“Quiet” Brainspotting

When I sat in my last Brainspotting session as a client, I expected something to happen—tears, tremors, or a noticeable shift that would signal movement. Instead, nothing surfaced. As my therapist sat quietly a few feet away from me, I stared at the spot, which refers to a specific eye position believed to correlate with where trauma or emotion is stored in the brain. I breathed, spoke a little, but felt mostly blank. When the session was over, I wondered whether anything at all had happened.

At the time, I’d been practicing EMDR for several years as a trained and certified trauma therapist, with meaningful success. Still, I was beginning to notice a ceiling to how far the work could go—particularly with clients who had developmental trauma. While EMDR was effective, its structured nature often limited the depth and flexibility these cases required. I’d heard that Brainspotting was a trauma therapy that helps the brain process unresolved experiences by using specific eye positions to access where those experiences are stored in the nervous system, but I hadn’t tried it. When I came across an online forum where a therapist asked clinicians trained in both EMDR and Brainspotting which they preferred, I was surprised by how many named Brainspotting, despite its limited empirical support at the time. Curious but skeptical, I decided to experience it myself before investing in training.

I was surprised to discover that Brainspotting sessions don’t follow a predictable script. Some are cathartic, others are quiet and spacious, and still others unfold hours or days later outside the therapy room. No one session predicts the next, because the nervous system—not the therapist and not the client’s expectations—sets the pace. I came to understand that when I felt mostly blank in my own Brainspotting session, it was actually my nervous system signaling that stillness and safety were what it needed before anything else could emerge.

What’s Happening When “Nothing’s Happening”

This variability of experiences during Brainspotting sessions often confuses clients. They expect healing to be dramatic or emotionally obvious, and when a session feels still or emotionally uneventful, they assume nothing meaningful has occurred because many of us have been conditioned to believe that healing must involve discomfort to be real. We’re taught to expect progress to look like effort—crying in session, revisiting painful memories, or feeling emotionally raw afterward. Yet I’ve watched clients leave quiet sessions and later report dreams that bring unexpected clarity, waves of emotion rising without warning, tremors releasing long-held tension, or insights appearing days later. Their systems were working all along—just not on a timeline the conscious mind could easily recognize.

Part of this comes from how Brainspotting interfaces with the nervous system. Both the client’s and clinician’s steady focus engage our orienting response—the brain’s natural “pay attention” reflex. As David Grand has often said, where you look becomes a clinical access point to subcortical processing. Even when a client feels blank or neutral, deeper survival systems—operating outside conscious awareness—are already responding in the background. Brainspotting asks both therapist and client to tolerate uncertainty and allow the nervous system to lead the process.

Neuroscientist Paul Gamlin, whose research focuses on the neural control of eye movements, has also shown that eye position is closely linked to activity in midbrain structures involved in attention, orientation, and autonomic regulation—systems that shape how the body senses safety and threat. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory further helps explain why integration often occurs after the session, once the nervous system feels safe enough to soften.

Together, these frameworks offer a coherent theory around why Brainspotting often works by collapsing the frame, i.e., quieting the mind’s urge to analyze, explain, or perform, so the nervous system can process beneath any conscious effort being made. When the pressure to “do” therapy falls away, the body is free to do what it already knows how to do.

Early on, when I began practicing Brainspotting, it used to unnerve me when a client said, “Nothing is happening.” An old anxiety would stir—a subtle but familiar fear of not being believed. It echoed childhood moments of being blamed for things I didn’t do, and I worried that clients might think I was overselling the modality or failing them. Through my own Brainspotting work, I learned to recognize that reaction as countertransference—my own material rather than a reflection of the client’s experience. Now I can stay present for it as it moves through me without collapsing the frame. I trust the process more. I trust myself more. And I trust that every client’s nervous system knows what it can tolerate and when.

Ironically, this trust didn’t develop in the high-intensity sessions I had with clients. It came from sitting through stillness in my own Brainspotting sessions with my therapist, when change moved at a snail’s pace.  Because of my own experiences, I can now hold the frame without forcing movement or interpreting the silence as a clinical mistake.

Freeze as Pacing, Not Resistance

Many quiet Brainspotting sessions reflect the body’s freeze response—a protector part stepping in to maintain safety. Freeze is not resistance or disengagement. It’s the nervous system regulating its own pacing. When I notice signs that a client may be in a “blank” state, I may offer brief psychoeducation about the involuntary nature of freeze. Sometimes I simply name what’s happening. “Let’s notice the freeze and thank it for doing its job.” Other times I ask, “How old does this part feel?” The intent isn’t to override or bypass freeze but to respect it as a form of protection that influences the speed of integration.

One client I’ve seen on and off for a couple of years demonstrates this “freeze” pattern clearly. Many of her sessions appear blank from the outside. She often reports feeling nothing. Yet her body consistently gives small cues: a lump in her throat, heaviness across her chest, tightness in her back. These sensations are familiar for someone who learned early that her needs were burdensome and her voice unwelcome. Sometimes we explore them; sometimes we simply sit with them. She rarely attributes her progress to Brainspotting, yet she returns whenever she feels stuck, which tells me she senses something shifting even if she can’t name it. Over time, I’ve watched her stop automatically assuming she’s the problem in her relationship and begin acknowledging painful dynamics she once minimized. There’s never been a dramatic breakthrough—just the slow, steady surfacing of a somatic truth she can no longer ignore. Those “blank” sessions were loosening something foundational long before she had language for it.

My own Brainspotting sessions mirror this variability. Some are intense and physically activating; others feel like staring into nothing. Much of my first year in Brainspotting was characterized by an unrelenting tightness in my jaw and chest. Eventually, I began to understand that the tightness would stay as long as I stayed small—quiet, agreeable, invisible, and out of the way. I’d stopped living in any meaningful way. Brainspotting revealed that the only way through was to reclaim expression: speaking, screaming into a pillow when needed, and eventually writing. That’s how I realized I needed to begin writing essays and naming truths I’d long avoided.

Now, after a Brainspotting session, sometimes hours later or the next day, a preverbal layer of experience emerges—an old loneliness, a pocket of grief, or a bodily signal that something has shifted. No narrative accompanies it, but the movement is unmistakable. Each time this happens, I feel more able to sit with my own internal experience. Pain now feels less like something to avoid and more like something I have the capacity to witness.

Ultimately, Brainspotting offers a therapeutic process in which the nervous system leads, whether the work is loud, quiet, or seemingly non-existent until it unfolds later. There are sessions where something cracks open immediately. Others create the internal conditions for change that emerge gradually in the days or weeks that follow. The variability in Brainspotting sessions isn’t an obstacle but the essence of the method. When we allow clients’ systems to move at their natural pace, Brainspotting becomes less about what we observe in the room and more about what clients’ bodies are finally able to do. My trust in this process deepens each year. Even when a session seems quiet or uneventful, I’ve learned that something is almost always shifting underneath.