David's teaching from the demonstration debriefs. What the frame actually is, why it is held rather than applied, and what to do with yourself while you hold it.
There are no procedures here, only frames, and even those are openly and loosely defined. At the end of every training David says the same thing: this is not mine, it is yours now, and more importantly it is your clients'.
The reason is compliance. Figure out your own way rather than his. If you carry away the message, even implicitly, that it should be done the trainer's way, you will bring that into the room and subtly put the client into compliance mode. Mindfully not doing that is the one thing that can help liberate a person from compliance as it processes through.
This is not mine. It is yours now, and it is your clients'.
Not a frame you choose. The frame is in the moment. David calls it a process frame: the frame holds the processing, and the processing in turn affects the frame that is holding it.
In a session there is a superordinate frame that therapist and client are holding together. Occasionally you take that frame and put it around one issue in the moment, so there can be more focus there, and then you return to the superordinate frame. That is not technique and not intervention. It is a different kind of framing.
David is clear that it is unplanned. A minute beforehand he did not know he was going to do it, and for every time he did it there were perhaps ten times he considered it and chose not to.
We are not intervening. We are holding the frame. That is entirely different.
When a client reports something that makes no sense to you, a colour that appears and falls to the floor, and asks what you make of it, the answer is that you take your lead from them. They are the expert on their own experience in a way you will never be. What is worth exploring is what they feel would help them.
Fall back on uncertainty. Even if you thought you knew what it was, you could not really know what it was for that person in that moment. They can only know it from inside; you can only hear about it and follow it from outside. If they want to see whether it can be applied to something, experiment together and see what happens.
Clients experience things with me all the time that I do not understand. Unless the client needs me to understand, I do not feel I need to.
Asked about getting tired or drifting during long silences, David reframed it. When the client drops down, we are present and attuned with them, so we drop down too. Being drawn into that can feel like tiredness or like losing the thread, if you are unfamiliar with it or misreading it. Dropping down is a different neuroexperiential state, not a lapse.
When you do lose attunement, or feel you have, the way back is to be gentle, encouraging and supportive with yourself. Any negative feeling towards yourself and you will not regain it, and criticising yourself in the middle of a client's process makes it about you, which is the last thing you want.
On the same question, David added that dissociation is not only a developmental response to feeling threatened. There is something natural in it, something deeper than that. We need to relearn ourselves as we relearn the people who come to us.
When a client says they do not know how to do this, or that nothing is happening, a therapist often feels a small lurch. David does not.
Healing is powerful given the right opportunity, and the client's healing trajectory will happen even if they do not believe in it and even if they cannot recognise it. He knows it will work; he does not know how or when. That confidence flows to the client, who then begins to feel safe and to share it. The reverse is just as true: when we think this time it will not work, the client feels that too.
So wait. Whatever needs to happen will happen in its own time and its own way, not when or how we expect. Once you have enough experience to have faith in that, you see it again and again, which is what lets you be relaxed. Being relaxed is not being unfeeling. It is knowing it is not for you to make it happen.
I never know what is happening. I never know where it is going, and I have no concerns about that.
On whether a session that opens something needs a ritual opening and closing to keep clinician and client spiritually safe, David answers personally rather than prescriptively: in all the ways he has been taught that things can be closed, he has never found it to be true, and thinking we have opened or closed something does not mean we have. If something spiritual is happening, it cannot be confined to the four walls of an office. Part of the definition of a higher power is that it is unknowable in its entirety.
He is equally clear that this is his own frame and not a correction of anyone else's, and that there is knowledge held in other traditions that he does not have and will never have.
His one practical offer: you can have more than one spot. To the degree that the client knows what it is, you can find an opening spot and a closing spot early in the session.
Flooding late in a session is a separate matter. There are things you can do to help bring someone back or down, and sometimes, whatever you do, you cannot. The belief that there is something that works every time has not matched his experience.
Asked whether a client and therapist could watch a recording of an earlier session together, David said yes, of course, and encouraged it. Both will see things they did not see at the time, and then you can talk about it. Someone who got triggered early in a session and then followed the process through would likely process that a second time too, adding another dimension of healing.
His wider instruction: creatively experiment, with the client as a co-participant. That is how we find ways of helping people heal better. The model itself came about that way: after the session that led to Brainspotting he did not know what had happened, and only understood it later, and only fully once he began using it with others and saw the same thing again.
For anyone who arrives at an advanced training and cannot tell which set-up they are watching: most of what is taught in advanced trainings is iteration and reiteration of what has already been taught. The underlying principles carry through, and the set-ups sit inside them.
If all you ever did for the rest of your career was Gazespotting, Inside Window or Outside Window, you would be finding your way through that pathway into the same system, and seventy to ninety per cent of what would happen would happen anyway. Advanced trainings are about moving seventy to eighty, eighty to ninety, ninety to ninety-five. You never approach one hundred.
So if you cannot name what you are watching, you may be expecting too much of yourself and trying too hard. Notes are useful. The learning piece is how you sit with people, and that does not change whether the demonstration is dream spotting, body spotting or expansion.
This does not happen because you make it happen. It happens because the potential is inside the person.
Consider the people who come to us, and in a BIPOC context it is sharper still. Has another person ever sat down with them, cleared their own field, and been with them for who they are and where they are? Most people have never had that experience, and it is what a good enough attachment experience is supposed to be. Attachment is vulnerable in itself.
In that context, in the face of uncertainty, all we have is the frame. The client brings their own frame of neuroexperience into the first session and every session after. Our job is to be mindfully aware of it, mindfully receive it, and mindfully hold it with them in a way that gives the healing its best chance.
Other therapists arrive programmed, with an agenda, with the best of intentions. To be met without that is a neuroexperiential game changer, even without eye positions. It sounds simple and it is deeply challenging, because it runs against the Western idea that things happen because you make them happen. Even rejecting that idea, it still gets into you.
On the caretaker in the therapist's chair: when we decide to become therapists and act on it, that is when caretakers turn pro.
The essence of a caretaker is empathy, which we come into the world with, part of our ancestry and our make-up. Seeing another person in pain, feeling it, and wanting to ease it is beautiful, not pathological. It gets distorted in family dynamics, but the thing itself is pure.
The child who was called independent, smart and mature was often precocious out of fear, and the precocity is part of what allowed them to do what they did. Healing means that precocious nature no longer being used for survival, and being available instead for expressing yourself in your life.