Brainspotting: In Our Response Lies Our Growth & Our Freedom

— Much like the body, the mind is capable of healing itself naturally. Psychologist and creator of Brainspotting Dr. David Grand believes the way people look and gaze can affect their feelings. The goal of Brainspotting is to enable people to target negative emotions by positioning their eyes in a certain way. Through trained brainspotting therapists, one's eyes are slowly guided across the field of vision until a brainspot becomes apparent, a location that evokes traumatic memories or painful emotions. There is increasing evidence that trauma is “stored” in the body and that it can alter the way the brain works. Trauma can, for example, have an effect on emotions, memory, and physical health. Brainspotting seems to activate the body’s innate ability to heal itself from trauma. Disturbing memories can be replaced in the brain, resulting in painful feelings being exchanged for more resolved, peaceful things. Brainspotting makes use of this natural phenomenon through its use of relevant eye positions. This helps the brainspotting therapist locate, focus, process and release a wide range of emotionally and bodily-based conditions. It is also a brain-based tool to support the therapy relationship, as it taps into and harnesses the body’s natural self-scanning, self-healing ability.

Valeria interviews Susan Martin — She is a Board-Certified Marriage and Family Therapist practicing psychotherapy in a thriving private practice in Boise, Idaho.

She is the founder of Susan Martin Therapy and Wellness working with adults struggling with the lasting effects of trauma, including developmental trauma experiences. Susan is certified in Brainspotting, a progressive and cutting-edge approach to treating the central nervous system’s adverse responses to current life stressors.

Susan helps clients who feel their past is keeping them from living their best futures, those whose bodies are tired of existing in survival mode, and those who are struggling with their relationships because of the somatic stress living with an always-activated central nervous system. Susan also specializes in depression, anxiety, the effects of shame, attachment wounds, and life and family changes and transition. Emotional health, nervous system health, neurobiology, and overall physical wellness are her passions. Her approach to her work is to treat the “whole” person and reach root causes of symptoms. Also, a certified life coach, Susan is currently developing a program to help heal and empower today’s high-achieving, busy, must-do-it-all women who are lost in people-pleasing, drowning in expectations, and don’t feel they have control of their lives to be authentically present, have deeper human connections, and have lasting healing from their pasts.

As an adopted adult continually growing and rejuvenating from her own preverbal trauma, Susan feels deeply and is sensitive to the world around her. Susan’s work represents a second career earning her Master of Arts in marriage and family therapy from Northcentral’s School of Behavioral Sciences in her forties as a busy wife and mother of two teenaged girls. Always an integral focus in her work with clients are resilience, purpose, gratitude, and, of course, joy. Her favorite quote is from the great Viktor Frankl, famed psychiatrist, holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

To learn more about Susan Martin and her work, please visit: https://susanmartintherapy.com/

— This podcast is a quest for well-being, a quest for a meaningful life through the exploration of fundamental truths, enlightening ideas, insights on physical, mental, and spiritual health. The inspiration is Love. The aspiration is to awaken new ways of thinking that can lead us to a new way of being, being well.