The Expansion Model

Where it came from

It began as a facilitation problem. In training practicums, some pairs finish early: fifteen minutes into a forty-five minute round they say they are done, the client has reached a true squeeze on zero. Rather than asking whether they would like to continue, David would say: I would like us to continue.

The pointer goes back up to the same spot. The therapist asks how the client feels on the spot now, returning to the original site of the body activation, which by then is clear, neutral, or open. Processing continues from that same eye position, now moving from a body that is no longer activated. And it takes off. It moves toward body expansion, experiential expansion. That is the whole origin of the model.

Possibility can be almost anything.

Zero to infinity

Activation work runs a ten to zero SUDs scale: you are clearing something, and zero is the floor. Expansion, half in jest, runs from zero to infinity. There is no ceiling, no end to expansion or to the possibility that comes with it.

So the aim is different. You are not looking to clear. You are looking to open, to increase or tap into the sense of possibility. Nothing has to reduce for the session to have worked.

When to use it

The core uses are personal growth, spiritual, existential and philosophical questions, creativity, and performance. It also turned out to be far wider than that.

• 1
  Personal, spiritual and existential expansion

  Someone who wants to experience more of themselves, not less of something. Take the issue and go straight to where they feel most expansive.
• 2
  Creativity and performance

  The acting coaching in Phase 3 is expansion work: where do you feel the character in your body, find the eye position that matches, and let the actor process the character rather than their own history. Twenty to forty minutes takes them further into character than hours of preparation.
• 3
  Trauma, through the expansion spot

  David originally believed a client had to be clear and grounded first. That was wrong. Instead of finding the resource spot, you find the expansion spot, and trauma can be processed through the body expansion. Surprising at first; no longer.
• 4
  When expansion breaks out on its own

  In ordinary processing, the arc where change and resolution begin can itself be expansion. Do not interrupt a transcendent experience to go looking for a spot, unless it presents itself.

How the frame is set

The set-up is short. The work is in finding what expansion actually is for this person.

• 1
  Find something expansive for them

  Sometimes the client just knows. Often you explore: experiences they have had of expansion, openness, or possibility. It can come from inside the presenting issue or from entirely outside it.
• 2
  Locate it in the body

  Have them imagine doing it, or remember doing it. Where do you feel the most access to that in your body? Where does it feel most open, where is there the most possibility?
• 3
  Find the eye position that matches

  Explore right, middle, left, and above and below if it is useful. You are matching the body experience of expansion, not an activation.
• 4
  Process with no goal in mind

  Except to see where the process goes. If the client loses the thread, the expansion image is something to come back to.

The three responses, and what to do with each

Asked to find expansion, clients tend to fall into three groups. This is not first-session work: it sits alongside ongoing processing, with a client who already has experience of Brainspotting and enough partnership with you to explore.

With depression, existential dread, hopelessness or shutdown, the processing that follows will not all be expansive. But there is more buoyancy in it than in the heavy processing you meet in freeze states. The only way to know whether it works with a given client is to try it.

With developmental trauma, look for resilience and adaptation: how they have managed to manifest it in their life. A hobby, an art form, a sport is often the doorway. People are a great deal more interesting than we give them credit for, and many carry talents they have never shared with anyone, least of all a therapist. If you work with people from marginalized communities you will find this again and again.

Positive experiences are in the nervous system as well.

Worth quoting

David's own words from the session, for the deck or for your notes.

Alongside culture before science

Expansion sits naturally with the rest of David's framing at this training: you meet the person, not a protocol, and what they carry culturally arrives before any frame set-up does.

Culture comes before science →