Most people who have heard of Brainspotting know the basic premise:
"where you look affects how you feel".
It is a deceptively simple idea, and like most deceptively simple ideas, the depth underneath it takes years to properly understand.
Brainspotting was developed by Dr. David Grand and is grounded in how the brain and body store and process experience.
As Dr. Robert Scaer describes it, Brainspotting works by finding a somatic cue and extinguishing it by down-regulating the amygdala, facilitating not just parasympathetic nervous system activation but homeostasis.
The approach works by identifying specific eye positions, called brainspots, that are linked to stored trauma, emotional pain, or nervous system activation held beneath conscious awareness.
What Happens When You Follow the Eyes
During a session, a therapist guides you gently toward these positions, creating the conditions for your brain and body to access and process what has been held there, often without needing words, narrative, or explanation.
What makes Brainspotting different from most therapeutic approaches is that it bypasses the analytical mind entirely.
You do not need to construct a story about what happened.
You do not need to explain yourself or find the right language.
The processing happens at a deeper level, in the brain's subcortical regions where emotional and physiological memory actually lives.
That is where talk therapy often cannot reach, and where Brainspotting begins.
I completed my foundational training, Phase One and Phase Two, with Noula Diamantopoulos through the Brainspotting Training Hub, the trusted training provider for therapeutic practitioners across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the greater Australasian Pacific region.
Phase One taught me to find the spot.
Phase Two taught me something harder:
- how to stay with what emerges
- how to trust the process when it goes somewhere unexpected
- how to hold the space without filling it
That second lesson turns out to be the more important one.
But foundational training, even excellent foundational training, is still a beginning.
I want to say something important before going further.
Brainspotting is not something I use instead of EMDR or any other modality.
My approach is integrative throughout.
In any given session, I am drawing on whichever tools best meet what is present in the room:
- Brainspotting
- EMDR
- parts work
- somatic awareness
- expressive arts
- the Trauma of Money Method
- Root Cause Therapy
The reason I am writing about my Brainspotting training specifically is because I think you deserve to understand what sits behind the tools your therapist is using, not just the names of them.
Working With Young People: A Different Kind of Attunement
In 2024 I completed specialised training in Brainspotting with Children and Adolescents with Monika Baumann, a licensed neuropsychologist and family therapist based in Vienna whose work in this area began with Dr. David Grand himself and has been shaped by years of clinical experience across Europe, the United States, and South America.
Training specifically in this population sharpened something in me that carries across all of my work, not just with young clients.
It deepened my understanding of what it actually means to meet someone where they are.
The Relational Field: Who We Look At Affects How We Feel
In 2025 I completed the Brainspotting with Relationships workshop with Dr. Jaegil Lee, and one sentence from that training has stayed with me ever since.
"WHO you look at affects HOW you feel, and WHERE you look."
That single reframe extends the entire model.
Brainspotting is not only about processing stored trauma in isolation.
It is about the relational field, the way our nervous systems were shaped by the faces, voices, and emotional presence of the people closest to us, and the way those early relational imprints continue to travel forward into every relationship that follows.
Dr. Lee's framework is centred on interpersonal neurobiology and the profound role of the face in emotional regulation.
When we encounter another person's face, we encounter ourselves, our inner world, and our anxiety.
The Brainspotting with Relationships approach uses three innovative frame setups specifically designed for relational issues, including:
- grief
- attachment wounds
- relational trauma
- conflict
- guilt
- shame
- the kind of unfinished relational business that can sit in the body for decades without ever quite resolving
For clients navigating money trauma, this relational lens matters enormously.
So many financial patterns are not fundamentally money patterns at all. They are relational patterns wearing a money costume.
The freeze when an invoice needs to be sent, the collapse when a fee needs to be raised, the compulsive giving that leaves nothing in the account.
These responses were shaped in relationship and they need to be met in relationship to shift.
Trauma, Connection and the Expressive Arts
In November 2025 I completed Healing: Trauma, Connection, Brainspotting and the Expressive Arts, Level 1, with Studio Noula.
This training brought together something I had been intuiting for a long time: that healing does not always move through words or even through direct body awareness.
Sometimes it moves through image, through colour, through the act of making something with your hands while the nervous system quietly does its work in the background.
The expressive arts dimension adds a layer of access for clients who find purely verbal or somatic approaches activating, or who have spent so long being articulate and professionally competent that giving themselves permission to be non-verbal, even briefly, is itself a significant and meaningful step.
For healthcare professionals in particular, people who have built their entire identity around knowing and explaining and holding things together for others, the invitation to simply make rather than analyse can open doors that nothing else quite reaches.
This is not art therapy in the traditional sense.
It is Brainspotting held alongside creative expression, where the making becomes part of the processing container rather than the focus itself.
Why the Depth of Training Matters for You
I am not sharing this training history to present a list of achievements.
I am sharing it because when you are considering working with a therapist, you deserve to understand what sits behind the approach, not just the modality name on a website.
Brainspotting is a brain-body, bottom-up approach that has been specifically designed to integrate with all other therapeutic modalities.
That design intention matters, because it means the depth of Brainspotting available to you in any session depends entirely on the range of what your therapist has been trained to see, hold, and work with alongside it.
The clients I sit with are carrying complexity.
Inherited patterns.
Relational wounds that predate memory.
A body that learned to brace long before the mind could make sense of why.
That kind of material needs a therapist who has done the work to understand it at multiple levels, not just at the modality level, and who can move fluidly between modalities as the session requires rather than staying within a single framework because it is the only one available.
If you have been wondering whether Brainspotting could be part of what helps you, I hope this gives you a clearer picture of what that actually looks like in practice here.
Wondering if this is the right fit?
A 30-minute "Let's Connect" call is available to give you a space to ask your questions, share a little of what you are carrying, and find out whether working together feels right.
No pressure, no expectation that you will have it figured out before we speak, just a safe enough place to begin.
