National Certified Counselor - Pre-License in PA and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner
If you are interested in the development of your own learned meaning/experiences to help yourself improve your mood that includes a swanky cool calm internal narrative about your identity that boosts your confidence and sense of belonging, but you know about yourself or did talk therapy already, and, yet you are still feeling depressed, anxious, moody, etc….
Then, it is likely you want more than coping skills or experiential learning tasks you will forget [neuroscience says you will] when you are stressed. Think of the autonomic nervous system as part of your computer’s hardwiring and your conscious thoughts/mind as your software. Hardware and software require maintenance and updating. Brainspotting offers my clients a way to update their drivers that play the lead role in how their brain will choose unconsciously their impulsive reactions and their body’s energy state. An energy state can shift quickly and often is observed in therapy when parts of self like frustration, who is often heavy-handed for example, arise to protect another part of our sense of self.
When the body and mind chose to connect and learn from within a place of safety, the mind can learn and thus move forward to recall and do things like the coping skill taught to the client and practiced in session. Thus, the ANS must be in a calm state of safety to do talk therapy, so bottom-up therapies like brainspotting are utilized along with a bottom-down therapy like CBT [talk therapy]. And, the good news is that Brainspotting is a natural evolutionary design of the brain to rewire life experiences’ of its own meaning-making.
Brainspotting was first observed and identified in 2003 as a fluke discovery of how the mind’s software rewires the felt sense of meaning in the body. The client sits facing the therapist and works collaboratively to find the right eye position so the client’s own brain can work to rewire emotions, one sense of meaning, somatic memory, integration of resolution, and performance enhancement to name a few.
The therapy is safe, easy, and a great “you can’t do it wrong” mind-body attunement tool that offers clients the successful outcomes [upgrades] by providing a renewed sense of peace felt in the body that my clients report they seek. My clients report: “it’s over”, “I’m okay now”, “I did not doubt myself”, “it feels different now”, “I can step outside the chaos and not get involved or triggered”, “I can trust myself now”, and “I got control back” just to name a few.
Melissa Pickersgill, MS (Missy, she, her, hers) is a certified Brainspotting practitioner, BSP, and board-certified National Certified Counselor. Missy started her private pay practice to help clients whose insurance disqualify them at the state agency where Missy is an outpatient Mental Health Clinician working with both children and adults. It’s the process of seeking out the cause of the client’s symptom(s) from a trauma-informed, clinical mental health, and multicultural counseling lens that Missy feels the most confident in herself. Offering hope to clients sustains Missy most, as it is her passion to share how the body was already designed to go back in time, to heal, to fix, to do a redo, to rebuild connection, to integrate compassion, and fuel one’s desire to seek pleasure from learning, caring, and sharing. Share in Kindness
“We were never meant to heal alone”-Missy
