When Words Haven’t Been Enough to Heal
Brainspotting Therapy in Snohomish, WA
Yes, it's a weird name. It's also the thing that reaches what talk therapy never could and gives you access to your subconscious to create real change.
Most therapy works with your story. This works with what your story is made of.
You've talked about it. You've journaled about it. You've sat across from good therapists who asked good questions and still, something hasn't moved.
Not because you haven't tried hard enough. Not because healing isn't possible for you. But because the part that needs to heal isn't stored in your words. It's stored in your body, your nervous system, the places beneath language where memory lives before it becomes a story.
Brainspotting works there. In the subconscious. In the body. In the part of you that has been waiting for someone to finally know how to reach it.
Who is Brainspotting for?
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A lot of childhood trauma is stored in “non-verbal” areas of the brain, so it’s normal to not be able to access “memories” of the most formative times of our life.
Brainspotting can be used to process things that don’t make sense like “why don’t I feel like I’m enough?” when I feel like I had a pretty good childhood.
It can also be used to process specific traumatic memories in a more targeted way. Trauma gets ‘stuck’ in our brains and brainspotting is one powerful way to release it so it no longer hijacks your behaviors and thoughts.
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I love using Brainspotting for adoption because for most adoptees, there is no memory of being removed from your biological parents. It feels like an impossible wound to heal with talk therapy alone because it lives so deep in your body.
There are so many ways to use brainspotting to heal this primal wound and I am so passionate about helping adoptees heal one of the most painful traumas a human can experience.
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It’s common to reach out for therapy when you have gone through a big change- be it one you chose for yourself or one that happened outside your control. Big changes shake up how we see ourselves and things feel confusing and blurry.
Often times when there has been a big change, our thinking brain starts to work in hyperdrive. Change is stressful for us- be it a good or bad change- and that stress lives in our bodies. It can be very disorienting and there are many wonderful brainspotting ‘frames’ to help you feel more accepting of what is no longer here while also creating curiosity, calm and confidence with what is new.
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I find that brainspotting is deeply spiritual because we dropping out of our thinking brain - our prefrontal cortex- and dropping back into our intuition, emotions, consciousness, and spirituality. I have witnessed some breathtaking moments with clients who connect with passed loved ones, their younger selves, the stars in the Universe, and God or Higher Power.
If you find yourself wanting to deepen your spiritual practices and connection to things that are outside of you, brainspotting is a beautiful option.
Brainspotting works for anyone carrying something that talk therapy has only ever grazed. Specifically I love to use brainspotting for…
But how does it even work?
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The Science of it
Brainspotting was developed by Dr. David Grand in 2003, and its premise is deceptively simple: where you look affects how you feel.
Your eyes are a direct extension of your brain. When you hold your gaze at a specific point in your visual field, it creates access to the deeper subcortical brain, the part that processes trauma, survival responses, and emotional memory. This is the part of the brain that traditional talk therapy, which operates primarily through the prefrontal cortex, often can't reach.
When we find your brainspot, the precise eye position that corresponds to what you're carrying, your brain begins to process what it has been holding. Not through analysis. Not through narrative. Through the body's own natural capacity to heal when it is finally given the right conditions to do so.
The research supports what clients feel in session: measurable reductions in trauma symptoms, anxiety, and emotional activation, often in far fewer sessions than talk therapy alone.
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The Spirituality of it
Brainspotting is a science. It is also something that feels, to many people, like a remembering.
When you find your brainspot and drop into that held gaze, something opens. People describe it as accessing a part of themselves that exists beneath the personality, beneath the conditioning, beneath the stories they've been telling since childhood. A place that is ancient and quiet and deeply, unmistakably their own.
This is not something I add to brainspotting. It is something brainspotting reveals. The science creates the container. What emerges inside it is yours, and it often feels like more than memory. It feels like truth.
For those doing ancestral work, generational healing, or deep spiritual excavation, brainspotting becomes a doorway into layers of healing that extend beyond a single lifetime. I hold space for all of that.
WHAT A BRAINSPOTTING SESSION LOOKS LIKE
A Brainspotting session is collaborative, flexible, and paced with your nervous system in mind. We'll start by making sure you feel safe and resourced before moving into any deeper work. Throughout the session, I'll guide you gently and check in often. You won't have to relive the trauma or talk through every detail,just notice what comes up as your brain begins to process what it's been holding. The goal is for your system to release what's stuck, so you can feel more grounded, present, and free.
Every session is different, and there’s no ‘right’ way to process.
Identify the issue/question/focus
We start by identifying what you want to work on. This doesn't need to be precise or perfectly articulated. It might be a feeling, a memory, a physical sensation, a situation that keeps pulling at you. We just need a place to begin and that place is intuitvely led by you.
Connect somatically
From there, we check in with your body. Where do you feel this? What does it feel like physically? A tightness in your chest, a weight in your stomach, a heat behind your eyes? The body is our guide, not your story about the body.
Finding the brainspot
Then we find your brainspot. Using a pointer, we slowly move across your visual field while you hold your attention on what you're carrying. At a certain point, something shifts, a subtle change in your face, your breath, your eyes. That's the spot. We hold it.
Focused mindful processing
From there, you go inward. There's nothing you need to do or figure out. Your brain and body do the processing. I stay present with you, attuned, holding the space, following where you go. Sessions end when there's a natural settling, a sense that something has moved or completed for now.
Why Accessing the Subconscious is Vital to Change: The Importance of Deprogramming
“95% of who you are by the time you are 35 years old is a set of memorized behaviors, skills, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions and attitudes that functions like a subconscious automatic computer program.”
-Dr. Joe Dispenza
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About 5% of our total mental ability is used in the conscious mind
It operates through logic, language, and willful attention
Talk therapy is largely a conscious-mind activity — analyzing, narrating, understanding "why"
Many clients come in frustrated because they know the “why” behind what they do, but they feel stuck in trying to change it
Insight alone is not enough to change.
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Runs roughly 95% of our mental and emotional life — the automatic operating system beneath conscious awareness, handling the vast majority of our thoughts, reactions, and behaviors without us choosing them
This is where implicit memory lives which is everything learned before language was online (think in-utero, early childhood and even prior generations)
Governs the body's state directly: nervous system responses, hormonal patterns, muscle tension, breath
Operates through image, sensation, emotion, and association rather than logic
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Bypasses the analytical mind by anchoring the eyes at a fixed point. Sustained gaze along with strong attunement from the therapist, quiets the prefrontal cortex's noise and allows for the subcortical and body-based experiences
Works through the midbrain and limbic system, where trauma, fear responses, and core limiting beliefs are stored as sensation rather than as language
Lets processing happen without needing to explain or understand it first — the material moves through the body's own sequence, which is why shifts often feel like something released rather than something figured out
The same access point opens the other direction: Expansion Brainspotting uses resource and expansion spots to deepen into intuition, creative flow, imagination, and spiritual/transpersonal states rather than distress
Holds a dual-attunement field — attuned to both the relational presence of the therapist and the client's own neurobiology — so the nervous system stays regulated enough to go deep without overwhelm
When we are in nature, we are naturally brainspotting all the time.
Think about gazing into a campfire or up at the stars in the sky and you suddenly have a profound thought or idea.
Or while on a hike and you pause to look at the tree canopy and have a childhood memory.
Take a moment to look at each of the photos below and see what you notice. Where do your eyes naturally fall? What sensations or emotions arise?
What lives underneath.
Every pattern you can't seem to break, every relationship that repeats, every reaction that feels too big for the moment, has a root.
Not a character flaw.
Not a failure of willpower.
A belief, formed before you had language for it, living in your body and running your life from underground.
Brainspotting reaches those beliefs where they actually live.
Not through analyzing them into submission, but by processing the nervous system activation that keeps them in place.
When the activation releases, the belief loses its grip and your body finally lets it go.
This is why people describe brainspotting as getting their life back. Because in a real sense, that's what happens.
If you can conjure it…we can brainspot it
Past, present or future.
If you can connect with it, we can brainspot it.
This can be a memory from your past or a dream for your future.
By using Expansion, we can conjure a desired feeling state like Trust or Love so that you can live more fully within that state.
Or we can use Activation to clear away a painful feeling state that you struggle with like Anxiety or Fear.
The beauty of brainspotting is harnessing the power of your imagination to bring movement into your life so that you are living the life you choose, and not the life you were programmed to live.
Ready to find out if this is the missing piece?
The 30-minute consult is yours to use however you need. Ask me everything. Interview me. Sit with how it feels to be in conversation with me before you commit to anything. If it's a yes for both of us, we go from there.