Developmental Trauma Training Institute

What if what you’re carrying doesn’t need more words—but a different place to be met?

Join Steve Sawyer in Rapid City, South Dakota for
Brainspotting Phase 1

June 5–7, 2026 | In-Person

This foundational training introduces Brainspotting as a focused, experiential approach for working with trauma, emotional overwhelm, and the deeper patterns held in the nervous system that talk therapy alone often cannot always reach.

Alongside lecture, demonstration, and practice, participants will have space to integrate learning in the natural landscape of South Dakota, allowing the rhythm of the environment to support reflection, grounding, and deeper processing throughout the training experience.

Rooted in clinical depth and lived experience, this training is designed for therapists, clinicians, and helping professionals ready to expand how they work with clients beyond language.

When words aren’t enough, something else becomes possible.
🧠Register: https://www.eventzilla.net/e/brainspotting-phase-one--inperson--rapid-city-sd-2138675750

So much of healing is learning that familiar does not always mean safe. At DTTI, we help clinicians and helping professionals understand how early experiences shape patterns, perceptions, and the ways people return to what they know — even when it hurts.

Healing begins when awareness, connection, and new experiences create the possibility for something different.

Even small moments of safety, attunement, and connection can begin to reshape a person’s relationship with themselves and the world around them. What has been carried for years does not have to define the future. Change becomes possible when people are supported in experiencing something new.

“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.” — Thích Nhất Hạnh

Why is change so hard?

Today on the DTTI Facebook Live, Steve Sawyer talked about how the brain is wired toward what feels familiar — even when those patterns create suffering.

A person may deeply want change, like stepping away from addiction or unhealthy patterns, yet under stress return to what is known. Not because they do not care or lack insight, but because early experiences shape the way the brain and body learn safety, survival, and connection.

The frontal lobes may understand change logically, but lasting transformation often requires more than insight. It requires embodied, integrative experiences that help the whole system experience something different.

Under stress, we often return to what is familiar. Healing grows through repeated experiences of safety, connection, and new possibilities.

You don’t come back the same after an adventure.

Join us for Brainspotting Phase 1 in Rapid City, South Dakota—deep clinical learning surrounded by the Black Hills, open skies, pine forests, and granite peaks.

Brainspotting Phase 1 introduces the foundational framework and techniques of Brainspotting, helping clinicians learn through focused attunement and brain-body processing. 🔗Register: https://www.eventzilla.net/e/brainspotting-phase-one--inperson--rapid-city-sd-2138675750

✨We’ll also be offering a free discussion about Brainspotting with Steve Sawyer, LCSW for anyone wanting to learn more about the model on May 29th:
https://www.eventzilla.net/e/free-discussion-about-brainspotting-with-steve-sawyer-lcsw-2138672692

🌲Come for the training. Leave with new tools, new perspective, and an experience that stays with you.

I was living with an underlying unhappiness in my life, and I was avoiding being fully in my life because of stress.

Not intentionally—but as a way of getting through the day. I would narrow my attention, not fully take things in, and move from one thing to the next without really landing in my experience.

And I would talk about it. I would try to understand it and make sense of it.

But I also noticed that didn’t really change much. I kept living the same life in the same way, even with more insight into it.

What I learned was that I didn’t come back to myself through insight or understanding alone.

I came back through movement.

Through something simple, like walking in nature.

And in that movement, I started to return to my own experience—back into my body, back into the moment I was actually in, and back into a life that felt more like mine again.