Neurofeedback helps with trauma. If you are suffering with the serious long-term consequences of trauma, neurofeedback can help.
Trauma can impact your relationships, social life, work life and your emotions. Unresolved trauma can lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD can impact your mind and body, but especially the brain.
Neurofeedback Helps With Trauma From Childhood Wounds
Severe childhood abuse, neglect and abandonment, known as developmental trauma, is one of the most difficult mental health issues to treat. Trauma can be long lasting. Over time, you can have all kinds of psychological and physical symptoms.
This type of chronic stress that occurs early in life, when your brain is developing, has a devastating effect on the central nervous system and brain. Neurofeedback has a profound ability to help.
You may have witnessed or experienced domestic violence. Maybe you had to deal with verbal, emotional, sexual or physical abuse. Developmental trauma can occur when you are dependent on caregivers that cannot love and nurture you consistently or in the way that you needed in order to thrive. You may even have experienced a complete lack of attachment to your caregiver.
The Effects of Trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Trauma can result in severe emotional dysregulation. You might be plagued by chronic dissociation, hypervigilence and self-destructive behaviors. Social isolation, rage, and fear are also common. https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/posttraumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/symptoms
In his book The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel Van der Kolk, a leading trauma researcher, talks about how trauma is stored in the body, as well as in thoughts and memories. Memories, including body memories, of trauma can overpower your nervous system. This can render you unable to function at your best.
How Neurofeedback Helps With Trauma
Neurofeedback re-wires the brain and helps your nervous system calm down. This helps build resiliency so that you can handle life’s ups and downs.
Neurofeedback Helps Chronic Body Tension and Stress
When you’ve been under stress, you start to feel tense in your body and emotionally upset. Your muscles will naturally tense. If this happens enough times, and for extended periods, your body and mind can get stuck in an amped-up state. You start to lose your sense of joy and excitement about life.
When tension becomes chronic, it can take a toll on your health. Normally, once the stress is resolved, your nervous system would come back down to a calm place. With chronic stress and anxiety, your brain and nervous system do not return to a calm level. This is where neurofeedback comes in.
In your brain, the amygdala is what senses danger, and activates your fight or flight response. With chronic stress, the amygdala can begin to stay ‘on’ even after the threat has subsided.
Every time you feel stress, the brain can’t figure out that you aren’t in that past trauma anymore. It doesn’t register that the small stressor you are feeling in your present is not the same as the serious threat you felt in your past. You find yourself not being able to cope.
Neurofeedback Helps With Dissociation and Arousal
Many people also experience dissociation, where you can’t feel your body or experience emotions. Dissociation is a way your nervous system deals with stress that just does not go away.
If you have suffered multiple traumatic events, you may be accustomed to living in a perpetual state of arousal. Conversely, you might feel shut down, or unable to feel or react. Complex trauma can arise from more subtle forms of emotional abuse and neglect and can be equally destabilizing.
Research On How Neurofeedback Helps With Trauma
There is lots of good research showing that neurofeedback (NF) helps with trauma. Studies have shown that neurofeedback has successful results among clients with PTSD who have not been responsive to prior treatment modalities.
In another study, compared with the control group NF produced significant PTSD symptom improvement in individuals with chronic PTSD, as well as improved self-regulation.
Self Regulation And Building Resiliency
Recovery from PTSD depends on being able to manage intense feelings and stress. The brain becomes stuck in unhealthy, rigid patterns. Neurofeedback is thought to change neuronal activation or connectivity patterns in the nervous system. Neurofeedback training helps you acquire self-regulation skills and thereby improve focus and attention as well as managing stress and anxiety.
What Happens During A Neurofeedback Session?
I apply four electrodes to the scalp in order to analyze your brainwave activity. The signal is fed into the computer, which processes key brainwave frequencies. You look at this activity through a moving calm picture, movie or video game.
The brain changes independently alters its activity, rewiring itself to a better pattern. New patterns result in healthier thinking, emotions and behavior.
When a brainwave helps you feel relaxed, yet alert, I tell the computer to encourage that wave. Eventually, brainwave activity that moves you towards better self-regulation is the result.
The specific locations on the scalp where we put the electrodes to listen in on the brain are specific to the conditions we are trying to address, and specific to each individual. Gradually, we retrain the brain to a more healthy and stable state of mind. Over time, the brain can maintain this healthier state without using neurofeedback.
You might be drawn to neurofeedback training because it is not necessary to relive traumatic events or bring out painful emotions. You simply sit in a comfortable chair and we work with brain function.
After neurofeedback, your brain waves are normalized so that you can manage your emotions. Your cognitive abilities are enhanced, as well. You can focus on learning, making friends, working and pursuing your goals.
Neurofeedback Can Lead To Greater Understanding
As neurofeedback progresses, the new, optimal state might help you to better understand the roots of your trauma. You can then resolve painful memories without feeling so much distress.
I support you during these moments by creating a safe environment. Through listening, asking you questions and helping you with somatic healing, you can develop insight and integrate your experiences. Neurofeedback helps you with this by keeping you grounded and regulated. Then, you develop a more integrated sense of self.
If you think I might be able to help, please feel free to reach out. You can leave me a confidential voicemail message at 310-314-6933 or email me mfoxmft@yahoo.com.
