Brainspotting Body-Based Therapy
Brainspotting Therapy
Trauma processing & the brain-body connection
Gazing and resting the eyes on a fixed point ahead is something ancestral and tracking traditions have used for generations to help the body process, settle and survive. Brainspotting works with that same connection: where you look, and how your nervous system registers experience. When someone talks through something difficult, the nervous system gives physical cues to where something sits in the body. Brainspotting uses that as a way in, without needing to go over the story again or analyse what it means.
How Brainspotting works
The brain processes experience through areas like the amygdala, hippocampus, and brainstem – operating below conscious awareness and before words form. When your gaze settles on a point that connects with something held in the body, the brain can continue working through what’s sitting there. This is called a brainspot – a specific eye position that activates the subcortical brain, where trauma, stress, and unprocessed experience live.
What Brainspotting Helps With
Trauma, anxiety & performance
- Ancestral and intergenerational trauma
- Attachment trauma and relational wounds
- Post-traumatic stress and PTSD symptoms
- Performance anxiety and creative blocks
- Anxiety in leadership and high-pressure roles
- Dissociation and shutdown responses
- Sports performance and peak performance states
- Phobias and panic responses
- Chronic pain and somatic symptoms
- Recovery from medical trauma or accidents
- Life transitions and loss of direction
Most people come to this work when they’ve realised that knowing their story hasn’t changed how their body reacts under pressure – the anxiety spike, the shutdown, the restlessness, or the exhaustion that keeps returning however much they understand the reasons behind it.
What To Expect In A Brainspotting Session
Where the magic happens
Sessions typically last 60 minutes and are guided with attention to pacing and what your system is communicating. I track what you’re experiencing internally and what I’m observing externally – this is called dual attunement, and means I follow what the body shows rather than a set protocol, so processing can happen without forcing a story.
I might suggest some tools to help the nervous system process further, like bilateral sound or eye covers. Some sessions are quiet, some involve talking, some don’t. There’s no expectation to produce insight or arrive at a narrative. The process moves at the pace your nervous system sets. What happens in a session can be profound. People find themselves processing experiences and challenges they’ve carried for years, and meeting them with a resilience they didn’t know they had.
Brainspotting vs EMDR
Which trauma therapy is right for you?
Both work with eye position instead of focusing on traditional talking therapy – and both are Western, clinical versions of something ancestral and tracking traditions have practised for generations: fixing the gaze on a point and letting the body respond.
EMDR runs through eight structured phases, moving the eyes back and forth while holding a specific memory in mind. Brainspotting has no phases and no fixed sequence – the eye stays on one point, with no requirement to identify or hold a particular memory at all.
People often move to Brainspotting after finding EMDR’s structure too activating, or after feeling like they were performing the protocol rather than working through anything. It also tends to suit trauma that doesn’t trace back to one specific event – developmental trauma, or stress that’s built up over years rather than a single incident.
A Whole-System Approach
Nervous system, brain & biology
Inside The Happy Reset® Inherited Pattens Project, Brainspotting sits alongside Tension & Trauma Release and Nutrigenomics. The three work together because what most people are carrying shows up across all of them – in how the brain holds experience, how the body stores it, and how biology either supports or undermines the capacity to process it. Sessions are built around you, your history, and what’s present on the day, and the balance between the three changes as the work develops.
Training & practice
As a Certified Brainspotting Practitioner (Phases 1–4) and Group Brainspotting Practitioner, I work within the ethical frameworks established in the UK and USA. That training sits alongside my traditional lineage and indigenous practice, where tracking a fixed point on the land and watching for what moves was never treated as separate from what the body was processing.
Sessions are offered in person and online throughout the UK.
Tension Release
Body
Your body remembers the story, and already knows how to release it
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Your nervous system holds onto stress, trauma and tension – often for years. Tension and trauma release works with your body’s own innate mechanism for discharging what’s been stored, without needing to talk it through or relive it. Clients often notice a physical sense of release during the first session, and the effects build over time as the nervous system recalibrates.
Brainspotting
Mind
Breakthroughs happen in spaces your brain already knows it has access to
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Brainspotting uses your eye position to access where emotional and somatic material is held in the brain. It works with pathways that talking alone can’t reach, which is why it often gets to patterns that years of conventional therapy haven’t moved. The processing happens internally – your brain does the work, the rest unfolds around you.
Nutrigenomics
Nutrition
What if you need different nutrients and foods to everyone else?
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Your genetic makeup determines how you process nutrients, handle stress hormones, and regulate energy. Nutrigenomics maps that picture so we can build an approach around your biology rather than generic guidelines. No two people get the same plan, as no two people have the same genetic profile. For most clients, this is the piece nobody else has ever looked at.
The Impact Of This Work
Across one-to-one sessions, corporate workshops and keynote experiences, people notice genuine transformation - better sleep, clearer thinking, stronger resilience and sustainable change. The Happy Reset® method works because it addresses your whole system, not just symptoms. The feedback I receive from happy clients, reflects what happens when people finally feel supported in a way that makes sense for their unique bodies, mind and wiring.