Brainspotting Therapy
Sometimes the most profound healing happens not through talking alone, but through accessing what's stored deep within your nervous system. In my practice across Singapore, Dubai, San Francisco, and Jakarta, I use Brainspotting as a powerful body-based approach to help high-functioning adults and couples process trauma, anxiety, and emotional pain that feels stuck—even after years of traditional talk therapy.
What Is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a brain-based therapeutic approach that uses your field of vision to access and process experiences stored in the deeper, subcortical regions of your brain—the areas responsible for emotion, memory, and survival responses. The principle is elegantly simple: where you look affects how you feel.
Developed by Dr. David Grand in 2003, this modality works with the parts of your experience that exist before language, beneath narrative, in the realm of sensation and implicit memory. By identifying and holding a specific eye position—a "brainspot"—that connects to the emotional or somatic charge of an experience, we create conditions for your brain to process and release what's been held there.
Why I Use Brainspotting in My Integrative Practice
I approach therapy from a biopsychosocial lens, recognizing that healing involves the dynamic interplay between our biology (nervous system, physical health), psychology (thoughts, emotions, beliefs), and social world (relationships, environment, culture). Brainspotting fits beautifully into this framework because it directly engages your nervous system while honoring the psychological and relational aspects of healing.
Having worked in intense corporate environments myself, navigated the complexities of motherhood and marriage, and witnessed the grind of startup life alongside my spouse, I understand that insight alone doesn't always translate to transformation. Many of my clients are exceptionally articulate about their struggles—they can describe their anxiety, trace their relationship patterns, and understand intellectually what needs to change. Yet they still feel stuck.
That's because trauma and deeply rooted emotional patterns often bypass our thinking centers entirely. They get stored in areas like the amygdala (our emotional alarm system), hippocampus (memory center), and brainstem (survival responses). Brainspotting accesses these subcortical regions directly, allowing your system to complete the processing it couldn't do when the original experience occurred.
How Brainspotting Integrates with Other Approaches
I rarely use any single modality in isolation. Brainspotting works seamlessly with the other therapeutic approaches I offer:
With Internal Family Systems (IFS): When we identify a part that's activated or carrying a burden through IFS work, Brainspotting helps us go directly into that part's experience and process what it's holding—often more quickly and completely than talking alone.
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With Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): While ACT teaches psychological flexibility and moving toward what matters, Brainspotting helps discharge the intense emotional and somatic activation that can make those skills feel inaccessible in the moment.
With Relational Life Therapy (RLT): For couples, Brainspotting allows us to address individual wounds from past relationships or developmental trauma that get activated in the present relationship, helping each partner show up more fully and authentically.
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With Nervous System Work: Because I view healing holistically, I'm always considering what helps therapy actually "land"—the daily practices, lifestyle factors, and somatic resources that build lasting change. Brainspotting naturally integrates with nervous system regulation and embodied awareness practices.
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What to Expect in a Brainspotting Session
Finding Your Brainspot: We begin by identifying what you want to work on—a specific memory, emotional state, recurring pattern, or physical sensation. I'll help you find the eye position that connects most strongly to this experience, either where your eyes naturally want to go or where you feel the most activation.
The Processing Phase: Once we've found your brainspot, you simply maintain that eye position and notice what happens internally—sensations shifting, emotions arising and changing, memories surfacing, or insights emerging. My role is to support you in staying with your process while tracking your nervous system responses and holding the therapeutic frame through dual attunement.
Integration and Grounding: As the processing completes, we'll notice the intensity decreasing and sensations settling. I'll help you reorient to the present moment and make sense of what occurred. Your brain continues processing for hours or days after a session, and I provide mindfulness practices to support this integration between sessions.
Who Benefits from Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is particularly effective for:
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Trauma and PTSD: Processing experiences without requiring extensive verbal recounting, which can itself be re-traumatizing
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Anxiety and Panic: Discharging the underlying nervous system activation that drives symptoms like tight chest, racing heart, and sense of impending doom
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Work Stress and Burnout: Resetting your nervous system after accumulated stress from chronic pressure, difficult work relationships, or high-stakes corporate and startup environments
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Relationship Wounds: Processing hurt from betrayal, abandonment, or rejection that affects how you show up in current relationships
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Grief and Loss: Honoring the full-body experience of grief and creating space for the waves of emotion that are part of the healing process
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Performance Anxiety: Resolving blocks that interfere with accessing your natural capabilities under pressure, whether in presentations, creative work, or high-stakes situations
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Cultural Considerations for Expat Clients
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Working across multiple international locations, I've developed deep appreciation for how cultural context shapes therapeutic work. Many of my clients are navigating the unique challenges of expat life—adjusting to new cultural norms, managing frequent transitions, and balancing multiple cultural identities.
Brainspotting is particularly well-suited for cross-cultural work because it transcends language and cultural narratives. The body speaks a universal language. Your nervous system responds to stress and stores experience in similar ways regardless of cultural background, while still honoring how culture shapes your meaning-making and what feels safe in therapy.
For clients adjusting to new cultural contexts, Brainspotting can help process the accumulated stress of constant adaptation, the grief of leaving behind familiar places and people, and the identity confusion that can arise when navigating multiple cultural frameworks.
Getting Started with Brainspotting
If you're curious about whether Brainspotting might be helpful for you, I invite you to reach out for a free 15-minute consultation. We'll discuss what you're struggling with and whether my integrative approach—including Brainspotting—feels like the right fit.
My Client Care Coordinator, Mei, will help with the onboarding process. Your first session focuses on goal setting, understanding your history through parts mapping, and introducing experiential practices you can use between sessions. From there, we'll determine together what combination of approaches best serves your healing.
Individual Counselling Options
Weekly Sessions: Consistent, ongoing support for gradual integration of changes over time
Intensive Sessions: Focused, accelerated progress through deep-dive work condensed into a structured timeframe—particularly powerful for Brainspotting when you want to dedicate concentrated time to processing specific trauma or performance blocks
Couple Counselling Intensives
All couples work begins with a customized Couple Counselling Intensive:
Exploration Intensive: A shorter process to build clarity and address a specific challenge
Deepening Intensive: A sustained process for deeper repair and long-term transformation
Your Path to Transformation
You don't have to keep trying to think your way out of what you feel stuck in. Brainspotting offers a way forward that honors both the wisdom of your conscious mind and the intelligence of your body and nervous system.
This isn't just talk therapy; it's about rewiring, re-patterning, and reimagining how you move through the world in a way that feels more connected, grounded, and true. Whether you're dealing with trauma, chronic anxiety, relationship patterns that keep repeating, grief, or accumulated stress from navigating intense work environments and cultural transitions—Brainspotting offers a pathway to the healing that words alone couldn't reach.
I offer online sessions for clients in Singapore, Dubai, and San Francisco, as well as both online and in-person sessions in Jakarta. Between sessions, you'll have access to mindfulness practices and WhatsApp support for scheduling-related questions.
Ready to explore Brainspotting? Contact me to schedule your free 15-minute consultation and discover how this integrative, body-based approach can support the transformation you're seeking.
