Brainspotting Therapy in Seattle

You have the words. The words aren't getting at it.

Sometimes being stuck means not having words for what happened. But there is another kind of stuck. You have all the words. You can describe the pattern. You can trace its history. You can tell the story so well it almost sounds finished. The telling doesn't touch it.

Understanding a pattern doesn't always change how it feels. The grief can stay under your sternum while you explain it clearly. The dread can arrive even when you know its history. We can pay attention to those experiences without deciding in advance where they came from. Brainspotting is one way I sometimes work with them.

How Brainspotting works

Brainspotting was developed in 2003 by David Grand, a psychoanalyst and EMDR clinician who noticed mid-session that when a client's gaze rested at one precise point, processing deepened on its own. Grand's shorthand: "Where you look affects how you feel."

In practice it's simple to describe. You hold whatever brings you in, lightly. A feeling, a body sensation, a situation, with or without a memory attached. We find the eye position where the activation is strongest, or where your system feels most steady. That point is the brainspot. You rest your eyes there, often with quiet bilateral sound in headphones. Your attention stays on the felt sense: your body's sense of the whole situation, there before you have words for it. Your system does the processing. My job is to stay precisely with you while it does. There's no protocol marching you through steps. Often there's not much talking at all. Most people are surprised by how much moves in the quiet.

Brainspotting has a small evidence base. Early studies are promising, but EMDR has the deeper research record. I'm certified in both. We talk about that difference when deciding what to try, and pay attention to whether it's helping.

One account of change I find useful is reactivated learning, met by an experience that contradicts it. Whether that explains change in either method remains an open question. The full account, with sources: How Therapy Changes Memory.

I'm Certified in Brainspotting — a credential beyond the introductory trainings, reached through advanced training, documented client work, and consultation with a certified Brainspotting consultant. See full credentials →

Brainspotting and EMDR: why I offer both

I'm Certified in Brainspotting and an EMDRIA Certified EMDR therapist, so the choice between them is never about which one I happen to know. It's about which door your system will open.

EMDR is structured. It works from a target memory through an eight-phase protocol, and its research base is deep. When there's a defined memory carrying the charge, EMDR is often the straightest line. Read about EMDR in my practice →

Brainspotting is open. It doesn't need a target memory, a narrative, or much language. It tolerates not-knowing. It follows activation instead of directing it, which makes room for what never had a story: experience from your earliest years, dread that lives in the body, the thing you can only point toward.

That difference matters most when:

• There's no clear story. We can start with what you notice now without requiring a complete account of its history.
• Words are your best defense. High-insight, high-verbal people can narrate their way around anything, including their own healing. Brainspotting works underneath the narration.
• EMDR plateaus. Processing that stalls or loops sometimes frees up when we switch to a spot and let the system lead.
• You're working with experiences from early life that are difficult to put into words.
• You're shut down rather than flooded. Brainspotting can work gently with numbness and collapse, at whatever distance your system needs.

They also work in sequence. Some clients stabilize in Brainspotting and then finish targets with EMDR; others use Brainspotting to reach what EMDR located but couldn't move.

What a session is like

We start by settling on what to work with, named as precisely or as vaguely as you can manage. The conversation with your father. The dread on Sunday nights. The thing in your chest that doesn't have a name yet.

Then we find the spot. I move a pointer slowly across your field of vision while you track it, and we watch for where the activation sharpens: a breath change, an eye flicker, a swallow, something you feel before you could explain it. You don't have to figure anything out.

Then, mostly, quiet. Your gaze rests on the spot. Your attention stays with the felt sense — the weight or heat or movement of whatever is actually there. You're not analyzing it or narrating it. You're staying aware while your system does what it couldn't do on its own. Images may come, or memories, or waves of feeling. Sometimes there are long stretches of stillness that are quietly doing something. I'm tracking you the whole way — attuned to you and to what your nervous system is doing. If the work gets intense, we adjust the distance.

Sessions run 55 minutes; when a piece of work needs more room, we may schedule a 90-minute session, prorated from the standard session rate. Afterward, people often describe feeling wrung out but lighter. The processing tends to keep moving quietly for days.

What Brainspotting can help with

Trauma without a clean narrative — Complex and developmental trauma, early experiences that are difficult to describe, or years that are hard to separate into individual events. More on how I work with trauma →

What talk therapy couldn't finish — Years of good insight that stopped short of the body. You understand it; it still runs you.

Anxiety and dread that live in the body — The chest weight, the stomach drop, the bracing that arrives before thought.

Grief — Including grief that's tangled with guilt or unfinished business, where the feeling sits deeper than the words for it.

Shutdown and numbness — When the problem isn't too much feeling but the absence of it, Brainspotting can work at the edge of what's reachable without forcing anything.

Performance and creative blocks — Brainspotting grew up partly in performance work and is widely used with athletes, performers, and writers: the freeze, the yips, the block often trace to something the body is guarding.

Not only for what hurts

The same attention that finds where your body holds an old wound can find where it holds steadiness, confidence, or aliveness.

Brainspotting calls this expansion work. Instead of starting from what's wrong, we start from a state you want more of. The groundedness of a good morning. The focus that arrives when you're playing music. The version of you that speaks without rehearsing first. Your body holds these too, and they have spots. We find one. You rest your attention there. The state gets roomier, more available, easier to find again when you need it.

For athletes, performers, and creatives, this is often the whole point. In trauma work it matters differently. Expansion builds ground to stand on while the harder processing happens.

How I hold it

The pointer isn't the therapy. The attunement is. Brainspotting is a relational somatic approach: the processing happens in your body, and it happens because someone is with you while it does.

Brainspotting in my practice sits inside the same existential-phenomenological orientation as everything else I do. That's a heavy phrase for a plain discipline: attend to what's actually there before deciding what it means. The felt sense is where that discipline becomes physical. You stay with it. You let it show you what it is. I hold myself to the same instruction from my chair — I attend to what shows up in you, not to the category I had ready. The spot gives your system a doorway. The relationship makes it safe to walk through. When something surfaces that wants meaning made of it, we make meaning. That isn't a detour from the processing. It's what the processing is for.

I use Brainspotting alongside EMDR, Flash Technique, and, where clinically appropriate with medical oversight, Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP). We use what your system responds to, and we say so when it's time to switch tools.