[Please contact me via spiritmaterial.com]
Hello, I am a certified Brainspotting consultant, have been training in and practicing Brainspotting as a primary approach since 2019, and as a consultant, am able to take practitioners through their certification process after they’ve completed Phase 2 training.
As a consultant, I help practitioners onboard both the core skills of Brainspotting, and the spirit of the approach, so they can then integrate it with their own approaches. As a clinician and coach, I operate out of an approach which is based on the fundamental respect for people at the cellular level.
My approach to my work involves a lot of the natural crossover between the spirit of Brainspotting, and my graduate studies in Contemplative/Buddhist Psychotherapy at Naropa University. These foundations share identical outlooks which are: depathologizing, compassion-first, client-following and focus on client’s inherent intelligences and wisdom; and they both strongly emphasize not approaching client work with an agenda, not forcing compliance or pre-scripted protocols on clients, and bringing in radical approaches to mindfulness, connection and awareness of space in ourselves, and between ourselves. My belief is any practitioner who has the spirit of Brainspotting in their bones, has an almost identical mindset—and can be trusted not to be forceful or unattuned in session.
Brainspotting, and most contemporary trauma approaches, operate from a view that people have evolved to have a great capacity to automatically sequester experiences which are just too much to bear, and sometimes these are stuck. They aren’t shaken off in the moment. They may pile up over years, or they may be so severe and foundational in our development, that our inborn protections do their best to manage the unmanageable. So we get things we call trauma, dissociation, anxiety, flashbacks, hypervigilence, freezing, fawning, going on autopilot. Sometimes these are blocks to performance, stage fright, choking at the moment we are to be in flow or at peak performance. Sometimes these manifest in ways where parts of ourselves sabotage greater success, relationships, growth. Sometimes these manifest in chronic physical conditions, pain, injuries. … and often there’s just no name, no category, and we are groundless. And groundlessness can be absolutely terrifying, especially when we are encountering it alone.
The texture of our hurting, and how we go on despite it, is totally individual. And so Brainspotting, like the arena of Contemplative Psychotherapy, or many of the areas in which I’ve trained, focuses on learning another’s nervous system, trusting it, and fostering radical safety for our clients. This is combined with precise (often minimalist) skills: ways of fostering the release of long-held wounding.
Brainspotting practitioners know that it can facilitate profound healing from profound wounding, partly because it offers a custom fit for each experience: the therapist knows not to be too distant or too overbearing; as with meditation or relationships, the experience is meant to feel not too loose, not too tight. As with much psychedelic work, this attunement helps set the stage for a someone’s internal healing intelligence to kick in. The medicine isn’t the therapist, it’s actually within the client nervous system.
It is sort of like a broken bone: the medical professional helps set it and ensure safety, then the body intelligence does the rest. This is radicaly different than approaches which place the healing capacity in the hands of a therapist, or an out-of-the-box script, through which a client is run, (and if the results aren’t lasting healing, than the client must not have done it right). Unlike cognitive or behavioral change approaches, my approach, the spirit of Brainspotting, and much effective trauma or performance work today focuses on body-mind, bottom up approaches. There is an emphasis on connection with the body, emotions, sensations, memories—however they are seen, heard, felt, known, elements of the nervous system and brain which are responsible for processing experience, and regulating autonomic, automatic physical processes. It is really about shifting from disregulation, to regulation. This general approach is not just about replacing the wrong thoughts with the right ones or analyzing oneself into safety and out of trauma. Insight is seen to emerge after healing experiences occur. And the way there is often unpredictable, cannot be scripted, and often can’t be dissected and reproduced or really understood. And the good news is the process of healing or freeing doesn’t have to be any of these: we don’t need to intellectually know why, or how at the microscopic level: we can just be glad that it has happened.
I have additional training in advanced Somatic Experiencing, Gestalt, Internal Family Systems, PACT couples therapy, Ketamine Assisted Therapy, and sex therapy training. These can integrate with my work, or Brainspotting can be done in a ‘pure’ form. It’s up to the client’s preference, and in a sense, every person will bring in their own way of processing—meaning there can be a new type of therapy done every session.