Brainspotting Therapy in Seattle

You have the words. The words aren't reaching it.

Talk therapy was built for one kind of stuck: not having words for what happened. There's another kind it keeps missing. 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.

That's not a failure of insight. It's a limit of where insight can go. What keeps you stuck was never stored as a story in the first place. It lives in the body. The grief stays lodged under your sternum while you explain it clearly. The dread arrives on schedule whether or not you understand where it comes from. Some of it settled in before you had words at all. Talking can't always reach that far back.

Brainspotting was built for this. It works underneath the story, where the thing actually lives.

What Brainspotting actually is

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. The observation became a method. Grand's shorthand for it: "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 a brainspot: a gaze position that correlates with what your body is holding. 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. You stay mindfully aware. 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. Clients are regularly surprised by how much moves in the quiet.

Brainspotting is a young method. EMDR stood in the same place twenty years ago: a small but growing evidence base, a mechanism still being worked out, and clinicians who kept using it because of what it did in the room. Brainspotting is there now. Early studies show real results, including in comparisons with established trauma treatments. The research grows every year. What clinicians keep seeing in the room is why it has spread so fast. I hold certifications in both. Which one we reach for depends on what your system needs, not on which decade the research started.

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 actually 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.

In the room, that difference matters most when:

• There's no clear memory to target. You feel the weight, but it doesn't attach to an event EMDR could work from.
• 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.
• The material is early. It comes from the years before you could say what was happening.
• 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. All of these are workable.

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. Your body flags the spot. You don't have to figure anything out.

Then, mostly, quiet. This is where Brainspotting becomes a mindfulness practice with an anchor. Your gaze rests on the spot. Your attention rests on the felt sense, the weight or heat or movement of whatever is actually there. You're not analyzing it. You're not 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 closely the whole way. Brainspotting calls this dual attunement. I'm attuned to you and to what your nervous system is doing. If the work gets intense, we adjust the distance. You're never left alone in it.

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 experience stored before language, the aftermath of chaotic years that never sorted themselves into separate 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 has a particular track record with athletes, performers, and writers: the freeze, the yips, the block often trace to something the body is guarding.

Not only for what hurts

Most of this page describes Brainspotting as a way to process pain. It has a second use. 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. It's also how the work eventually turns from clearing the past toward building a life.

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. Philosophers spent a century arguing that the body understands a situation before the mind has words for it. Brainspotting takes that seriously as method. You stay with the felt sense. 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.

And because no single method fits every nervous system, Brainspotting here is held 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 honestly when it's time to switch tools.