Neurofeedback Training For Professionals
In 2011 I was introduced to the concept of neurofeedback by a meditation student during a lunch break of a weekend meditation program I was leading. Paul, knowing I was a psychotherapist, wanted my assessment of the device and whether I thought it would be an effective treatment for conditions such as anxiety, depression and school/work performance.
“Natalie, what do you think of neurofeedback for anxiety?”
I responded with a puzzled look. He went on to briefly describe how it’s brain training to fix the maladaptive patterns of the brain that lead to the symptoms of anxiety, depression, and ADHD. He’d been reading the book, Symphony in the Brain, written by a New York Times science writer on the history of neurofeedback to educate himself because he had been approached to be an angel investor in a peak performance neurofeedback clinic in NYC.
I told him I’d never heard of it and was skeptical of anything that was a “cure-all” for such difficult conditions as PTSD and ADHD, but agreed that I would get the book and do some research myself.
As a psychotherapist one of the biggest challenges is finding the best tools and techniques to help the brain stop doing the maladaptive stress response habits which create so many of the symptoms that bring clients to therapy. Those stress response patterns include constant worrying or fearfulness, anxiety, hopelessness, depression, a state of confusion, thought loops that can’t be controlled and contribute to addictions forming as people seeking help through addictive substances such as alcohol to down-regulate their systems. When someone flies into a rage that is a habitual stress response and from a part of the brain is not controlled by our conscious selves. In fact, research using MRI technology to study what happens in the brain for people with trauma/PTSD what has been shown is that the most primitive brain structures control the fight/flight/freeze stress response and send messages through their neuron network to the pre-frontal cortex, which we can call our “conscious” selves, but that the neural pathways sending a communication from our conscious-selves brain to the primitive brain are not active. Meaning: we, our conscious selves, don’t ‘decide’ to fly off into a rage, but rather our primitive, limbic, survival brain is in charge and reacts to the environment trying to keep us safe but not realizing that the ‘threat’ now does not require a fight response.
I digressed. Now back to the story of bringing neurofeedback into my therapy practice. Even though I don’t consider myself a ‘techie’ and wasn’t all that interested in bringing some brain training equipment into my psychotherapy work, I felt I owed it to my clients to find out if this would help them heal faster. I started by reading what I could find on the topic and calling the few neurofeedback therapists I could find in the New York area.
Choosing the Equipment
My first questions were: what are the different neurofeedback devices out there? I soon learned that there were two types: protocol or linear neurofeedback and dynamical neurofeedback, of which NeurOptimal was the only one on the market. The former was the original or first generation of neurofeedback. It worked by contrasting how a “normal” or typical brain functions electrically and one that is symptomatic. A brain map called a QEEG is often used to map how the symptomatic brain, whether it’s anxiety or depression, or a head injury, is functioning. The neurofeedback trainer then sets protocols to train the client’s brain to migrate its patterning towards the typical brain. This type required the trainer to be an expert as he or she was actively impacting the brain’s electrical functioning.
The second type of neurofeedback called dynamical, which was designed by a pair of psychologists, functioned differently. It worked purely as a feedback system giving each brain the opportunity to see its own maladaptive patterns. The software was created on the premise that the brain is designed to gather information continuously to make effective decisions while uses its energy efficiently. Give the brain good information at precisely the right millisecond ant it would use that data to optimize its functioning. Hence the product’s name: NeurOptimal.
When I was talking with various trainers in 2011 “brain training” was not in the public’s repertoire of faddish things to do. Rather, it was seen as this radical Frankenstein-like experiment. Thinking similarly myself, the thought of “tweaking” peoples’ brain did not interest me. I was relieved when I spoke with a number of clinicians who had started with protocol-based but switched to the fully automated and non-invasive NeurOptimal system. They found it as or more effective. They liked that it was more cost-effective than the protocol style because it did not require an expensive brain map to be done before the client started training.
Given the clinicians’ feedback and my own lack of interest in playing God over anyone’s brain, I decided to take it to the next step and I tried it myself and sent my most interested PTSD client, Karen, to train herself.
My Own Experience from Training My Brain with NeurOptimal
My first session I didn’t notice anything. I enjoyed the music, and because there wasn’t anything I needed to do with my conscious self, used the time to meditate. I felt refreshed at the end, but no more than I would if I’d just done my meditation practice. My client, however, had a very different experience in her first session. She had suffered from complex PTSD her entire life. She had been abused as a child and lived in a state of fear and anger as an adult. She was a perfect candidate to try neurofeedback. She was working in psychotherapy, had a strong yoga practice, and in general a healthy lifestyle, all things I learned later, helps support shifts that come from brain training. She reported to me, “Natalie, I felt a sense of calm come over me for the first time in my life.”
After my third session I was driving home and I noticed that my sense perceptions were clearer and my mind was better focused. Still no big shifts. After Karen’s third session she noticed that a shift had happened at work. Usually, around her male co-workers she would tense up and sometimes get into heated arguments, but now she was relaxed around them and if they said something distasteful, she found herself “just walking away.”
Once I saw what it did for Karen I knew that I owed it to my clients to introduce it into my practice as part of the supports I offered for helping anxiety, depression, and PTSD. (Later we expanded the practice to include neurofeedback home device rentals for ADHD, sleep support, addiction recovery and concussions.)
It wasn’t until I had purchased my first professional NeurOptimal system for my therapy practice in late 2011, and was training myself regularly, that I noticed a profound shift in my experience. I was driving home, late on a Thursday night, having worked a long week, and tired that I noticed something was different. I was tired but I wasn’t upset. Usually, my drive home included physical exhaustion, as well as mental exhaustion and often a story of sadness and how difficult my circumstances were. This night I realized that, yes, I was physically tired, but I wasn’t mentally distressed. My mind was calm. I even tried drumming up my old story, “I’ve worked such long hours, tomorrow I have a full day of parenting a toddler, when am I going to get a break!…” and still no sadness. It was like the trap door wasn’t opening, even though I was stomping on it.
“Wow,” I thought, “This is the power of brain training!”
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