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. 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.
Benefits of Brainspotting
Therapy can bring up really hard memories and emotions that you’d rather not have. But brainspotting is flexible and can be as intensive or gentle as you’re needing. if you’ve ever had a massage, you know that the first time you work through the knots, you might not sure how you’ll continue through the pain until you start to notice the release.
As your body learns to discern the difference between safe and unsafe, helpful and unhelpful, you may notice you process the pain differently and start to feel the healing that comes with this new kind of challenge.
For those who don’t feel ready to share or have been in sensitive professions or situations (like first responders), brainspotting is great because it doesn’t require your detailed account of traumatic events to experience the benefits.
Who You’re Working With
Hi, I’m Priscilla- I’m a wife, a mom to a preschooler, and an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist. I grew up in the Bay Area in a Chinese church community, worked in my family’s business, and now spend my days walking alongside people as they navigate life’s ups and downs.
In my first introduction to therapy as a client, I had so much to say. All the things that I’d try to put away, came pouring out like word vomit. My therapist at the time helped me put new words to what I was experiencing and I received some invaluable tools for how to think about myself and my experiences.
Admittedly, I began brainspotting as a clinician before I tried it myself as a client. Given the timeline of my training, that’s just how it worked out. Years after my first experience as a client, I still had to reckon with the reality that oftentimes, my emotions worked contrary to what I understood cognitively. It was when I watched one particular brainspotting client move silently from fear to determination, paralysis to action, that I decided to experience brainspotting as a client beyond what we do within our training.
Despite my work, I have fallen into the trap of thinking logic and reasoning make a “better” person. But the truth is, emotions, while they don’t tell the whole story, they often tell us something really important about our experiences. They still need attention. Brainspotting allows us to attend to things that sometimes words cannot reach.