How Brainspotting Expands Your Capacity for More Love, Joy, & Pleasure
So, you've done ~the work, but you're ready for more.
Maybe you've spent years healing, you feel good enough, or you’re just deeply committed to growth.
You’ve noticed that while the old patterns, memories, and wounds feel better, there’s still a limit on the good things you can let in- more joy, deeper connection, or a greater feeling of ease.
This limit isn't your commitment or your desire or your willpower. It’s often an unconscious survival pattern stored deep in your brain.
Your system is amazing- it learned how to protect you, but those old rules can keep you closed off, even from the very things you want now: love, pleasure, and expansion.
This is where Brainspotting (BSP) comes in.
It’s a tool for helping you move beyond coping and into actively wiring your brain to open up to more.
This post talks about how BSP shifts from fixing the past to creating an intentional future, helping you expand your ability to receive and radiate the life you want.
The Shift: Resource Brainspotting for Expansion
Brainspotting uses a simple, precise eye position- the brainspot- that links directly to activated areas in your mid-brain.
While we can use a Brainspot to process trauma and distress, we can just as powerfully use it to access and strengthen your existing positive resources.
This is called Expansion (or Resource) Brainspotting.
We intentionally look for an eye position that helps you settle into feelings like calm, confidence, deep self-worth, or effortless joy.
The Neurobiology of Your Resource Spot
Our brain is a powerhouse.
When you’re focused on an old wound, that emotional pain is held as an activated area.
When you find a resource spot, you are directing the brain’s processing power to a place of strength.
Midbrain Connection:
The Brainspotting model suggests that when your gaze is held at a specific point, it helps activate the deep brain structures- specifically the limbic system, which controls emotion, memory, and behavior.
By focusing on a positive resource while holding that spot, you are strengthening the neural network associated with that positive state.
Creating Neural Pathways:
You aren’t just thinking a positive thought- you’re using the precise eye position to create a direct link, or a neural pathway, between your deep emotional brain and the resource.
This makes the feeling of calm or joy more accessible and automatic when you need it.
The Power of Dual Attunement:
In Resource Brainspotting, the therapist is often attuned to your physical response (somatic experience) while you focus on the spot.
This dual focus supports your body in settling, deepening the resource installation. You are teaching your body and brain how to be in a regulated state more often.
We aren't just moving away from pain, we are moving toward possibility by actively strengthening the good stuff, creating sturdy neural pathways for feeling the joy and pleasure that is there.
Expanding Capacity for Love and Connection
The core of this expansion work is helping your nervous system feel secure enough to be fully open.
This is different than processing betrayal trauma or working through deep grief.
It changes the operating question from, “Will I get hurt?” to, “How good can this feel?”
1. Wiring for Trust and Receiving Love
Even if you’ve healed old trust issues, your body might still carry a default setting of vigilance, making real intimacy feel like a risk.
This shows up as:
Feeling anxiety when a partner is simply late, even with a text.
Withdrawing emotionally when a relationship starts to feel "too good."
Constantly waiting for proof that the other shoe will drop.
With Brainspotting, we work on what you want to build.
We use a Resource Spot to create a deep, body-felt experience of safe openness.
Instead of focusing on the anxiety of potential risk, we focus on expanding your ability to receive, trust, and feel worthy of consistent, healthy love.
This process helps our nervous system learn that being vulnerable does not equal being threatened.
It helps you shift from anticipating defense to confidently anticipating connection.
2. Making Self-Love Real, Not Just Mental
You “know” you need to love yourself, but what does that really mean? Often, it feels like a mental task, a set of affirmations you have to force yourself to believe.
Self-love needs to be a biological reality, not just a philosophy.
BSP helps you connect with your innate worthiness as a felt, integrated body experience.
I might ask you to recall a moment of deep self-compassion or connection, and then use the Brainspot to lock that feeling in.
When you connect with your unique Self-Love Spot, that feeling of inner warmth and acceptance feels real, not just like an abstract idea.
This embodied self-love is what:
Solidifies boundaries easily, without guilt or hesitation.
Reduces people-pleasing behaviors because your worth isn't contingent on others' approval.
Draws you toward healthier relationships that match your elevated sense of value.
3. Installing Your Future State
You have specific dreams for your life- a feeling of creative freedom, a sense of deep inner peace, or a specific, healthy relationship.
Brainspotting helps you feel that reality now by utilizing a Future Resource Spot.
The process is active:
I ask you to vividly imagine the desired future, engaging all your senses.
We then use a Brainspot to process that positive feeling through your brain.
We’re essentially installing the energetic blueprint of that reality into your current nervous system, reducing the internal resistance to change and creating a powerful, magnetic pull toward the future you want.
We’re helping your nervous system feel more familiar and comfortable with your desired success.
Tapping into Pleasure, Joy, and Creative Flow
Many of the protective patterns that once kept you safe now limit your ability to feel true, uninhibited joy and pleasure.
Your system is so used to guarding against pain, or the potential for pain, that it short-circuits positive feeling.
Pleasure as a Core Resource
Pleasure isn't a luxury, it's a necessary, useful resource for nervous system regulation and a full life.
This encompasses everything from the sensory joy of a good meal, the warmth of laughter, the physical experience of passion, to the simple contentment of a peaceful moment.
Brainspotting is a powerful tool for expanding our ability to receive pleasure.
Protective patterns often create a subconscious limit on how good we’re allowed to feel.
BSP helps your nervous system identify and lower that ceiling.
It helps you:
Increase Capacity: You feel and tolerate positive sensations for longer periods without getting anxious or shutting down.
Deepen Presence: You move past analyzing the moment and fully inhabit the sensory experience of joy or pleasure.
Reduce Guilt: You teach your system that you are worthy of feeling good, decoupling pleasure from guilt or shame.
Quieting the Critic for Flow State
When you try to create, relax, or simply be present, does the inner critic jump in?
Does anxiety or judgment cut short your moment of joy?
This critical voice is often the result of an overactive prefrontal cortex (PFC), the brain's "alarm system."
By focusing on a Flow Resource Spot, you can quiet the overactive PFC.
This allows you to access deeper, more intuitive states- the flow state where creation, enjoyment, and insight happen effortlessly.
This is the difference between struggling to write a difficult email and having the words just come to you.
Brainspotting helps you find that "zone" consistently, letting you stop overthinking and start simply being and doing with ease.
Embodied Experience: The Somatic Shift
The goal of this expansion work is to move the feeling of joy and connection from a thought in your head to a permanent resident in your body.
Brainspotting uses your physiological responses to confirm and deepen the resource. You may notice:
Your shoulders drop when you hit the spot.
Your breathing deepens effortlessly.
A wave of relaxation moves from your chest down your arms.
Brainspotting helps your body learn to hold and tolerate intense positive emotion without tightening up or checking out.
It brings our mind and body into alignment for true, sustainable expansion.
Brainspotting for Confident and Joyful Dating
If you’re single, dating can feel exhausting, risky, and disappointing.
If your system is wired for protection, navigating the vulnerability of meeting new people can feel overwhelming.
Releasing Unseen Dating Blocks
Even when you consciously want a healthy relationship, subtle, unconscious blocks can hold you back.
These are often patterns programmed in the mid-brain that look like:
The Freeze Response: You go completely blank or feel physically awkward when face-to-face with a potential partner.
The Fawn Response: You over-accommodate or lose your own personality to make the other person comfortable.
The Self-Sabotage Response: You withdraw or find a flaw the minute a connection gets deep.
Brainspotting helps you identify and gently release the emotional charge tied to these automatic responses.
We’re creating space for new, healthy connection to show up for you by reducing the power of the old defense mechanisms.
Cultivating a Confident Presence
When your nervous system is consistently connected to your Resource Spots of self-worth and calm, your entire energy changes.
You become genuinely present, open, and authentically yourself.
This is the key to attraction: authentic presence. Brainspotting helps you settle into a grounded, confident state.
This means you show up to a date or a new relationship from a place of wholeness, not fear or need.
When you feel regulated, you have a deeper ability to connect authentically.
Easing Into Vulnerability
Dating requires vulnerability.
If our nervous system sees vulnerability as a threat, we’ll stay guarded.
With BSP, we can intentionally strengthen your “Vulnerability Resource Spot.”
This eye position helps you feel resilient and grounded even as you open your heart. It allows you to share authentically without feeling depleted or exposed.
This shifts nervous dread into manageable excitement, allowing you to connect more easily and filter for partners who can handle your true self.
Navigating Disappointment and Rejection
Dating inevitably comes with rejection and disappointment. Instead of these moments triggering old wounds or shutting you down completely, Brainspotting helps you build emotional resilience.
By strengthening your Resilience Spot, you process the pain of a "no" as an event, not an identity.
You quickly reduce the emotional intensity tied to the rejection, allowing you to move on without internalizing the experience as a flaw in your worth.
We keep our heart open and functional, ready for the next possibility.
Your Next Step Toward Expansion
Are you ready for more love, joy, and ease than you currently let yourself feel?
Our brain has the power to adapt, and Brainspotting is the precise tool to guide that process directly toward your highest intentions.
We’re not ignoring the past, we’re actively creating new neural pathways for your best future.
You can begin this important work of positive expansion right now, at your own pace, with focused resources designed for this purpose.
Ready to move beyond healing and connect with your brain’s capacity for more love, joy, and real connection in your life?
Expand Your Love: A Brainspotting Guide gives you the structure and exercises you need to start identifying and installing these powerful Resource Spots on your own.
This resource is focused purely on positive resource activation and expansion- it’s for cultivating greater love, joy, and pleasure in your daily life.
