Brainspotting
Therapy
Process Trauma Without Having to Explain Every Detail
If you've tried traditional talk therapy and felt like you were circling the same stories without real relief, Brainspotting may offer a different way in. This approach uses eye position, body awareness, and focused attention to support your nervous system’s natural processing, without requiring you to narrate every detail or analyze yourself to exhaustion.
When Talking About It Isn't Working
You might benefit from Brainspotting if
You've talked about your trauma extensively but still feel stuck
Anxiety lives in your body; chest tightness, stomach knots, tension you can't release
You have trouble putting your feelings into words
Traditional talk therapy feels too slow or intellectually focused
You experience emotional flashbacks but can't always identify why
You feel things intensely but can't always explain them
Past experiences still trigger strong physical reactions
You're tired of retelling your story over and over
Your Body Remembers
What Your Mind Tries to Forget
Trauma doesn't just live in your thoughts and memories. It gets stored in your nervous system, creating patterns of tension, reactivity, and dysregulation that talk therapy alone often can't reach.
You might be able to understand your trauma intellectually—know exactly why you react the way you do—and still feel hijacked by your body's responses. That's not a failure. That's your nervous system doing what it was designed to do: protect you from threat.
The problem is, it's protecting you from dangers that are no longer present.
Brainspotting works differently. Instead of starting with your story, we start with where you feel it in your body. By maintaining focus on specific eye positions while tuning into physical sensations, your brain can support processing at a deeper nervous system level—often much faster than traditional approaches.
You don't need to fully understand why your body reacts this way. You may just need an approach that can reach what insight alone has not changed.
How Brainspotting Therapy Works
Your Session
We'll identify what you want to work on—a memory, sensation, or emotional state. I'll help you find a "brainspot"—an eye position that activates the issue. You maintain that gaze while noticing what emerges. There's no "right" way to do it.
Gentle Processing
Unlike trauma therapies requiring you to recount details, Brainspotting is surprisingly gentle. You're in control. You decide how deep to go. Many describe it as "productive spacing out"—your conscious mind relaxes while your deeper brain does the work.
Brain-Based Healing
Brainspotting is a neuroexperiential approach that uses eye position, body awareness, and focused attention to support deeper nervous system processing. It works with lived experience, not just verbal insight.
What We Treat
• Trauma and PTSD
• Anxiety and panic
• Grief and loss
• Performance anxiety
• Chronic pain with emotional components
• Creative blocks
• Relationship patterns
• Emotional dysregulation
• Feeling "stuck" despite other therapeutic work
What to Expect
FIRST SESSION
Assessment and Introduction
We'll talk about what brings you to Brainspotting and what you hope to resolve. I'll explain the process in detail and answer all your questions. If you're ready, we might do a brief demo so you can experience what it feels like.
DURING TREATMENT
Active Processing
Each session focuses on a specific target—a memory, sensation, belief, or emotional state. Progress often happens in layers. You might feel immediate relief after one session, or you might need several sessions to fully process a particular issue.
Between sessions, your brain continues integrating the work. You might notice shifts in how you feel, react, or think about things. Some people experience vivid dreams or emotional releases. This is all part of healing.
ONGOING
Integration and Maintenance
As you process stored trauma, you'll likely notice cascading improvements—things you didn't even realize were connected start shifting. Triggers lose their power. Physical tension eases. Emotional reactions become more proportionate. You feel more present and less hijacked by your past.
How Brainspotting Fits Alongside Other Approaches
Brainspotting and Talk Therapy
Talk Therapy
Focuses on understanding, analyzing, and making meaning of your experiences. It works primarily through language, reflection, insight, and conscious awareness.
Brainspotting
Focuses on helping your nervous system process experiences that may not shift through insight alone. It uses eye position, body awareness, and focused attention to support processing where trauma, stress, or overwhelm may be held in body based patterns.
Both approaches can be valuable. Many clients benefit from using them together: Brainspotting for deeper processing, and talk therapy for reflection, integration, skill building, and making sense of what comes up. In my practice, we can move fluidly between approaches based on what your nervous system and your life seem to need in any given session.
Brainspotting, EMDR, and Clinical Fit
EMDR
EMDR is a structured, research supported trauma therapy that uses bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements, tapping, or sound, within a phased treatment process. I’m trained in EMDR and can use EMDR therapy when we agree it’s clinically appropriate.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting also works with eye position, attention, and nervous system processing, but it often feels less protocol driven and more spacious. For many neurodivergent clients, that flexibility can make the work feel less pressured, less verbally demanding, and easier to pace.
EMDR and Brainspotting can both be valuable. In my practice, Brainspotting is often the approach my neurodivergent clients and I prefer because it leaves more room for silence, body awareness, complexity, and individual processing style.
Why I Use Brainspotting
After 25 years as a therapist, I’ve worked with many clients who were smart, insightful, and deeply committed to healing, but still stuck. They could explain their trauma, recognize their patterns, and describe what they wanted to do differently. But understanding something intellectually did not always change how their body responded under stress.
That’s when I knew I needed tools that work below the level of conscious thought.
Brainspotting offers one way to do that. By using eye position, body awareness, and focused attention, it can help the nervous system process experiences that may be difficult to reach through conversation alone.
I’m also trained in EMDR, and EMDR can be valuable when it’s the right fit. In my work with neurodivergent adults, though, Brainspotting is often the approach that fits best because it allows more room for pacing, silence, body awareness, complexity, and individual processing style.
You Don't Have to Keep Carrying This
Whatever you've been through, you don't have to keep reliving it. Your brain is trying to heal, it just needs the right conditions.
Brainspotting creates those conditions. It offers a way to process trauma that honors both your need for safety and your capacity for healing.
If you're tired of feeling stuck, tired of your body's reactions controlling you, tired of talking about the same pain without relief, let's try something different.
Want to know more about costs? Check the [Fees & Insurance] page. Have other questions? Read the [FAQ].
Brainspotting Therapy FAQ
The following questions address common concerns about Brainspotting therapy, including how it is used within treatment and how it fits into a broader therapeutic approach.