David's teaching from the practicum debrief. Dosing set out step by step, why it works on an expansion spot, and what he said about humility, shame and perfectionism.
David's own preference is to think in terms of possibility rather than expansion. Possibility is not linear. The opportunities that come out of it are there, but they can be subtle and they can be elusive, and they do not arrive in the order you expect.
There is a giftedness to everybody, including people who would be seen as ordinary.
Taught in Phase 5, and worth knowing about wherever you are. Dosing means looking at the spot for a few seconds and then looking away. You would assume it belongs to an activation spot or an Inside Window spot, but it works with any spot, a gazespot included.
David calls it the ultimate in resource work, and the most powerful and effective resource approach across the board, with anything.
The coming back is usually to your eyes, but it can simply be away from the spot. And the client is processing the whole way through: as they prepare to look, while they look, and in the settling afterwards. They are not just letting their system calm down. They are processing while it calms.
It is like being protective towards a wounded part.
You would think an expansion spot is the last thing you would dose, that the two are incompatible or even opposites. That is a linear way of looking at it. The nervous system is profoundly non-linear, and so is the process we run, which is what makes them match.
What it gives the client is the driver's seat: I own this, I say when to stop, I say how long, I say when I am ready and when it is done.
Of all the qualities a Brainspotting therapist needs, humility is among the most important. Being able to sit back requires it: to recognise that you do not have control over the process of the person in front of you, and that the greatness is inside them and you are there to serve it. That is not how any of us were taught.
David is explicit that this is not a stage you complete. He has an active practice and is still learning and relearning it, and expects to be for as long as he does this. It is a dynamic, ongoing journey, and a good one.
We are surrendering to their greatness, which goes totally against what they have experienced in their lives, including on the day we see them.
When your client is a therapist, and especially a Brainspotting therapist, you are not working with what they know or what they have experienced professionally. You are working with their vulnerability and their young woundedness.
So the intimidation, the sense that they will be judging how you work, is beside the point. That is not what they came for.
There is exactly one group of people who never experience imposter syndrome, and they are the true imposters.
Imposter syndrome is part of a trauma constellation. Widening the frame: survivors who carry shame are carrying something that does not belong to them. It belongs to the perpetrators. If every survivor let go of that shame, it would have nowhere to go but back to the perpetrators, individually and collectively. It can be hard to take in at first, and people generally find their way to it.
Shame itself is a developmental neurobiological phenomenon with survival value, as fear and anxiety have. Organic shame is meant to keep us from doing things we would feel badly about. What happens is that a natural human tendency gets exploited. Which is why healing shame means getting neurobiological access to where the shame configurations sit in the nervous system.
The shame does not belong to the survivor. It belongs to the perpetrator.
One of the Brainspotting sayings: perfectionists fail one hundred per cent of the time, and in that way achieve perfection.
Perfectionism is an attempt to find safety. If I am perfect then I cannot be attacked, assailed, criticised or undermined. And that too is neurobiological, and by extension neuroexperiential.
Dosing itself has not been studied. What the papers on the research page do support is the premise underneath it: that the visual system is structurally part of how trauma is held, and that brief, controlled exposure to a visual cue is doing something to circuitry rather than to a narrative.
The AURORA finding is the closest: the structure of the ventral visual stream shortly after a trauma predicted intrusive symptoms and nightmare intensity months later, and sustained engagement of that network appeared to wear on it. That is an argument for small doses and long settling, not for pushing.