My Journey to Becoming a Certified Brainspotting Therapist

I didn't set out to add another certification to my practice. I set out to solve a problem I kept running into with clients — one that talk therapy alone couldn't fix.

The wall I kept hitting

I specialize in financial therapy — helping people untangle the shame, avoidance, and freeze responses that show up around money. And I kept seeing the same thing, session after session: clients who could tell me, in perfect detail, exactly why they froze every time they opened their banking app. They understood the pattern. They could name the childhood scarcity, the family money script, the shame spiral.

None of that understanding touched the freeze itself. They knew why. They still couldn't make their hands open the app.

That's the moment I started looking into Brainspotting.

Why I waited longer than I wanted to

I actually wanted to pursue this training a few years before I finally did. At the time, a financial coach I was working with advised against it — I was already certified in two other modalities, and another training didn't fit the plan we'd mapped out.

I believed, even then, that Brainspotting would pair well with the financial therapy work I was already doing. It took a few more years before I was in a position to actually find out if I was right.

Getting certified, and what actually changed

I completed my Brainspotting Level 1 training, and it changed how I listen in session — not just for financial trauma, but across the board (Shout out to John Edwards, LCSW, for providing one of the only BIPOC Brainspotting trainings and certifications in the States and Worldwide). Brainspotting works by using the body's own visual field to locate where activation lives in the nervous system. Once you've trained your eye to track that, you start noticing things a purely verbal approach talks right past: eye position, breath changes, the small physical freeze that happens right before someone changes the subject.

For my financial therapy clients specifically, this was the missing piece. The freeze that happens when someone stares at their bank account isn't a discipline problem, and it isn't something you can talk someone out of with a worksheet or a budgeting app. It's a protective response. Brainspotting gives us a way to work with that response directly — processing what the freeze is actually protecting against, instead of just naming it and hoping insight is enough.

What this means if you're looking for support

If you've been in therapy before — or tried financial coaching, budgeting apps, every productivity system — and you already know what you're supposed to do but can't make yourself do it, that gap is exactly what this training was built to address. You're not lacking willpower or information. Something underneath the behavior hasn't been processed yet.

I bring this Brainspotting-informed approach into my Financial Therapy Intensive here at TODOS Therapy, alongside a culturally responsive, trauma-informed lens for Latinx, BIPOC, and neurodivergent clients navigating money shame, underearning, and financial avoidance.

If this sounds like where you're stuck, I'd love to talk. Book a free consult and we can figure out if this approach is the right fit for you.