Trauma Expert Dr. Bessel A. van der Kolk promotes Neurofeedback

 

Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

 

Link:  Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. free webinar link

Medical director of The Trauma Center in Boston, professor of psychiatry at Boston University, and director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress Complex Trauma Network, Van der Kolk is recognized in the field for being a pioneer of once unconventional mind-body interventions, such as Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) trauma psychotherapy, neurofeedback, and yoga. Over the last 30 years, he has established a reputation as an iconoclastic critic of traditional approaches to trauma—especially Prolonged Exposure therapy, which he’s characterized as “among the worst possible treatments” for trauma, merely desensitizing people to their suffering, instead of healing them.

 

As a somatic therapy as well as a psychotherapist with my roots in trauma resolution that goes back 33 years, I fully concur with Dr. van der Kolk.  Asking certain individuals who have been traumatized to re-live the experience, is akin to driving the memory deeper and having them experience it all over again.  In my years of working with hundreds of people, I finally sought an approach that was non-aggressive/non-invasive, could feedback to the brain in its own language how it was spending energy, without ever directing it, and could assist the brain to do what it does well which is to re-normalize itself  (physics term), or said another way, heal itself.  Neuroplasticity is the science that has demonstrated that our brains are capable to learning and improving their survival capabilities from direct experience and improving their effectiveness or resilience in life.

 

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk is a key figure in the trauma field and he uses neurofeedback in his center to treat people with traumatic stress and PTSD.  He says, “I’ve witnessed breakthrough results in the treatment of trauma, abuse and neglect with neurofeedback.”  This has been my experience as well in using NeurOptimal® Neurofeedback in my clinical practice these past 9 years. I have seen adopted children from both rise and China who has severe PTSD symptoms and although I am trained and certified in EMDR (one of the protocols Dr. van der Kolk uses), these children were so dis-regulated that it was impossible to ask them to even sit to process past events. I have also seen significant healing in regard to traumatic brain injuries and concussions, changes that are unseen in the medical world today.

 

NeurOptimal® has proven to be a significant tool in helping their brains resolve traumatic reactions that previously were impossible to ask.  Because Dr. Val Brown, the developer of the NeurOptimal neurofeedback approach has actually owned, operated, taught and been certified on virtually every approach to neurofeedback in the field today, and his technological and mathematical prowess has allowed him to bring neurofeedback in the current physics reality which is non-linear, dynamical physics.  You can read more on this on the website here.

 

Furthermore, NeurOptimal Neurofedback Personal System allows families to affordably train themselves and their children at a fraction of the cost of seeing a practitioner in their office. For under $19 a session, individuals and families are purchasing, or renting, systems and doing the training in the convenience of their own home to great benefit.  We are educating people that we do not have to find work-arounds and coping strategies for traumatic stress reactions, we can help the brain to heal itself naturally and based on its own inherent design, and in a complete non-invasive, non-protocol approach.

 

 

Link:  Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. free webinar link

Neuroplasticity and confidence.

Brain

I was reading this morning some research on brain neuroplasticity related to confidence from Mount Sanai Hospital School of Medicine. They call confidence ‘life’s enabler’ or the quality that turns thoughts into action. Taking small steps in daily life adds up, they say in other words. Also, viewing failure as new information to be accepted as part of learning, versus sense of failing.

Good posture, too, plays a part in how confident we feel. This is innately known with practices like Tai Chi or yoga; feeling confident physically imports into feeling confident emotionally and mentally.

And then lastly, monitoring negative, automatic thoughts is important. From the neurofeedback spectrum perspective, this is a bandwidth area known as ruminative catastrophizing; 95% of the negative thoughts we are having we already had yesterday and the day before, and so on and we can see it happening on the monitor in real time, though clients are rarely aware that their brain is generating it. The negative thoughts can cause you to feel defeated but actually, they are happening unconsciously and if we can catch them, we can unhook from them and begin to focus on what we want, not what we don’t want. This comes directly from meditation practice; return to the present moment when we discover we have lost present moment contact.

So these strategies are all important for sure; but my experience tells me that helping the brain at the instinctual level is way more effective and immediate.

NeurOPTIMAL™ neurofeedback bi-passes the defense process and mirrors back to the brain its ineffective energy expenditure in a completely non-invasive way, so there is no need for the brain to protect against this completely non-agressive information. It does it at the level of the hormones and neurotransmitters which is where moods are generated before we even have a thought.

What clients tell me what they begin to notice is that those unconscious and automatic self-defeating patterns begin to drop away because it takes tremendous amounts of energy to sustain negative states, and the brain can learn from its own experience; neuroplasticity. Anxiety, for instance, is something that the brain is generating while we are experiencing it. It takes our reserve energy to keep that anxiety going, or an actively generated stress state. By showing the brain comprehensively what it is doing on a moment-to-moment basis, it is fully capable of learning, thus dropping these self-defeating habits and staying more in the present since there is no past or future other than in our imagination and memory circuits.

Poor energy expenditure is not congruent with an energy conserving system which is the brain’s main task, along with knowing when something in our environment has changed that needs to be solved or challenge met.

See this link to the Independent Survey to see how effective NeurOPTIMAL brain training is based on what clients told us about their experience. And because we use current physics and mathematics, called non-linear, dynamical, we never ever get side effects that the Classical neurofeedback approaches depend on in order to push brain change.

 

Link: http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/you-can-train-your-brain-to-become-more-confident

Neurofeedback podcast interview with Upgraded Ape organization

If you want to hear what NeurOPTMAL neurofeedback does from the developer himself, this is a wonderful interview.  He gives his background and how he got into this field.  He also provides a simple explanation about how NeurOPTIMAL can improve resilience in life.  When your brain sees what is has been doing electrically, it improves itself because this is its design. This is the neuroplasticity.

After 8 years of using MeurOPTIMAL with clients as well as using it myself, I am still learning new things each time I hear Val Brown be interviewed.  He is a great teacher and able to synthesize very complex information into simple ways of grasping how NeurOPTIMAL can do what it does across so many symptoms and presentations.

WIRED FOR MIRACLES?

Jim Robbins article is a classic on the neurofeedback field.  He interviewed all the original leaders in the field and it is a pretty good historical look at the how the field has evolved.  He does not speak about non-linear, dynamical neurofeedback, which NeurOPTIMAL is, but it will provide an interesting look at how the field evolved.

 

By: Jim Robbins