From the morning discussion with David Grand at this training. Notes, not a transcript: David's teaching on attuned presence, on what the frame is when nothing is certain, and on why trusting the client completely is not a platitude.
Many therapists carry a habit over from talk therapy: attunement means repeating what the person said, nodding, mm, ah. That is not attunement, and clients often have their own version of what irritates them about it, which they will never tell you.
Then the client goes into process, starts looking somewhere, and something happens that neither of you can name. That is the moment the therapist thinks: I must be doing this wrong. What is actually being asked for is to stay attuned, present, open, and follow the tail of the comet.
Brainspotting is really easy to learn and tremendously difficult to practise.
In the five-day intensives, the therapist sits in front of the client and the trainer sits off to the side, guiding. Sometimes the trainer is effectively running ninety per cent of the session and the person in the therapist chair ten per cent.
At the end, again and again, the client turns to the therapist and says: I could not have done it without you. I felt you with me the whole time. With the active, explicit part of the role taken away, what remained was attuned presence, and that was where the healing came from.
We will never understand the power of attuned presence. That might be the most powerful thing in Brainspotting.
When something a therapist says lands well mid-process, the reason is almost never the phrase. It is that the words came from following the client rather than leading them. That distinction is the whole thing.
David made the same point about the group itself. Having said he would take no practicum questions, he took two, and went with it. The group was telling him something. We listen, we attune, we are present, and we follow. If that goes against the plan, so what.
David put the phrase to the room as a question, and then gave his own reading. As we try to define the frame, we find we cannot, because we do not know what frame the client is really bringing. We know what they say, we know roughly where it goes, but we do not know. We are receiving much more of their implicit frame than their explicit one, so the frame is uncertain as well as the larger uncertainty.
What the frame does is let you meet somebody completely where they are. The emphasis sits on completely.
The argument David uses with students: the client's nervous system has one to four quadrillion synaptic connections. Most are deeply subcortical, entirely out of reach of conscious awareness and of the thinking, language neocortex. That being the case, how much can you actually explicitly do with a client?
You may have to press it two or three times before it lands. The answer that comes back is: then there is nothing I can do. Yes and no. There is nothing you can really explicitly do. There is a great deal you can do implicitly.
There is nothing you have to do.
Made concrete, four quadrillion one-centimetre marbles would circle the Earth four times. It makes literal something that cannot otherwise be conceptualised, and it shows the impossibility of what we are trying to do. That this is reality is not a problem. It is ultimately a good thing, and accepting it takes a paradigm shift.
Take a client who says: I am a horrible person. Reflecting it back can shock a room, but that statement comes from a wounded part with a long developmental history. To say otherwise is to disconfirm that part's reality in the moment, and a part whose reality you disconfirm has no reason to trust you or to listen to anything else you say. Where that person is, is exactly where they need to be.
David's challenge: run a factor analysis on any model you have trained in, from theory through to practice, and look for the elements that say you can fully trust your client and the elements that say you cannot. Both are usually in there. In most models the instruction to absolutely trust the client is either absent or quietly contradicted.
His own view, stated as opinion and bias: a preset protocol that must be followed so results can be replicated for research is itself a statement that the client cannot be trusted. Any model that is primarily explicit rather than implicit misses something about presence and healing. Brainspotting is mostly implicit, occasionally explicit, and then it returns to the implicit.
We have to absolutely trust our clients.
Asked whether the sensation of blood flowing inside the brain during processing is physiologically real, David's answer was to hold the frame rather than adjudicate it. We know brain activity brings more blood flow to an area, but that piece of neuroscience neither defines nor defines away what is being experienced. Brainspotting talks constantly about neural pathways and electrical impulses and very little about brain chemistry, so if it feels like fluid moving, it could be blood exactly as described, or neurochemicals. In session he would say: be mindful of what it feels like, what it looks like, however you experience it on a sensory basis, and let us see where it goes. Wherever it goes is where it should go, and will reveal whatever it is, even if that is hard to grasp.
We are far more capable of experiencing our own physiology and neurophysiology than we are given credit for. And this is exactly the kind of thing a child would say and be instantly disconfirmed for. No, that cannot be. Do not worry about it. Instead of: how interesting.