Brainspotting Therapy

You understand your trauma. So why does your body still react like it’s happening?

You may already know where your patterns came from.

You may understand your attachment wounds, your family dynamics, your triggers, your coping strategies, and the ways your past shaped you.

You may have talked about it for years.

And still, your body reacts before your insight can catch up.

You freeze.

You spiral.

You shut down.

You overthink.

You feel flooded.

You become hypervigilant.

You know you are safe — but some part of you does not seem convinced.

This is one of the reasons I use Brainspotting.

Brainspotting offers a way to work with experiences that may be held more deeply in the nervous system, without requiring you to explain or analyze every part of them first.

What is Brainspotting?

Brainspotting is a brain-body psychotherapy approach that uses visual focus, body awareness, and attuned therapeutic presence to help access and process emotionally charged material.

The basic idea is simple:

where you look can affect how you feel.

During a Brainspotting session, we may identify a particular point in your visual field that connects with an emotion, body sensation, memory, belief, or internal experience.

From there, rather than immediately trying to interpret or change what is happening, we slow down and allow your system to process.

There is no pressure to perform.

No requirement to find the “right” words.

No expectation that you tell your story in a perfectly organized way.

Sometimes there are memories.

Sometimes there are sensations.

Sometimes there are images, emotions, associations, or shifts that are difficult to put into language.

And sometimes very little appears to be happening on the surface while something deeper is reorganizing underneath.

Brainspotting can be especially helpful when insight is not enough

Many of the people who come to me are extremely self-aware.

They have read the books.

They understand trauma.

They know the terminology.

They can explain why they react the way they do.

They may even be therapists, healthcare professionals, attorneys, academics, creatives, or other people who spend a lot of time thinking deeply about human behavior.

And yet insight has not fully changed the experience.

You may understand why conflict feels threatening and still panic when someone is upset with you.

You may know that your childhood is over and still feel like you are bracing for danger.

You may recognize that perfectionism is protective and still feel unable to stop.

You may know intellectually that you are worthy and still carry shame in your body.

Sometimes the work needs to happen somewhere other than the thinking mind.

What happens in a Brainspotting session?

There is no single way a Brainspotting session has to look.

We may begin by identifying something you want to work with: a memory, emotion, trigger, body sensation, fear, belief, relationship pattern, or simply a felt sense of being stuck.

I may then help you notice where you feel that experience in your body and guide you in identifying a visual point connected with it.

Once we find a Brainspot, we slow down.

You notice.

I stay with you.

You may talk throughout the process, speak only occasionally, or spend stretches of time in silence.

The goal is not to force anything to happen.

Your nervous system sets the pace.

Some sessions feel intense.

Some feel quiet.

Some bring unexpected associations or memories.

Others bring subtle shifts in sensation, perspective, or emotional charge.

Brainspotting is less about “doing it right” and more about creating the conditions for your own system to process what it is ready to process.

You do not have to tell me everything

For some people, one of the most relieving aspects of Brainspotting is that healing does not require a detailed verbal retelling of every traumatic experience.

You are always allowed to decide what you want to share.

We can work with a feeling, sensation, image, belief, or level of activation without requiring you to disclose every detail connected to it.

This can be particularly meaningful for experiences that feel difficult to explain, overwhelming to revisit, or too complicated to put into words.

You remain in control of the process.

Brainspotting + CPTSD

Complex trauma often lives far beyond explicit memory.

It can show up in the body as bracing, shutdown, hypervigilance, dissociation, shame, emotional flooding, chronic tension, or the sense that something bad is always about to happen.

You may understand that a current situation is different from the past while your nervous system continues to react as if the old danger is still present.

Brainspotting can offer a way to work with these deeper trauma responses while staying grounded in the present.

I often integrate Brainspotting with attachment work, parts-oriented exploration, somatic awareness, depth psychology, and relational psychotherapy when working with complex trauma.

Brainspotting + neurodivergence

I also find Brainspotting particularly compatible with many neurodivergent and highly sensitive clients.

Traditional therapy can sometimes require an exhausting amount of verbal processing, emotional labeling, eye contact, cognitive restructuring, or linear storytelling.

That does not work equally well for every nervous system.

Brainspotting can create more space for nonlinear processing.

You may follow sensations, images, memories, associations, movement, silence, or whatever naturally emerges.

There is room for intensity.

There is room for distraction.

There is room for complexity.

There is room for your brain to process the way it actually processes.

You do not need to become more neurotypical in order to do meaningful therapeutic work.

Brainspotting for people who think too much

If your mind is constantly analyzing, evaluating, anticipating, explaining, or trying to solve what you are feeling, Brainspotting can offer a different doorway.

Thinking is not the enemy.

For many people, intellectualization developed for very good reasons.

Understanding may have helped you survive.

But sometimes analysis can become a way of staying one step removed from experience.

Brainspotting does not ask you to abandon your intellect.

It simply gives us another place to listen.

What can we work on with Brainspotting?

Brainspotting can be incorporated into therapy around many different experiences, including:

  • CPTSD and complex trauma

  • childhood trauma

  • attachment wounds

  • religious trauma

  • medical trauma

  • chronic illness

  • grief and loss

  • relationship trauma

  • perfectionism

  • shame

  • anxiety

  • emotional reactivity

  • dissociation

  • burnout

  • difficult memories

  • body-based trauma responses

  • fear and hypervigilance

  • feeling stuck despite insight

  • identity-related wounds

  • neurodivergent masking and exhaustion

  • painful family-of-origin patterns

  • performance or creative blocks

You do not need to know whether Brainspotting is the “right” intervention before beginning therapy.

We can decide together when and whether it makes sense to use.

Brainspotting is not about forcing a breakthrough

You do not need to have a dramatic experience for Brainspotting to be meaningful.

There is no prize for crying harder, remembering more, or having the biggest emotional release.

Sometimes meaningful processing is quiet.

Sometimes the change is noticing later that the thing that used to send you into a spiral has slightly less charge.

Sometimes you realize you have a little more space before reacting.

Sometimes your body feels different.

Sometimes a belief you have carried for years no longer feels quite as true.

The goal is not catharsis for the sake of catharsis.

The goal is greater freedom.

My approach

I do not use Brainspotting as a rigid protocol that overrides the relationship between us.

It is one tool within a broader depth-oriented, trauma-informed, neurodivergent-affirming approach.

Our work may also include:

  • attachment exploration

  • parts work

  • shadow work

  • somatic awareness

  • family-of-origin exploration

  • relational processing

  • identity work

  • grief

  • nervous-system education

  • depth psychology

Some sessions may involve Brainspotting.

Some may involve conversation.

Some may move naturally between the two.

Therapy does not need to look the same every week.

This may be a good fit if…

Brainspotting may resonate with you if:

  • you have already done a lot of talk therapy

  • you are highly self-aware but still feel stuck

  • you intellectualize easily

  • you have difficulty finding words for what you feel

  • you experience trauma primarily in your body

  • you are neurodivergent or highly sensitive

  • you become overwhelmed by highly structured therapy

  • you want an approach that allows for silence and nonlinear processing

  • you are curious about working more directly with the nervous system

  • you want trauma therapy that does not require you to retell every detail of your past

  • you are looking for something deeper than learning more coping skills

You do not need to know how to do Brainspotting.

You do not need to prepare.

You only need to arrive.

Online Brainspotting Therapy in Maine, North Carolina + South Carolina

I offer online Brainspotting and depth psychotherapy for adults located throughout:

Maine
North Carolina
South Carolina

My practice is especially oriented toward highly sensitive, neurodivergent, deeply reflective adults navigating complex trauma, chronic illness, medical trauma, burnout, and patterns that have not fully shifted through insight alone.

If you have spent years understanding yourself and still feel like some part of you remains stuck in survival mode, Brainspotting may offer another way in.

Ready to explore Brainspotting?

You do not need to decide in advance whether every session will involve Brainspotting.

We can begin with what is happening in your life now and decide together what kind of work feels most supportive.

Reach out to explore whether working together feels like the right fit.