Beginning this week, my intention is to share periodically about a book I’ve read that may be of interest to anyone who is exploring or considering neurofeedback training for whatever reason. Some of these books may be scientific and heavy on neuroscience, whereas others may have a more spiritual bent, because neurofeedback encompasses mind, body, and spirit.  In any case, I am sharing what strikes me and not providing a review or report.

Normally when I read a book, I end up scanning pages and sometimes entire sections or chapters, simply because either the writing failed to capture my attention or the content was weak. With The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk, I found myself doing the opposite.  I read slowly, taking in the long but well-written and content-rich words of one who is in my mind the most prominent and respected name in the field of trauma.  For someone whose life has been touched in any way by life’s traumas large and small, this book is worth reading the same way—a few pages at a time, with a notebook nearby.

Van der Kolk decries the emphasis that mainstream psychology places on medications and cognitive approaches to resolving trauma and treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), noting that they have a dismal record of success in restoring a person to healthy emotional functioning. He also points out that many people end up with a multitude of false diagnoses that share only a trauma response underneath the myriad of symptoms. Van der Kolk prefers an approach that recognizes how the body’s safety systems have been hijacked and that reconnects body and brain in a way that makes it safe for individuals to experience healthy emotions so that they can actually live inside their bodies again.  He explains why this is so through an explanation of brain functions—including a description of the limbic system and polyvagal theory, and the memory distortions that occur in individuals who have experienced trauma.  He speaks to the irrationality and non-verbal nature of trauma, and he talks about how trauma in childhood causes different physiological responses than trauma in adulthood.  Most importantly, Van der Kolk offers hope to those who suffer and their families.

In the final and perhaps most important section of his book, Van der Kolk shares what he views as essential approaches to helping individuals tone down their internal alarm systems in ways that allow them to function better in life. He suggests body work, especially yoga, massage, and EMDR.  He suggests a more dynamic approach to psychotherapy called IFS, or Internal Family Systems, which is quite similar to psychosynthesis.  Van der Kolk also encourages therapeutic theater participation, although that may be much harder to find such a program than his other suggestions.  Of especial interest to me is that Van der Kolk is a strong proponent of integrating neurofeedback into any wellness plan for trauma recovery and dedicates an entire chapter to the subject.

His emphasis on brain training and body work have not yet received support from the American Psychological Association, but individuals around the country are paying attention to his ground-breaking efforts. As someone who has been a long-time neurofeedback trainer and has specialized training in the IFS-related field of psychosynthesis, I especially appreciate his wisdom, leadership, and courage in the face of nay-sayers.

If you have any interest in this topic or relationship with someone who’s experienced trauma, put this book on your must-read list.

If you’ve read the previous post, you know that putting together a list of the things you’re tolerating in life can result in a daunting list. The first time I did it, my list was close to 200 items. I worked on the little ones first, because getting something done in 10-15 minutes made me feel like I was making progress, not just from the task itself but from the process of crossing out items on my tolerations list. It meant that I was tolerating less in life.

What I wasn’t expecting, though, was that no sooner would I cross off one of the more moderate-sized items, than I’d realize that there were a handful of items that either popped up or I had forgotten about. It meant that although my tolerations list got low, it still existed. I realized that it was a flow—some things off, some things on the list. That ebb and flow, as long as I did a reasonable job of making sure I was taking care of things rather than putting up with them, meant that my overall stress level reduced just enough that I was able to sit back and look at the bigger picture.

Looking at the bigger picture is the key aspect of this exercise. Yes, you’ll feel better about taking care of the little things—the gnats and mosquitos of life, as one of my former counseling clients put it, but you’ll also be creating room in your life to take a more serious, more careful look at the bigger stressors in your world.

What you’ll find is likely to surprise you. You are likely to see that it really isn’t the thing you THINK is making you crazy that is really the cause of stress in your world. Instead, it’s almost always something underlying the surface problem. Bad bosses, delinquent children, poor relationships…there’s always something else fundamental to how the situation got to where it is for you. Knowing that there’s something deeper and that you can find it is life changing, because it opens up new doors and new options for change.

Every now and then, I run across a study that is particularly exciting.  An article in the latest issue of the journal NeuroRegulation is among those findings that are worth sharing.  In it, researchers report that they were able to increase the reading level of students with learning disabilities by more than an entire grade level using a short course of neurofeedback.  Granted, it was just one study with a small number of participants under laboratory conditions, so the improvements may be better and have come faster than typical results might be, but the findings point to a promising method of helping children for whom reading is a struggle.

You can read the article for yourself here:  http://www.neuroregulation.org/article/view/15893.  The jargon may be a bit confusing to a lay reader, so feel free to call me if you’d like to explore what it means in more depth.

Most anger management programs talk about triggers and ways to control one’s anger. That’s all well and good, but the truth is that anger and rage flare up in a tiny fraction of a second, making it difficult if not impossible to stop an outburst. The key is to stop the anger before it starts, and that requires more than just vowing not to let that temper get out of control again. Besides that, it’s practically impossible to eliminate all triggers (though it IS nice to imagine our crazy Northern Virginia traffic without all the bad drivers).

Fortunately, neurofeedback is an excellent way to calm the body and therefore reduce angry outbursts. Sessions can help soothe something called the autonomic nervous system so that the body is no longer in fight, flight, or freeze mode. If you’re calm and your body is relaxed, anger cannot exist as the same time.

Because neurofeedback is a teaching tool that helps the body to create new electrical patterns, trainees set themselves up for a lifelong skill. This means that rather than having some short-term solution, people who use neurofeedback create conditions for responding more calmly long term.

If you’re curious to learn more about how neurofeedback might help you, call or email for a complimentary information session.

I was going to write about stress management this month, but one of the ultimate stressors, violent and terrorist-triggered death is front and center in the wake of yet another mass shooting.

As we search to find meaning and sense in the senseless, most of us look to the easy and obvious solutions. We must do something about gun control. We must provide mental health care. We must fix racism. We must write and pass laws.

Is it any wonder that nothing gets done when we’re wringing our hands and asking others to do something, yet we do nothing and take no responsibility for getting that something done?

It’s all a charade, and I think, deep down, we all know there’s more to a solution than passing a few laws. Sure, regulating guns at least as well as we regulate driving privileges is a good idea. It might even preserve a few lives. But gun control alone won’t solve the violence in our society, no matter how worthy the cause. And, absolutely, taking care of those who suffer from mental health illness is important and a worthy cause. We’re likely to prevent even more deaths, largely by preventing suicides, if we help ease the suffering of those who suffer quietly with depression, anxiety, and even psychosis.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though. Gun control and mental health care aren’t going to fix the problem. At best, they can resolve a few symptoms. The real problem is this:

We have created a culture in which we have glorified the neglect of one another. We have taken our national myth of the rugged individualist too far. It’s become an every man for himself (and every woman for herself) society.

We’ve done it to ourselves in hundreds of little ways. We compete too much and cooperate too little. We connect with our own tribe and demonize The Other. We deny the basics of food and shelter for the poor and most vulnerable in our country. We forget that we are social animals, which means we aren’t properly socializing our youth to maintain society. Most get by, but those who get left along the margins can and will behave in anti-social ways. Add guns and the glorify of making a splashy impact, and you have a perfect prescription for mass shootings.

We can talk about changing rules and regulations and, yes, those are necessary steps, but we must do more. Fortunately, the something that must be done is not overwhelming. It’s not something that only large and powerful groups like elected officials or the National Guard must do because it’s too big for any one individual. In fact, it’s the opposite. ONLY the cumulative effect of individual actions can change our culture in ways that diminish the glorification of the taking of human life or other violent terrorist acts. Only individual action can create a sense of community in which even those on the margins can feel a sense of importance and belonging.

Every major religion on the planet teaches the solution of individual action. A major piece of the solution is right there in front of us, pervasive even if we happen not to be religious. It is the solution of loving our neighbor, of treating others as we ourselves would like to be treated and as we deserve to be treated.

It sounds facile to many, I realize, but it is in fact one of the hardest things any human can ever undertake. Noticing, respecting, thinking about, and being kind to the people around us is hard work, especially when it’s people we think are weird, wrong, jerky, or otherwise offensive.

Plus, if simple kindness is hard, intervening when there is a problem or suspected problem is even harder. It takes an amazing amount of courage to take many of the actions that could truly make a difference. We risk exposing ourselves. We risk feeling like we’re butting in where we don’t belong, because our society tells us to mind our own business. The line around what is not our business is too large in a society that values extreme individualism.

A few years back, there was a trend toward what were called random acts of kindness. We need to revive that trend, only we need to have focused acts of kindness. It will require stepping outside ourselves to pay deep attention to the other people in our lives. If we pay attention, we each will be able to tell what needs to be done. Will we make mistakes and butt in where we should not? Of course. But, most of the time, we’ll be making a positive difference and modeling to others, especially our children, that caring matters, and that caring involves doing more than posting a sympathetic Facebook post.

Imagination can take us so many places, because there are endless ways to ease others’ suffering, even if just a small bit for the moment. Some steps may be huge. I personally would love to see someone form a non-profit that specializes in providing low-cost mental health care to teens and young adults, regardless of background. However, most things that can be done are so small as to be almost insignificant, especially to a jaded observer. But, they all matter, because together, each act adds up to toning down our excessive individualism toward a happier medium in which caring for others is expected and rewarded. It will change our culture. The truth is, our small acts won’t fix everything, they certainly can’t eradicate the presence of sociopaths bent on destruction who have always walked among us.  However, our individual acts of reaching out to others are the best way to heal our terrorized, angry, and violent society.

We all know, or think we know, solutions to the stress we feel in our lives. Most of the solutions are written about in pithy magazine articles or in click-bait postings such as “The Top Ten Tips for Stress Reduction.” You probably could recite many of them off the top of your head: get a good night’s sleep, eat right, go for a walk, reduce your caffeine intake, talk your troubles over with a friend, have a glass of red wine, light some candles and take a bubble bath, go to the gym, drink more water, have a massage.

These are worthy pursuits, and most people will find that at least one or two of these techniques offer brief, almost immediate respite from the day’s troubles. But, few of us actually do what these articles tell us to do. How many stressed-out people really make a habit of getting a decent amount of sleep the majority of the time? How many get the recommended number of fruits and veggies more often than not? How many exercise on a regular basis?

Part of the reason we don’t do these things is that the so-called solutions feel like luxuries. We’re too busy to try them, because we’ve structured our lives in ways that deprive us of the precious minutes we need to restore and rejuvenate ourselves. Another reason we don’t implement these ideas is that we’re not that good about creating new habits. It takes a lot of commitment to go to bed an hour or two earlier, no matter what a chipper author has to say on the matter. But, perhaps, the biggest and most significant reason we don’t consistently do the recommended things to reduce our stress levels is that we know those efforts are only temporary, half measures that get at the symptoms of stress rather than meaningful steps to get at the root causes of stress. What’s the point of spending time and money on something that doesn’t give long-term relief?

The truth is, we’d be much more likely to scrimp and save time and money to get that monthly massage if our stress levels were manageable and we were doing it because we knew it was a healthy way to maintain our body rather than coming at it as a desperate way to grab a few moments of relief in an otherwise overwhelming life. We’d be more likely to take steps to create new habits in our lives if the change was worth the effort, and we know deep down inside that however worthy the goal of a good night’s sleep might be for our health, sleep alone won’t solve our stress.

We have it backwards. Those stress reduction tips are important to maintain a healthy lifestyle, yes, but we’re much more likely to take good care of ourselves when we’re not overwhelmed with stress. Good habits are the outcome of reducing our stress, not the main path to reduced stress.

This is not to suggest that we give up and stop our healthy habits, just because they aren’t a stand-alone, long-lasting way to reduce stress. By all means, eat your fruits and veggies, move your body, and rest well. Maintain your good habits. It’s folly to do otherwise. However, it’s time to tell yourself the truth about the causes of stress and their long-term resolution in our lives. Reducing stress is different and simpler than we generally realize, and in the next few posts will explore some ways to achieve this.

One of the things I hear most often about neurofeedback is the concern that by working with the brain, we may somehow be changing an individual’s personality—or core self—and harming their cognitive skills. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Neurofeedback is a teaching tool. It rewards the brain for making gentle changes in the same way we are rewarded with satisfaction when teaching ourselves a new skill. Think of the changes that neurofeedback initiates as being similar to the changes to the brain you’d make if you were trying to learn a new language. The only difference is that instead of remembering colors or numbers, your body is remembering new patterns of response to life.

Your core self isn’t damaged. In fact, many people notice that their best selves come out when they undertake brain training; feeling better often leads to being better, being more at ease and able to focus and engage the world. It makes sense when you think about it. When you’re better rested and less stressed, you’re more likely to be patient with people in your life rather than snapping at them, you’re more likely to get things done in a timely manner rather than missing or being coerced into meeting deadlines, you’re more likely to get pleasant responses from people when you yourself feel pleasant. When you are calmer and more focused, you may even perform better in school—there have even been studies showing an increase in IQ that came from neurofeedback training.

The bottom line is that many people are intimidated by neuroscience, but each of us consciously and unconsciously changes our own brains every day as a result of how we choose to spend our time. Making the choice to spend time on teaching ourselves how to be better selves suddenly doesn’t sound all that intimidating.