My Brain After Phase 5 Brainspotting Training

Phase 5 Brainspotting training this past weekend left me with incredible insights. And it did so by giving my brain permission to stop trying to produce them.

We are conditioned to orient toward understanding: "What does this mean?" "Where did it come from?" "How do we resolve it?". Over time, “something is happening” becomes insufficient unless it can be named, contextualized, and fixed.

The Neuroexperiential Model (NEM), which lays the groundwork for Phase 5, is not convinced that those elements are required for healing to occur. One of the core concepts of the Neuroexperiential Model is that most of what our nervous system does happens outside of conscious awareness.

Phase 5 keeps returning us to uncertainty, which sounds abstract until the profound nature of that concept really settles in. In Brainspotting, talk about "the frame". It's kind of like the anti-protocol. It’s the shared, in-the-moment experience created when two (or more) nervous systems are present together and oriented toward the same purpose.

During the training, I felt something begin to reorganize in my own nervous system.

I found myself thinking back to my very first Brainspotting experience, during the Phase 1 practicum. At the time, I didn’t have language for what was happening. I remember being unable to articulate my own body sensations and assuming that meant that I was not going to be able to “do” Brainspotting. But my practice partner invited me to "just start there" and "see where that takes you." Once I was given that permission, I sat silent for 45 minutes while my body seemed to move with its own agenda.

What I understand now through the lens of Phase 5 is that this was the first time my system had been allowed to move through a full freeze response cycle without interruption, containment, or having to make sense of it. My nervous system was completing something that had been paused for a very long time.

That recognition validated for me that much of what we call “progress” in this work is actually permission for the brain-body system to complete interrupted or repressed processes.

Throughout my master’s program, I questioned whether I was making the "right choice" pursuing mental health counseling. I was trying so hard to do it "correctly". I followed the protocols and exact sequence for each technique. I worked so hard to sound like what I thought a therapist was supposed to sound like.

In my final practicum, a professor gave me feedback that shifted my mindset: "Stop trying so hard. Just be yourself." It was the first time I had heard that in a professional context. That same orientation surfaced again years later in Brainspotting theory. To get back to myself in this way required a surprising amount of unlearning.

Within the NEM, "symptoms" and "diagnoses" are viewed as brilliantly adaptive responses to threat. These adaptive parts are not symptoms to eliminate, but reflections of the conditions that required them. Their characteristics mirror the survival demands that shaped them. They are not pathological.

Holding that stance experientially shifted how my own system related to pauses, gaps, and moments of non-access. There was less urgency to retrieve something useful and a growing trust in my own process.

Phase 5 also deepens attention to orienting responses (following where the eyes, head, and neck want to go while processing) without forcing conscious intention. Our brain-body system is always processing, even when there is no obvious outcome or insight. The ethic remains consistent: do less, interrupt less, trust the client's innate ability to heal and follow their lead.

At the end of the training, David Grand closed with words that further reinforced why Brainspotting continues to align for me both personally and professionally:

"Don’t try to do it my way. Do what feels right... And of course, go where your clients take you... If you have a choice between doing what you think is the way I taught it and doing what feels right to you, do what feels right to you... always be evolving in this process. If you are in the frame, if you are holding the client’s frame with them, if you’re holding your own frame—things will not stay the same".