April '23 - Sexual Assault

Brainspotting Provides Powerful Healing for Your Sexual Assault Clients

Sexual Assault is the most common trauma we treat at Pacific Trauma Center. Often, victims of incest, rape, and other forms of sexual perpetration take on the darkness and shame that rightly belong to the perpetrator(s), not them.

Psychoeducation about the Flight, Fight, Fawn, and Freeze responses are essential to healing. Victims who freeze during the event(s) often feel culpable and responsible because they shut down and did not fight. It is important to teach them that the Freeze response emanates from the deepest and most primitive part of their brain, the brainstem. It is not a conscious decision they are able to make. Rather, the decision is made outside of conscious awareness by their reptilian brain, whose job it is to protect them and initiate the response that will help them survive best.

Sexual abuse is a soul wound with victims feeling “morally tainted." Their identities are fragmented, there is a sense of a dark spiritual void, and a loss of their innermost self. I have found it to be crucial to find Expansion Spots to bring back the truth of who they are as a soul; to explore Brainspots that bring in light, love, and truth to counter the profound darkness and evil implicit in sexual assault.

“One beam of sunlight and the darkness ceases to exist.”

David Grand

Finding a Soul Spot (where the client connects to the goodness and beauty of their soul) is powerful for deprogramming the shame that belongs to perpetrators. Some of my clients process their sexual traumas from an Expansion "God Spot," others from a beloved ancestor spot, and other still from a Soul Spot.

Here are two set-ups I find most helpful for Sexual Assault Clients: