Your Body Remembers: How Brainspotting Unlocks the Trauma Hidden in Muscle Memory
Have you ever felt tightness in your chest when you're anxious, or a lump in your throat when you try to speak up? That’s not random. It’s your body talking.
Long before we can name our pain, our bodies carry it.
Through the lens of somatic psychology, we now understand that trauma doesn’t just live in our minds—it embeds itself into our muscle memory, posture, nervous system, and physiology. This is where brainspotting comes in: a powerful mind-body therapy that helps unlock and heal the pain your body remembers—even when your mind has forgotten.
The Science: How Trauma Lives in the Body
When we experience overwhelming events—whether acute trauma or repeated emotional wounding—the body often goes into survival mode: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
If that energy doesn’t get discharged or processed, it gets stored in the body as:
Chronic muscle tension or pain
Digestive issues
Sleep disturbances
Emotional numbness or reactivity
Dissociation or anxiety
This stored trauma often hides in places like the shoulders, chest, jaw, hips, or even facial muscles. These are not just physical symptoms—they are somatic memories.
As trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk says, “The body keeps the score.”
What Is Brainspotting—and How Does It Help?
Brainspotting is a trauma-focused therapy that uses a combination of eye position, somatic awareness, and focused mindfulness to help the brain and body process stuck emotional material.
By finding a “brainspot”—a specific gaze location that activates a bodily or emotional response—you access subcortical brain regions responsible for survival, memory, and emotion. These are the same areas where unprocessed trauma gets stored.
While you maintain gentle focus on the brainspot, your therapist holds attuned presence, and your body begins to naturally release the trapped tension, pain, or emotion.
Unlike talk therapy, you don’t need to explain it, analyze it, or even understand it—your body knows how to heal.
Muscle Memory and Emotional Holding Patterns
Some common ways muscle memory stores trauma:
Tight jaw or throat → fear of speaking or suppressed grief
Clenched fists → unresolved anger or helplessness
Lower back tension → emotional burden or lack of safety
Chest constriction → grief, heartbreak, or betrayal
Frozen posture → fear, hypervigilance, or shame
Brainspotting allows these somatic holding patterns to unwind without forcing or retraumatizing. It’s a deeply intuitive process led by your own nervous system.
What to Expect in a Brainspotting Session
Grounding and resourcing to help your nervous system feel safe
Identifying a physical sensation or emotional activation
Finding a brainspot through visual tracking or body cues
Processing while holding the gaze—you may feel emotion, tingling, memories, or calm
Integration and reflection at the end
Each session is different. Some feel like emotional breakthroughs; others feel quiet and deep, like your body finally exhaled.
Why This Work Is Transformational
It honors the body’s wisdom instead of overriding it
It accesses healing beyond words
It works even if you can’t name or remember the trauma
It empowers your nervous system to complete its survival cycle
Clients often report feeling lighter, clearer, more grounded, and more emotionally connected in the days and weeks following a session.
Final Thoughts: Your Body Deserves Peace
If you’ve felt disconnected from your body, stuck in cycles of anxiety or pain, or like talk therapy hasn’t fully gotten to the root—brainspotting offers a gentle, evidence-informed path forward.
Your body remembers what your mind may try to forget—but it also remembers how to heal.
You don’t need to carry it all anymore.
Ready to explore brainspotting for trauma healing?
Contact me and take the first step toward reconnecting with your body, your breath, and your emotional freedom.
