Trauma and Brainspotting

Trauma makes it challenging to move forward.

You have lived with fear, anxiety, heightened startle response, avoidance, confusion, and feeling lethargic long enough!

Something happened to you, causing severe distress and leaving you scared of life. Maybe it was an abusive partner, a natural disaster, growing up in a dysfunctional family, childhood abuse and neglect, or even assault.

Your traumatized brain often does not distinguish between something harmless in the present and past traumatic events. You react the same even though you are safe in the present moment. This overreaction is a trauma response, which can control your life and keep you in fear.

Trauma does not have to define you!

Therapy can help you process this trauma, and you will see the clear connections of how the traumatic event from long ago still causes problems in your life today. I will help you recognize your trauma responses and teach you skills to bring you back to the present moment, calm you down, regain control of yourself, and effectively respond to move you forward rather than staying stuck.

As a Certified Trauma Therapist, I provide trauma-informed Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), and Brainspotting Therapy interventions. CBT focuses on how your thoughts and feelings cause you to act in specific ways. It can teach you how to cope with negative thoughts and change your behaviors to cope with your symptoms.

CPT is an evidence-based, short-term treatment that can lessen or eliminate Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms. This form of therapy uses cognitive-behavioral techniques to help you cope with your symptoms. During online treatment, a counselor educates you about PTSD symptoms. Then, they help you change your unhelpful beliefs or “stuck points” associated with the traumatic event.

Brainspotting Therapy (BSP) is a newer approach.

“Brainspotting is based on the profound attunement of the therapist with the patient, finding a somatic cue and extinguishing it by down-regulating the amygdala. It isn’t just PNS (Parasympathetic Nervous System) activation that is facilitated, it is homeostasis.”
– Robert Scaer, MD, “The Trauma Spectrum”

Dr. David Grand, Ph.D., discovered Brainspotting in 2003. “Where you look affects how you feel.” The brain activity, especially in the subcortical brain, organizes itself around that eye position.

Brainspotting locates points in the client’s visual field that help to access unprocessed trauma in the subcortical brain.

Brainspotting is a powerful, focused treatment method that identifies, processes, and releases core neurophysiological sources of emotional/body pain, trauma, dissociation, and other challenging symptoms.

This method is a simultaneous form of diagnosis and treatment, enhanced with bilateral sound, which is deep, direct, and powerful yet focused and containing.

You can move past trauma.

Together, we will identify the underlying cause for your ongoing stress from past trauma. Then, we will determine the best approach to help you reprocess that trauma, allowing you to put it in the past where it belongs.

Don’t let trauma keep defining you. I have the methods and expertise to help you overcome the fear associated with that past event.

Our work starts with you contacting me today.