Brainspotting is a powerful therapeutic approach that utilizes relevant eye position with somatic awareness to access and release the effects of trauma/adversity to facilitate deep, rapid healing on a subconscious level.

We all experience trauma or adversity at different points in life. Trauma is an experience in which threat is detected by the brain-body. Traumatic experiences can include those that are life threatening like car accidents, war and natural disasters. They can also include abuse, neglect or even living in an invalidating social environment, especially early in life. It is natural for humans experiencing these kinds of threats to life or well-being to have much of our brain-body’s energy shift to the brainstem and mobilize a fight, flight or freeze response often in our most important developmental years. This readies the nervous system to take extreme measures for the sake of survival.

When traumatic experiences happen early enough in life, often enough and through the hands (or words) of parents or caregivers, it can lead to a complex trauma response. This is the brain-body’s survival energy getting stuck deep in the lower, subconscious regions of the brain-body system. This leads to difficulties such as bothersome thoughts, nightmares, feeling checked out or removed from the body, avoidance, alertness, anxiety, depression, difficulty sleeping, bitterness, isolation, difficulty trusting, losing control and interpersonal conflict.

To make matters worse, epigenetics has shown us that the traumatic experiences and lifestyle choices of our parents, grandparents and more distant ancestors can channel traumatic responses to us through shifting gene expression. This is why some of us may exhibit a trauma response, even when childhood seemed to be mostly free of adversity.

Brainspotting can heal the effects of trauma, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, impulsivity, bitterness and address a host of mental health challenges. It works brilliantly with any human with a nervous system (and we all have one). With Brainspotting, we utilize the brain-body’s inclination to constantly scan the environment through the five senses for threat or safety and its inclination to scan itself for homeostasis (returning to a state of balance).

Within a Brainspotting session, we can work to dislodge stuck survival energy for healing or to enhance growth or performance in personal or professional life. Within a session focused on healing, you will choose an issue to work on. I will help you to locate the place in the body in which the issue is expressing itself, find a relevant Brainspot (a place where you can rest your gaze) and invite you to mindfully process (by simply observing the thoughts, emotions and physical sensations that arise). Often people will, “connect dots,” within the session, seeing for the first time the way two different issues are connected or seeing the issue with renewed perspective. Within a session focused on enhancing work, creative or sports performance, you will choose the area of growth. I will help you locate the somatic (body) experience and Brainspot that correlate with that area, and I’ll invite you to mindfully process. Processing seems to continue in the days and weeks following a Brainspotting session. Often by the time of the next session, you will have had a revelation, realization, reduced distress or enhanced confidence, clarity and calm. As your subconscious begins to shift, you may find that your conscious mind is better able to make sense of things that used to be overwhelming, confusing or terrifying.

Within couples and family work, I use Brainspotting in different configurations. For example, I may invite one member of a couple to process an issue for half or all of a session while the other partner mindfully witnesses and reflects their observations. Then we may switch and have the other partner process for part or all of a session. I also like to set up each member of a couple or family with their own Brainspot and then let all simultaneously process, checking in periodically on each person. Brainspotting can be used with couples and families for every session, every other session or as needed throughout treatment to help people to get beyond things they may not otherwise be able to overcome, such as forgiveness.

I am a certified Brainspotting practitioner. I have been transformed through having received my own Brainspotting therapy for over the past year. I am excited to continue my growth journey with regular Brainspotting for myself. As a survivor of complex trauma, I had a tendency to see injustice in a pronounced way in both the world and in my life. While I always appeared polished at work, in personal life I have often become disgruntled with circumstances and emotionally reactive to threats, both real and imagined. After having received Brainspotting treatment, I now find more space between stimulus and response. A difficult thing will happen, I will have my initial reaction in my mind (the one the “old Rachel” would have) and then I breath and notice a more expansive reality above, around and beneath my difficulty. At that point I am able to be thankful for enhanced wisdom and move forward in a more effective way.

DBT Skills facilitate growth on a conscious level. DBT blends Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with Mindfulness and encourages the integration of opposing tendencies in humans. The Skills help us to do this through enhancing Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotional Regulation and Interpersonal Effectiveness. This approach has a strong body of evidence supporting its efficacy in treating Borderline Personality Adaptation (commonly called Borderline Personality Disorder or BPD), a developmental challenge thought to be caused by complex and inter-generational trauma as well as numerous other mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression and oppositionality. What I love about DBT Skills are that they help our thinking brain know how to regulate ourselves and interact with others more effectively.

DBT Skills begin with Mindfulness. The creator of DBT, Marsha Linehan, noted that some form of Mindfulness can be found in every religious tradition on the planet, including meditation and contemplative prayer. Linehan is a woman with Catholic roots who practiced meditation extensively through Buddhism in adulthood. There is a strong scientific body of evidence supporting the idea that Mindfulness holds the power to change the structure of our brains, to reduce emotional reactivity and to enhance calm.

DBT Skills include Distress Tolerance. These skills marry well with Mindfulness as they help us to better deal with, accept and therefore change what we can about the difficult realities of our lives. Pain and suffering are frequent parts of life on our planet. Radical Acceptance has been referred to as the cornerstone of DBT Skills. This powerful tool can help us to be less negatively affected by the atrocities, difficulties and annoyances that come our way and that might normally derail our wellness or self-respect.

DBT Skills include Emotional Regulation. Since the traumas/adversities we and/or our ancestors have faced can make many of us prone to emotional reactivity, explosive anger outbursts, irritability and oppositionality, Emotional Regulation skills are key to living a satisfying life.

DBT Skills include Interpersonal Effectiveness. This skill set helps us to become master diplomats. I find that many talented and capable people have a lot of social capacity in many arenas. One of the most common areas in which otherwise highly functional humans struggle is in effectively communicating with our spouses, partners, children or parents. As our primary attachment figures, these people are exceptionally well positioned to call up a trauma response. Another is in the interactions we have within this world in which we perceive threat, small or large, real or imagined. Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills can help you take your interactions and relationships to the next level.

As a Social Worker who has focused on families and children her entire career, my practice is foundationally based in the Social Systems Therapeutic Approach. Attachment and Behavioral theories are also central to my work; especially my work with families and couples.

Social Systems is an approach to therapy that uses a broad lens. This means I consider the various, concentric circles of social systems that surround the humans I work with. These circles include the family, school or workplace, membership is various religious, sports or interest groups, town or city, state or province, country and world. As humans we are shaped by our experiences and also those of our parents, ancestors and the various cultures within which we find ourselves. Similar to Brainspotting, Social Systems Theory centers Homeostasis. Social Systems Theory considers the homeostasis of social groups, such as the family, friend group and larger community. 

Attachment-based therapy centers the “blueprint” for relationships that we receive from our parents or early life caregivers. This is the pattern we have for relationships. If our relationship with our parents was hostile and unpredictable, we may have developed a tendency to be hyper-alert to detecting threat within others, especially our closest others. This was a natural developmental adaptation necessary for survival, as infant humans cannot survive without bonding with a caregiver who will protect and feed us. Often as we get older this tendency no longer serves us, and can cause children and adults to see potential threat or abandonment from others in an amplified way.

I use Attachment to help humans heal through their relationships, including through parent-coaching during child-led play for children, and through helping couples better communicate to meet each others’ attachment needs and help heal attachment wounds together.

Behaviorally based therapies include tried and true methods for changing behavior in children and adults. The idea is that we are “programmed” to behave in certain ways by our social environments; especially our early-life social environments. We have learned that certain behaviors were rewarded, while others were punished or simply not reinforced. With our children, most of us inadvertently parent the way we were parented. Many of us find that our children’s behavior is not what we desire. The good news is there are ways to make changes in the social environments of our children (or ourselves) to cultivate the behaviors we want to see and cull those we don’t want to see.

I love incorporating behavioral interventions into work with children/families, couples and adults. I harness the power of strategies such as identifying the underlying functions of the behaviors of people, young and old (figuring out why we do what we do) and shifting the way the social environment, including antecedents and consequences (the things that happen before and after undesirable behaviors), operates around them to elicit more of the desired behavior. I love using these tactics to bring about behavioral change in children and teens with argumentativeness or oppositionality and to bring about behavioral change in adults who wish to shift to a healthier set of habits.