What Is Brainspotting? Does research or evidence support it?
Key Takeaways
Brainspotting is a talk therapy technique created in 2003. It asks you to hold your eyes on one fixed point while you think about a painful memory.
No major clinical guideline recommends brainspotting. The 2023 VA and Department of Defense PTSD guideline and the 2025 American Psychological Association PTSD guideline both leave it out.
The studies that do exist are small, mostly lack a real control group, and several were co-written by the person who created and sells brainspotting training.
A 2024 peer-reviewed critique in Medical Hypotheses argued that brainspotting meets the working definition of a pseudoscience.
Feeling better after a session is real, but it does not prove the eye position did anything. Attention, calm breathing, and a caring therapist all help on their own.
If you are dealing with trauma in Naples or Collier County, start with a therapy that has cleared the evidence bar, then look at the whole-body factors that keep your nervous system stuck.
Trauma marketing moves fast in Southwest Florida. After hurricane seasons, after a hard snowbird transition, after a loss, ads for "rapid" trauma clearing show up in every Naples feed. Brainspotting is one of the most common. It promises deep relief in only a few sessions, no homework, and no retelling your worst day out loud.
That promise is appealing. It is also a claim, and claims are supposed to be testable. At Harmony Health Clinic we take a root-cause approach, and people sometimes assume that means we accept anything labeled holistic. It does not. Root-cause care still has to answer to evidence. So here is a straight look at what the brainspotting research shows, where it falls short, and what to do with that information.
What is brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a psychotherapy technique developed in 2003 by David Grand, a licensed clinical social worker. The core idea is that a specific spot in your field of vision connects to unprocessed trauma stored in the deep brain. A therapist watches your eyes while you talk about a distressing memory, looks for a small reflexive cue like a blink or a pause, and then has you hold your gaze on that exact point while you sit with the feeling.
The proposed mechanism was published in a journal called Medical Hypotheses in 2013. That detail matters more than it sounds. Medical Hypotheses exists to publish untested ideas on purpose. Publishing there is a starting point for research, not a finish line. Thirteen years later, that pathway still has not been confirmed by brain imaging or any other direct test.
Is brainspotting Supported by evidence-based Research?
No. Brainspotting is not currently evidence-based by any standard research definition. It is not recommended in the 2023 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense PTSD guideline, and it is not recommended in the 2025 American Psychological Association PTSD guideline. The published studies are small, mostly uncontrolled, and several were co-authored by the method's own creator. That is the short version. The details are worth reading, because they show you how to evaluate any therapy, not just this one.
What do the PTSD treatment guidelines say?
Clinical practice guidelines are the closest thing medicine has to a scorecard. Panels of experts read every study, grade the quality, and then say what is supported.
The 2023 VA and Department of Defense guideline recommends cognitive processing therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and prolonged exposure as the psychotherapies with the strongest evidence for PTSD. You can read the 2023 VA and DoD PTSD clinical practice guideline in full, or the shorter synopsis published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
The 2025 American Psychological Association PTSD guideline lands in a similar place, naming cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure among its first-line options.
Brainspotting appears in neither document. Not as recommended. Not as suggested. Not even as "insufficient evidence to say." It simply did not clear the bar to be considered.
Why absence from a guideline matters
Supporters often answer this by saying brainspotting is just too new. That argument has an expiration date. The method turns 23 years old in 2026. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which brainspotting grew out of, went from new idea to guideline recommendation in roughly the same span of time by producing randomized trials. Brainspotting has not done that.
What does the actual brainspotting research show?
There is research. There is not much, and the quality is thin. Here is the honest inventory.
The 2017 comparison study
A 2017 study in the Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology compared 53 people treated with brainspotting to 23 treated with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing over three sessions each. Both groups improved. Effect sizes for the EMDR group ran from 1.19 to 1.76, while the brainspotting group ranged from 0.74 to 1.04.
Read those numbers again. This study is the one most often cited as proof that brainspotting works, and in it brainspotting performed worse than the comparison therapy on every measure reported. There was also no randomization, the groups were wildly unequal in size, and one of the three authors was David Grand himself. You can review the 2017 Hildebrand and Grand brainspotting study yourself.
The 2022 single-session study
A 2022 study compared brainspotting, EMDR, and body scan meditation against a control condition of book reading, using 37 psychologists and 3 medical doctors as participants, with one session of each intervention.
Forty people. All of them mental health or medical professionals. One session. No one in the sample had a PTSD diagnosis, only "distressing memories." Read the 2022 comparative study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and judge for yourself, but this is a pilot signal at best. It cannot tell you whether the technique treats a clinical condition.
The pattern across all of it
Look at the whole literature and the same problems repeat:
Tiny samples. Most studies involve fewer than 80 people. Several involve fewer than 30.
Weak or missing controls. Without a comparison group, there is no way to separate the therapy from time, attention, and expectation.
Developer involvement. The creator of the method, who also owns the training business, is an author on key studies. That is a financial conflict of interest, and it would raise flags in any other area of medicine.
Friendly venues. Several papers appear in journals affiliated with the body psychotherapy field rather than mainstream psychiatry or psychology.
No independent replication. Nobody outside the brainspotting community has reproduced the results in a rigorous trial.
Has anyone formally called brainspotting pseudoscience?
Yes. A 2024 paper by Dean McKay and Angela Coreil in Medical Hypotheses described brainspotting as a clear pseudoscientific trauma treatment and examined why clinicians adopt methods like it. Their argument has two parts.
First, the claimed mechanism has no grounding in established neuroscience. Second, and more damaging, the method is built so it cannot be proven wrong. If you improve, the brainspot worked. If you do not improve, the therapist did not find the right spot yet. A claim that no result can contradict is not a scientific claim.
There is an irony worth naming. That critique ran in the same journal that published the original brainspotting hypothesis. Medical Hypotheses is a speculation venue on both sides of this argument. Take the critique as a serious professional objection, not as a settled verdict from a top-tier trial. The stronger point against brainspotting is not the label. It is the empty space where the randomized trials should be. You can read the 2024 McKay and Coreil analysis in Medical Hypotheses directly.
But people say it helped them. What is going on?
Those reports are real, and dismissing them would be a mistake. Something genuinely happens in a brainspotting session. The question is what.
A brainspotting session includes a warm, attentive therapist, an hour of protected quiet, sustained focus on a difficult memory in a safe room, slow breathing, and a strong expectation of relief. Every one of those elements has independent evidence behind it. None of them requires a specific eye position.
This is why controlled trials exist. To find out whether the special ingredient does anything the ordinary ingredients do not already do. For brainspotting, that test has not been run.
Feeling better matters. It is just not the same as knowing why you feel better, and the difference decides whether you should spend a thousand dollars chasing more of it.
How should you evaluate any trauma therapy?
Use the same filter we apply to lab panels, supplements, and injectables here in Naples. Our post on what FDA approved really means walks through the same logic in a different setting, and our guide to third-party tested supplements applies it to what goes in your body.
Ask these five questions:
Is it in a major clinical guideline? If a VA, APA, or specialty society panel reviewed it and recommended it, that is a strong signal.
Are there randomized controlled trials? Not testimonials. Not case reports. Trials with a comparison group.
Who ran the study? If the developer profits from training and certification, look for independent replication before you trust the result.
Can the claim be proven wrong? Any method with a built-in excuse for failure should make you cautious.
What is the opportunity cost? Months in an unproven therapy is time not spent in one that works.
What we would look at instead
If trauma symptoms are affecting your life, start with a licensed mental health professional using a guideline-supported therapy. That is the first move, and nothing in a functional medicine visit replaces it.
From there, the body side is worth examining, because a nervous system stuck in high alert rarely runs on psychology alone. Chronic stress physiology, disrupted sleep, blood sugar swings, and thyroid or adrenal patterns can all keep symptoms burning. Our article on chronic stress, fatigue, and hormone imbalance covers how that loop forms, and our anxiety and depression and insomnia condition pages explain the root-cause factors we test for.
That work is measurable. Advanced lab testing gives you numbers that move or do not move, which is exactly the accountability brainspotting lacks. And as we cover in why detoxing and healing take more time than you think, the honest timeline for nervous system recovery is longer than any fast-fix marketing suggests.
Naples has a large population of retirees, snowbirds, and hurricane-season survivors, which makes it fertile ground for therapies sold on speed. Slowing down long enough to ask for the evidence is not cynicism. It is how you protect both your money and your recovery.
Frequently asked questions
Is brainspotting the same as EMDR?
No. Both use eye position, but EMDR uses guided back-and-forth eye movement within a structured protocol and has decades of randomized trials behind it. Brainspotting holds the eyes still on one point and has almost no controlled research. EMDR is recommended in the 2023 VA and DoD PTSD guideline. Brainspotting is not.
Is brainspotting dangerous?
There is no evidence that brainspotting causes direct physical harm. The main risks are indirect: money spent on an unproven service, and time in an unproven therapy instead of one that works. Trauma processing without proper training can also destabilize some people, so credentials of the provider matter regardless of method.
Does insurance cover brainspotting?
Coverage depends entirely on your plan and your provider's billing, since brainspotting is usually delivered inside a standard psychotherapy session by a licensed clinician. Because it is not a guideline-recommended treatment, some plans will not cover it as a distinct service. Ask the provider's billing office directly before your first appointment.
Could future research prove brainspotting works?
Yes, and that is the fair position. Nothing here says brainspotting is impossible. It says the evidence does not exist yet after more than two decades. If well-designed randomized trials from independent research teams show a real effect, the conclusion should change. Until then, treat it as unproven.
Does Harmony Health Clinic offer brainspotting?
No. Harmony Health Clinic provides functional medicine, chiropractic care, and related services in Naples and throughout Collier County. We do not offer brainspotting or other psychotherapy services, and we refer patients with trauma or mental health concerns to licensed mental health professionals.
Ready to look at the whole picture?
If stress, poor sleep, or unexplained fatigue is wearing you down, the answer may be measurable. Schedule a functional medicine consultation with Harmony Health Clinic and let us look at what your labs actually say. We serve Naples, Bonita Springs, Estero, Marco Island, and all of Collier County, with telemedicine available statewide.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult with a licensed healthcare professional for diagnosis and treatment. If you are struggling with trauma, anxiety, or thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional or call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
