Brainspotting for Emotional Reactivity: Your Path to Inner Calm

Breaking Free from Overwhelming Emotions Through Brain-Based Therapy

If you find yourself snapping at loved ones over small things, spiraling into anxiety without warning, or feeling hijacked by emotions that seem to come from nowhere, you're not alone. Many high-achieving individuals struggle with emotional reactivity that disrupts their relationships and inner peace. The root of these overwhelming emotional responses often lies in unresolved trauma and emotional pain stored deep within your brain and body—experiences that traditional talk therapy may not always reach.

With Audrey Schoen, LMFT, Brainspotting therapy offers a powerful, brain-based way to heal. It works directly with your nervous system's deeper parts. This innovative approach helps you access and process past traumas that fuel reactive patterns. The result? Genuine space for calm, connection, and emotional freedom through deep processing.

Understanding Emotional Reactivity: When Your Brain's Alarm System Won't Turn Off

Emotional reactivity isn't a character flaw or weakness—it's your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you from perceived danger. When you experience overwhelming emotional experiences, your brain stores them in ways that keep your internal alarm system hypervigilant. This explains why a simple email from your supervisor can trigger intense anxiety, or why minor relationship conflicts can escalate into major arguments accompanied by physical sensations like racing heart or tightness in your chest.

The challenge lies in understanding where these emotional responses originate. Unresolved trauma often drives emotional reactivity, and this doesn't only mean life-threatening events. It includes smaller, repeated experiences that overwhelmed your ability to cope—chronic pain from criticism, ongoing stress, or emotional neglect. These emotional experiences become stored in your subcortical brain, the deeper, more primitive regions responsible for survival instincts and emotions.

Your subcortical brain operates outside conscious awareness, which explains why you can logically understand something isn't dangerous while your body still reacts as if it is through intense emotions and physical symptoms. You might feel "stuck" in patterns of anxiety, anger, or emotional shutdown that seem impossible to break through willpower alone.

These survival patterns—like hypervigilance, people-pleasing, or emotional numbing—once served a protective purpose but may now create the very chaos you're trying to avoid. When trauma is stored in non-verbal, subcortical brain regions, emotional responses happen faster than conscious thought can intervene, leading to painful memories surfacing unexpectedly.

What Makes Brainspotting Different: A Direct Path to Healing

Brainspotting therapy represents a revolutionary therapeutic approach to trauma that bypasses endless mental analysis to work directly with your brain's natural ability to heal. Developed by David Grand, who observed that "where you look affects how you feel," brainspotting therapy is a neurobiological tool that accesses the deeper brain regions where emotional reactions actually live.

Unlike traditional talk therapy approaches that focus on talking through problems, brainspotting therapy creates space for your nervous system to gently process and release emotional "baggage" stored outside conscious awareness. The process is deeply client-led—you remain the expert on your own healing journey while I provide attuned, supportive presence as your system engages its natural healing mechanisms.

A "brainspot" represents specific eye positions that connect to stored emotional or physical responses. During brainspotting sessions, we locate these spots within your person's visual field, and by maintaining your gaze there with mindful awareness, your brain gains direct access to emotional pain stored in deeper regions. This therapeutic method allows for natural emotional processing and emotional release without requiring you to analyze or relive painful memories in detail.

Brainspotting sessions typically involve less talking and more internal emotional processing. This therapeutic approach provides direct access to subcortical brain regions where trauma is stored without words, meaning you don't need to verbally revisit past traumas to experience emotional healing. As a trained therapist certified in brainspotting therapy, I maintain what we call "Dual Attunement"—staying attuned both to you as a person and to your brain's processing—creating a safe and supportive environment for deep work.

The Science Behind Brainspotting: How Your Brain Heals Itself

Brainspotting therapy's effectiveness stems from its ability to harness your brain's natural ability for deeper healing and rewiring through neuroplasticity. When you're caught in cycles of emotional reactivity, it can feel like your brain has a mind of its own. The encouraging truth is that brainspotting therapy works with scientific principles that support lasting mental health improvements.

The technique accesses your subcortical brain—deep, primitive areas responsible for survival, emotion, and split-second reactions that can derail your day. Brainspotting therapy uses the retinocollicular pathway, a direct connection between your eyes and your midbrain's fight-or-flight control center. By holding your gaze on specific eye positions, you activate this pathway, giving your brain direct access to where emotional pain is stored.

Many individuals get trapped in what David Grand terms "frozen maladaptive homeostasis"—a state where the brain remains locked in survival mode due to unprocessed trauma. Brainspotting therapy helps gently "unfreeze" these stuck patterns, allowing your nervous system to achieve emotional regulation naturally through the body's innate capacity for healing.

This process enables your brain to access its own "filing system" for trauma, processing experiences that were misfiled in subcortical brain regions like the amygdala and limbic system. By bypassing analytical thinking, brainspotting therapy facilitates emotional release—your body's natural way of discharging stored emotional energy through responses like yawning, deeper breathing, or gentle trembling as bodily sensations shift and change.

The ultimate goal involves creating lasting change by rewiring your brain for calm. As you process and release stored material, new neural pathways form, establishing healthier responses to triggers. The intensity of old triggers diminishes, emotional regulation improves, and a fundamental sense of safety is restored within your body and mind through this comprehensive approach to mental health.

What to Expect in Your Brainspotting Journey

Beginning brainspotting therapy involves a grounded, collaborative process designed around your unique needs and goals. Before we start, you'll complete a comprehensive intake packet that includes validated measures I use to track progress and inform your personalized treatment plan for addressing trauma and emotional challenges.

Our first therapy sessions focus on understanding you completely—your background, contributing factors, the systems you navigate (family, work, culture), and your specific goals. This allows us to design a holistic approach together. When you're seeking targeted work for specific issues like performance anxiety, panic attacks, or past traumas, I often incorporate Accelerated Resolution Therapy to build early momentum in your healing journey.

Each brainspotting session follows a gentle, supportive structure designed to help you feel safe and contained in a supportive environment, whether we meet in my Roseville office or connect online throughout California and Texas.

The Four Key Phases of Brainspotting Sessions

Grounding and Resourcing: We begin by ensuring your nervous system feels safe and stable through grounding exercises that help you feel centered and present, paying attention to bodily sensations and creating a foundation for emotional processing.

Activation and Locating the Brainspot: Together, we identify the specific emotional issues you want to address—perhaps anxiety spirals or shutdown patterns during conflict. From there, we locate your "brainspot," specific eye positions where your system holds emotional charge around these concerns. I might use a pointer to guide your gaze within your visual field, or we may notice where your eyes naturally drift when focusing on the concern.

Focused Processing: You maintain your gaze on these specific eye positions, often with bilateral stimulation through headphones to support processing. During this phase, you simply notice whatever emerges—physical sensations, painful memories, emotions—without needing to analyze or make sense of the experience. This emotional processing phase is often quiet as your nervous system undergoes emotional release of what it's been holding.

Integration and Closing: We gently transition you back to a grounded state, integrating any emotional shifts or insights that emerged during the session, ensuring you feel stable and supported.

Throughout this process, you remain in charge of your healing journey. Your role involves staying present and curious, following your internal experience without judgment while allowing your brain's natural ability to heal to unfold. My role as your trained therapist certified in brainspotting therapy is providing steady, attuned presence while your system engages its natural healing capacity.

Who Benefits Most from Brainspotting

Those who benefit from brainspotting therapy include anxious overachievers and people-pleasers who feel tired of being controlled by their emotions. If you're someone who has tried self-help approaches or even traditional talk therapy but still feel "stuck" in reactive patterns, brainspotting therapy offers a different pathway to mental health and emotional healing.

This therapeutic approach works especially well for individuals who have experienced trauma, whether from single overwhelming events or chronic stress patterns. It's also highly beneficial for those seeking deeper connection in relationships but finding their own emotional patterns creating barriers to intimacy and emotional freedom.

The method proves valuable for addressing various emotional issues including perfectionism, self-criticism, unhelpful relationship patterns, anxiety, performance anxiety, panic attacks, and the internal chaos that keeps you feeling disconnected from yourself and others. Many clients describe feeling like they're on an emotional rollercoaster they can't control—brainspotting therapy helps you step off that ride and reclaim emotional regulation.

Individuals who have experienced trauma often find that brainspotting therapy provides a gentler alternative to traditional talk therapy approaches, allowing for deep emotional processing without the need to verbally recount painful memories in detail. The method engages your brain's natural ability to heal while working directly with the nervous system's capacity for emotional release and emotional regulation.

Beyond Individual Healing: Brainspotting and Relationship Health

Your emotional reactivity impacts every relationship in your life. When you heal the roots of reactive patterns through brainspotting therapy, you can respond thoughtfully instead of defensively, engage in genuine dialogue without constant triggering, and show up authentically, allowing for vulnerability and deeper connection in a supportive environment.

For couples struggling with "communication breakdowns," the real issue often involves internal narratives and unconscious processes interfering with connection. While both partners might believe better communication skills will solve their problems, the deeper work involves addressing the emotional reactivity and unresolved trauma that prevents those skills from being effective.

In my couples therapy work, I use Relational Life Therapy (RLT), a direct, skills-focused therapeutic approach that works beautifully alongside individual brainspotting therapy. One core tool we use is the feedback wheel for conflict resolution—a structured process that allows one partner to bring a problem, communicate their experience, share what they made up about what happened, express how they feel about their interpretation, and request specific repair actions.

Importantly, the feedback wheel isn't a dialogue. The other partner doesn't share their feelings or perspective in that moment; instead, they listen to understand and offer concrete repair actions. This approach creates a pathway for resolution rather than escalating conflict, supporting both partners' mental health and emotional well-being.

Recommended Structure for Couples Work

I typically recommend 80-minute therapy sessions, often scheduled every two weeks, with an initial three-month commitment to both in-session and out-of-session work. This allows us to evaluate progress together and determine next steps in your healing journey.

Relational Life Therapy unfolds in three phases:

Phase 1: Assessment and Pattern Identification - We map your specific "conflict dance," identifying each partner's moves and stances that contribute to escalation. We establish clear goals for success, implement ground rules including timeout procedures and de-escalation skills, and I actively highlight both the costs of maintaining current patterns and the benefits of change.

Phase 2: Trauma and Origin Work - We connect present-day reactivity to family-of-origin patterns and past traumas, then directly target those emotional blocks so lasting change becomes possible. This phase often involves addressing trauma and emotional pain that has been stored in the nervous system, sometimes incorporating individual brainspotting sessions to process and release unresolved material.

Phase 3: Skills Development - We teach and practice concrete tools, including the feedback wheel. When roadblocks emerge, we work through barriers so these skills become accessible during real conflicts, supporting long-term mental health and emotional regulation.

The Healing Process: What Changes You Can Expect

Brainspotting therapy creates transformation that extends far beyond the therapy room. By working with the deep subcortical brain regions where emotional patterns are stored, you can reclaim your natural capacity for calm, connection, and authentic living through comprehensive emotional healing.

Common changes clients experience include reduced anxiety and nervous system regulation, healing of attachment wounds that allows for healthier relationship patterns, quieting of harsh inner criticism leading to improved self-esteem, better sleep quality and increased mental clarity, resolution of performance blocks whether creative or professional, and relief from physical symptoms like chronic pain, tension headaches, or persistent sadness.

The emotional processing involved in brainspotting therapy often leads to emotional shifts that clients notice both during and between sessions. Many report feeling lighter, more grounded, and better able to handle stressors that previously overwhelmed them. The emotional release that occurs through this therapeutic method can also address physical symptoms that stem from stored trauma and emotional pain.

The process is highly personalized to your specific circumstances and needs. Some clients experience profound emotional shifts after just a few brainspotting sessions, while those with complex past traumas may need more time for deeper healing. Brainspotting therapy often works more efficiently than traditional talk therapy, and many clients notice positive changes early in their healing journey.

During our work together, I use detailed measurements to track your progress and adjust our comprehensive approach as needed. Around the 3-6 month mark, we reassess using the measures from your initial intake, update goals, and refine our plan together, ensuring your mental health needs continue to be met effectively.

Important Considerations and Realistic Expectations

While brainspotting therapy can be transformative for addressing trauma and emotional challenges, it's crucial to approach the process with realistic expectations. Finding a trained therapist with specialized training is essential—the skill and attunement of your therapist directly impacts the safety and effectiveness of your experience with this therapeutic method.

Processing stored emotional pain can involve temporary discomfort as your nervous system works to process and release what's been held. However, a skilled therapist guides you through this safely, creating a safe and supportive environment for your healing journey. Brainspotting therapy isn't a quick fix, though many clients notice early positive shifts in their emotional regulation and overall mental health.

Lasting change requires commitment to the therapeutic approach, and the therapeutic relationship itself is a vital component of healing. This comprehensive approach recognizes that emotional healing happens within the context of a trusting, attuned relationship with your therapist.

This is not a self-directed approach. The attuned presence of a trained therapist is crucial for creating a safe container for processing intense emotional pain and addressing trauma. Attempting to work with deep trauma or reactivity patterns on your own can be unsafe and potentially re-traumatizing.

Those who benefit from brainspotting therapy most fully are those who approach the work with openness to their own emotional experiences and a willingness to trust their brain's natural ability to heal. The method engages your innate capacity for emotional release and emotional regulation, but requires the supportive environment that only a skilled therapist can provide.

Your Path to Emotional Freedom Begins Here

You don't have to remain trapped in cycles of emotional reactivity that leave you feeling frustrated, disconnected, and out of control. Many intelligent, thoughtful individuals struggle with these patterns because they haven't found the right therapeutic approach to address the unresolved trauma and emotional pain happening beneath the surface of consciousness.

Healing is not only possible—it's deeply empowering. Brainspotting therapy addresses the root sources of reactive patterns, allowing your nervous system to finally process and release what it's been holding and discover a new, calmer way of being in the world through improved emotional regulation and mental health.

As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in helping anxious overachievers and people-pleasers find inner peace, I bring a direct, engaged, and personalized therapeutic approach to our work together. We collaborate actively, often incorporating powerful modalities like brainspotting therapy and Accelerated Resolution Therapy early in treatment to create momentum and immediate positive changes in your emotional processing and overall well-being.

As a solo therapist, I customize care specifically to your needs and specific circumstances. Some clients benefit from weekly therapy sessions; others prefer longer sessions every other week. We can maintain a consistent appointment schedule or arrange meetings more flexibly based on your preferences and progress in your healing journey.

Whether we connect online throughout California and Texas or meet in person at my Roseville office, you'll find a supportive environment where you can stop performing and start genuine healing. You don't have to remain stuck in patterns that leave you feeling overwhelmed and disconnected from yourself and others.

If you're ready to explore how personalized brainspotting therapy can help you reclaim emotional freedom and build the calm, connected life you desire through addressing trauma and supporting your mental health, I invite you to reach out for more information about pricing and scheduling. Your journey toward lasting emotional well-being can begin today.