Brainspotting Therapy for Healing Old Wounds

Breaking cycles, finding freedom, and building healthier relationships.

Maybe on the outside, things look fine — you’ve built a career, cared for your family, and done everything you thought you “should.” But inside, anxiety, shame, or self-doubt won’t let go.

For many Asian Americans and others who grew up with similar family dynamics, these struggles aren’t just personal. They’re often tied to multigenerational trauma, cultural pressures, or survival strategies that once made sense but now hold you back. Even if you understand where it all comes from, letting go can feel impossible. That’s where Brainspotting therapy comes in.

Brainspotting is a brain-based therapy that helps us access unprocessed emotion and memories located in the lower brain, where our survival instincts also live. We do this by assessing brain spots, points in our visual field that seem to activate relevant and significant emotional or bodily responses. In other words, where we look affects how we feel and we try to find these activations in our body to give them the time, attention, and safety that they have been lacking.

If you’re ready to release old patterns and feel more at ease in yourself and with others, let’s connect!

Trauma Can Show Up Like…

Crippling Anxiety- every choice seems to carry an immense impact. So everyday choices may feel too risky or like life and death. 

Perfectionism- you’re often weighed down by imposter syndrome and never feel good enough.

Depressed Mood- low and hopeless as if you’re trapped in a joyless life that you have no control over. 

Shame & Guilt- you may feel like you’re bad or worthless and need to hide your true self. You have a highly critical inner voice.

Difficulty Setting Boundaries- the boundaries you set are either extremely rigid or extremely porous. Rigid boundaries can set one up for disappointment when life inevitably brings unpredictability; overly porous boundaries neglects the structure needed to set your priorities straight.

Resentment- you may find yourself angry with others and blame them for problems in your life.

Dissociation & Numbness- you might not feel able to name your feelings or find you go through life feeling like you’re not really in your body

Chronic Pain & Health Issues- high levels of stress and cortisol can manifest as health problems and often when you’re stuck difficult life patterns, doctor visits and self care may be last on your priority list, further exacerbating illness and pain.

Common Challenges

Burnout- When you’ve been through trauma, your body can stay stuck in “survival mode,” always on alert. Carrying that stress on top of everyday life eventually wears you down and leaves you running on fumes. Your job isn’t saving lives, but everything feels like an emergency. Or maybe you really are saving lives on the job, but the hardest part is how thankless it is and you resent the people you used to want to help. If Burning out leaves you exhausted, unmotivated, and disconnected from the things that matter most.

Emotional Dysregulation- If your emotional or physical safety were violated, dismissed, or neglected in the past, that can leave your nervous system feeling constantly on edge, like it’s bracing for something to go wrong. Even small stressors can spark big reactions because your body is still trying to protect you from dangers that are no longer there. This is why rage, sudden tears, or emotional outbursts can feel so uncontrollable — it’s your system showing it’s overwhelmed and needs attention.

Relationship Issues- trauma has a way of sneaking into our relationship dynamics. Old wounds can make it hard to trust, open up to people, hold boundaries, or to believe in one’s worthiness of love and care. Sometimes that shows up as pulling away, other times as conflict or clinging too tightly — but underneath, it’s often a similar story- the nervous system is still protecting us from hurts of the past, even when what we really want is closeness in the present.

Loss of Sense of Self- when you’re busy surviving, there often isn’t a way to prioritize your needs or desires. So the body learns to numb to those things to protect us from the pain of feeling the loss. Unfortunately, that can become an overworked muscle. If your circumstances don’t require survival mode, but you continue to neglect your own needs and wants, it becomes hard to connect to and understand yourself.

Consequences of Avoidance

Life is really impossible to navigate alone and sometimes the hardest part is dealing with our internal world- how we feel about ourselves, what happened to us, and our circumstances. Sometimes people get lost in loops of thought, intense feelings, self-destructive behaviors, and suffer silently alone while feeling misunderstood.

The thing about letting suffering brew or trying to stuff it down, though, is that it doesn’t go away. Eventually it leaks or explodes out. It shows up as health issues, addiction, and divorce, etc.

Who You’re Working With

My name is Priscilla and I’m an associate marriage and family therapist. Some particular things that have shaped my worldview and posture towards life and healing:

Married

Mom to a preschooler.

I’m Chinese-American and a Bay Area native

I grew up in the Chinese church and am a practicing Christian. 

Worked in my family’s business, both as a child and as an adult. 

I’ve always desired to love my people well- family, friends, community, and my neighbor. I love connecting with others authentically and it’s always given me a sense of purpose to do so. In my context, though, I somehow came to believe that in order to honor those around me, I would have to shrink myself.

While intending to care better for others, I ended up hyper-focused on monitoring myself. That meant that internal shame and judgement became my closest companion. I learned to read between the lines of every interaction with people or my environment to make sure I knew what was needed to do “good” things and make others comfortable and happy.

The problem is that this kind of caring often results in making assumptions about needs and expectations that don’t exist. Even when expectations from others are present, it becomes easy to forget ones own needs. In turn, it becomes a breeding ground for resentment and leads to disconnection from oneself and others.

Before I knew it, I wasn’t sure what I wanted, where I started, and where I ended. But my own therapeutic journey (individual and family btw!) led me to a place where I had to confront my fears, assumptions, and shame. I had to take ownership of the permission I already had to take up a little more space.

I found that nurturing my own sense of self was an integral part of living life aligned with my values and connecting better with others.

Ready to do this work together?

What to Expect

Process:

Therapy can have a number of benefits, including cultivation of your self-esteem/identity, improvement of interpersonal relationships and the resolution of the specific concerns that led you to seek therapy. However, working towards these benefits requires active involvement and intentional efforts to achieve the changes desired. 

Often the process of therapy involves remembering and talking about unpleasant events, feelings, or thoughts and it is not unusual for clients to feel considerable discomfort or strong feelings of anger, worry, fear, etc., or to experience increased anxiety, depression, insomnia, etc for a time.

Attempts to resolve issues that lead a person to therapy in the first place, such as trauma, low self-esteem, or strained relationships, may result in changes that were not originally intended. As a result of your own personal transformation, some of your relationships may become healthier, while other relationships may become more limited or even come to an end depending on the values and needs that you develop or discover.

Changes can sometimes be easy and swift, but often they will be slow and frustrating. Many clients are understandably anxious for change to occur right away, but emotions, thoughts, attitudes, habits, and relationship patterns that have developed over years (sometimes decades) takes some time to change. 

Timeline:

Length of therapy varies depending on what you’d like to work on. To address a single trauma that happened fairly recently for example, can take a few sessions or even a single session to resolve. Processing old trauma or childhood abuse can take longer and can be affected by how it shows up in the present (like if perpetrators are still in your life or if you’re dealing with ongoing medical treatment).

Some people may prefer to do more rigorous, intensive work to resolve things that sometimes require sitting with unpleasantness internally for an extended time together within one session. Others may need a gentler approach that allows plenty of safe space in between sessions to do personal processing and learning.

Cost:

$160/session at Havenly Counseling Collective

FAQ:

1. What if it doesn’t work?

   I can’t promise therapy will work out the way you want, but a more helpful question may be “is therapy something I want to try out while what I’m doing now isn’t producing the change I want?” You are always welcome to pause or stop therapy for whatever reason you have.

2. What happens when my family members don’t want to participate in family therapy?

   I personally think it is still worth pursuing therapy as an individual even if one’s preference was to involve others. I tell clients all the time that we cannot control others, but we can control what we, ourselves do. A question to ask yourself, “Are other people’s participation in life-changes the determining factor in my own choice to pursue change?”

3. Do you take insurance?

   I do not, but I can offer a superbill to you to submit for reimbursement to your insurance. You can use this benefits calculator to help you plan.