspot.”

It’s a location in the visual field where your eye position accesses a specific feeling or sensation. Because of how the retina and eye muscles connect to the central nervous system and vagus nerve, the eye position activates the issue, within the brain.

Unlike EMDR, which is very therapist-directed and involves a set script (including telling you what to talk about and when to move), Brainspotting is adaptive and self-led. You decide where to look, how to move, and what you want to share.

Brainspotting works by accessing neural networks deep in the midbrain and brain stem, outside the neocortical territory of the logical, thinking mind. By sustaining attention on a specific point in your visual field, you can allow the traumatic imprints that are still held in your nervous system to process gently to completion.

Our bodies want trauma to heal.

When your nervous systems feel safe enough to digest long held traumatic imprints, your body naturally returns to a natural state of self-regulation in a short time. Brainspotting works because, as the neuropsychologist Donald Hebb said last century, "Neurons that fire together, wire together."

Neural networks are pathways in the brain and nervous system that are created and strengthened through repetition. Neural networks associated with traumatic memories are often linked to other experiences of overwhelm and distress. This is why flashbacks often lead to a cascade of other disturbing memories and tend to have a life of their own.

Traumatic memories show up as sensory imprints — flashes of visuals, sudden smells, intense emotions, and body sensations of terror, captivity, and disconnection.

When we safely access neural networks that still hold the charge of past traumatic experiences, we allow these pathways the time and space to clear what they've been carrying and reset their orientation towards health and happiness.

The body and brain work powerfully together to heal. 

Brainspotting is Fast

I have experienced a phenomenal acceleration in my own healing process through Brainspotting that I haven't experienced from other modalities. And I've pretty much tried them all.

I've seen people accomplish, in months of work, what they hadn’t achieved in years of talk therapy. Because we work directly with the neural networks holding the stress and trauma, results are rapid. We don’t even need to understand what’s happening to experience the shifts.

Although we can prime the process, once it starts, it's directed by the body and the subcortical brain — not the conscious part of us that needs to explain and make meaning of everything. It often takes people by surprise, because of how much can be covered at once, albeit in an extremely nonlinear fashion.

And unlike catharsis, which forces us into the intensity of the past in an effort to confront it and heal, Brainspotting is gentle. We can always make the process easier by moving towards an expanded, resourced state and away from the charge of activation. We don’t need to experience intensity or re-experience any part of the trauma to clear the remaining imprints of it from our systems.

And Brainspotting isn’t just for trauma. We can also use it to elicit high-performance states, helping the brain and body to forge new neural networks associated with expanded states of achievement and experience.

Brainspotting was originally developed as a performance-enhancement tool for elite athletes, as it can quickly prime our brain and body to reach for heightened states of achievement.

It’s a safe, gentle way for the body and the brain to create new pathways towards post-traumatic growth and thriving.

Healing is Permanent

There was a certain amount of developmental and complex trauma that I always thought would be there, in my body. It wasn't much — a whisper of fear, a wash of frozen shock, a collapsing-in of my heart sometimes. But after all these years, it was still there.

Over time, I learned to make peace with it.

I even befriended it, as the long-wounded companion it is, requiring my compassion, care, and attention on a semi-regular basis. That part of me healed, but always held a memory of the original wounds and the intensity of those past experiences. 

The hypervigilant part of me was dedicated to maintaining a memorial to my past, to keep it from repeating.

In my early Brainspotting sessions, without knowing exactly why, I found myself gently gagging and dry heaving in the slowest, most beautiful release. I know it might not sound graceful, but it felt that way. I experienced the tension, fear, and pain leaving my body through those movements.

And they didn’t come back.

I can remember the past and feel the sadness and grief of what I went through. I can touch into the anger at not being supported, and the fear I had back then...

But it doesn't grab me. It's a distant memory, with a beginning, middle — and end.

And it's over.

And my body knows that. Finally.

You Don't Have to Talk about What Happened

The real magic of this modality, for me, is that we don't have to articulate our past traumatic experiences to heal them. We don't even need to consciously remember what happened, because we're working only with the activation that the nervous system is still carrying in the present. 

This is such a gift for trauma healing.

So many of us don't want to go there. And rightfully so.

Why bring up the past, when the past is what overwhelmed us and caused such distress in our systems and negatively impacted our lives?

In Brainspotting, the way we access the past is through the body's experience of feelings and physical sensations, or what is called the "felt sense." When we access the neural networks connected to the sensation of traumatic memories, from a place of compassionate witnessing and presence, we allow them to organically complete and consolidate back into normal memories.

The memories are still there, but they feel different — more distant.

None of this requires analyzing or even remembering the past.

Although linked memories may arise, we don't need to explore them, to try to understand ourselves better, or to reach a different mindset about what happened. We don't try to force ourselves to see the "big picture," change the "narrative," or use any other mind-tricks that never quite make their way down to the body, where the trauma is stored.

Talking activates the neural network but doesn't have the power to clear the charge. Only a body-based modality can get us there.

What if Healing was Easy?

I share all this because it's easy to believe that trauma healing is a long, arduous process and then to decide it's better not to start. We might avoid healing because we're not certain we will ever see results for the investment of money, effort, and time.

But if we don't heal, we will forever self-limit our life experiences, personal achievements, and relationship satisfaction. 

It's too high a price to pay for maintaining the uneasy defeat of the status quo. Then, we wonder to ourselves, "Is this all there is to life?" and remember, before, how we used to come alive at the thought of being in the world.

Knowing that trauma healing can be fast, permanent, and not require us to go digging into the quagmires of the past allows us to choose mindfully what path we want to take.

We can empower ourselves by choosing health and happiness. Healing is there, if we let ourselves be brave enough to want it.

And healing is more accessible now than ever before, at a time when we need it most.

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