My Neurofeedback Journey, 2

On April 27, it had been about three weeks that I’d been working with the BrainPaint® desktop home neurofeedback machine.  I’ve been doing about 1.5 hours of neurofeedback a day. That turned out to be a little too much for me as a beginner, so I gave myself a break the last two days.

After my second “Alpha-Theta” training April 19, I could not stop sobbing during the session, or after — for 4 hours straight. It was cathartic. During the session my body was shaking — like really shaking. It reminded me of Peter Levine’s discussions and the video he has of the polar bear shaking after it was attacked and then later it came out of the trauma. It was incredible. I wasn’t just thinking this poison was coming out of my body — I was feeling it. I was shaking worse than if I had been locked for several hours in a deep freezer…

It really was amazing… I let go of a lot of stuff. I saw that my mother did the best she could. I could see myself letting go of the residual anger.

Then, the anger was replaced with a tremendous well of grief and loss. I realized that I was full of so much grief over what could have been and how my life might have been different if this had not happened to me — how my mother’s life would have been different if she had been able to feel love from her children instead of being so stressed that she allowed the most horrific things to happen to her kids.

I thought about how my brother wouldn’t be psychotic if he hadn’t been hurt so much…. How he could know happiness instead of his constant fear…..

And please know: it might not be good for most people to do this alone, as the title of your book says, “Don’t Try This at Home.”  For me, I’ve been working on confronting my childhood for decades, so I have an ability to tolerate this intense experience.  But for most people, unless you are willing to take chances and you’re pretty strong, a person might get really shaken up. It would probably be good to have a therapist to discuss what is happening and to process those deeply brain stem based emotions — or a group of healing friends. To have someone with you to support you would be helpful.

I might be doing better if I had a therapist too, but like Kathy I’ve had bad experiences with therapy so my confidence in it is low and anyway I’m in a rural area without much available.  But I think many people with severe childhood trauma like me who are considering neurofeedback might want to use it with formal support such as therapy or a support group.

For me, I wasn’t re-traumatized. That is all I want to say for now except I think this is a powerful tool!

Getting More Relaxed

By May 6, I found that we need to give the neurofeedback some time to settle into our brain, let the brain settle into new patterns. That’s why I’m not posting as much: I just don’t feel the need to reflectively respond to everything, and that means everything in general.  For someone with trauma, that’s progress.

I have been able to work through my anxiety and though it seems strange, send the emails and make the telephone calls that I need to make but generally procrastinate on. I have been cleaning and organizing. Usually I am so disorganized I am not good at this.

Now I am less reactive. I am certain of it.  When talking to others and they say something that would generally trigger me – I might still become triggered but there is more of a second or two to contemplate first.

I stopped doing several hours of neurofeedback per day. I think so much was making it very confusing for me to determine what was going on in my brain.  While I think generally it has all been effective, I like the general stabilizing non-linear protocol I began with.  I have done several more sessions of the “Alpha-Theta.” That is the type that has the capability to take us into the deep meditative state.

I haven’t had anymore of those really emotional spells during the “Alpha-Theta,” but my dreams have been more colorful. Actually last night I had the first dream in color and it was sad, but more positive.  Usually my dreams have always about big mean things trying to kill me.  So that is great, too.

I feel like I am better able to sit back, take in others point of view, back off from feeling like I have to do everything myself. I really feel this is great.  I also attribute it to the neurofeedback.  I feel like I could talk to people much easier now and have a great interactive conversation without feeling strange and out of place inside.  This is all awesome to me.

And I am feeling like moving into other areas of healing like meditation which I am not good at because of a “way too busy mind that is always quadruple tasking”.  I actually sat down and did about 15 minutes of sitting meditation yesterday and that was good.  So I think all in all this has been a very positive process for me.

I have also been taking others suggestions or at least listening and then making I think more informed decisions based on information from others. To me this is the start of trying to connect.

Also, though I don’t use Facebook much, I have been posting on Facebook more recently and will see people I know. Before, I would be afraid to send a friend request — I would be too afraid because I’m a bad person, that person wouldn’t want to be my friend.  But now, I have been taking chances, sending friend requests and guess what – people have been accepting.  I just find this totally weird for me.  I don’t look out of control outside but now, I am starting to feel more competent instead of “out of control inside.”  By that I mean that strange anxiety when you feel like you don’t belong, like you are an alien to a foreign species.  But now I’m starting to feel I do belong more, I’m feeling more human.

A Breakthrough or Epiphany?

On June 8, I wrote that I haven’t posted on my use of the BrainPaint® neurofeedback system for a month for a few reasons.

Good reasons: I felt so much better due to neurofeedback that I got too busy!  I’ve been out a lot, creating and attending meetings about the ACE Study and regional trauma-informed schools, and I’m writing several articles.  I’ve begun working on key things I used to procrastinate on, that’s also getting better with neurofeedback…  I can feel a real improvement in my impulse control and affect regulation (my ability to regulate my emotions is growing nicely.)

I still feel neurofeedback benefiting me in daily activities, for example if I want to write something that makes a point, I do it so that it’s not impulsive, and is worth reading.  My new ability to do that is part of the neurofeedback.

But I also missed a lot of BrainPaint® sessions. On the one hand, we do need time for the neurofeedback changes to settle into our brain. But I got 2-3 weeks behind so let me note: For anyone who decides to do home neurofeedback, it is important to follow the BrainPaint® policy to rate your goals and answer the assessment questions before each session, and also be careful to keep up with the updates they issue to their computer system.

I got behind on that because my cursor wasn’t working properly, I was blaming myself, so I missed a lot of sessions. Finally I called my BrainPaint® home neurofeedback coach and we learned it wasn’t my fault — the program needed an update, so it was updated June 5.

Then we reviewed and updated the BrainPaint® assessment together that calculated new protocols and she told me to stop trying to do everything on my own, to please call for help. I promised to follow the directions and did so over the weekend and — wow, did my brain move with the new protocols the system created!

In fact, as I was doing my session with the directed protocols, I came to what I have to call an epiphany.  Something has happened to me which feels weird, in fact it feels absolutely crazy (compared to how I used to feel).

I want to report it because it must be the neurofeedback which is really helping me. OK:

I’m often scared to take my dogs to the vet because the office is on a main highway, and the dogs jump out of the car as soon as a door is opened. I’ve been afraid one would jump out and get hit by a car. I have to put them in the back of the RAV4 when driving or I get a 60 or 45 pound dog in my lap, but I couldn’t get them out the back door due to trouble with the auto-lift gate.

Now yesterday while I was doing neurofeedback, for the first time in my life it hit me: Hey, I could go inside the vet’s office and simply ask a front desk person to help me so my dogs don’t jump out and get hurt. This sounds so stupid but it isn’t — it means for the first time in my life I considered asking another person for reasonable help!

That means believing people are supposed to help each other and that some people can be approached for help.

That’s a first step in trust. Amazing.
So I began to weep, really weep.
Let me explain why this feels so weird and crazy and amazing to me.

As many of us with a high Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) score, people have horribly hurt me. I’ve come to feel, I want no part of mammalian attachment to people (you call that “fur”) — even if it is the only way to heal. Trusting people is horribly scary for me for reasons like this:

When I was 7 or 8, I was with my dad in the car about an hour away from our trailer.  I never asked my dad for anything because he was incredibly mean. My dad smoked in the car with us kids inside.  But on this winter day, I had a cold, and as he is smoking, I suddenly couldn’t breath.  I am scared to death because I cannot breath. I timidly ask him “Dad could you please stop smoking? I cannot breathe.”  His response was “If you don’t like it, I can drop you off here right now and you can walk home!”  A very typical response. I don’t know how I managed to escape with my life in that small car for an hour as he puffed away while I was close to respiratory arrest… but I never forgot the incident or the horrible insensitivity.

From that time forward, I could not ask for anything reasonable – I could not ask for something reasonable to save my life.

To others, asking for assistance may seem like a no-brainer. But for me, tremendously hurt by my parents for years starting at a young age — to consider in the middle of today’s neurofeedback session that I could ask the vet for reasonable help — it made me weep.

And I’m going to try to no longer react immediately, even to such epiphanies, as I want to be more reflective going forward — another amazing plus of neurofeedback.  But wow, I have experienced an amazing movement of my brain that I don’t think could have occurred any other way.

I may even be able to move to where attaching to people becomes okay.
Oh and as I had this epiphany – my dogs ate my dinner and I didn’t get mad!

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Kathy’s blogs and Guest Blogs explore the journey of recovery from childhood trauma by learning about Adult Attachment Disorder in teens and adults, Adult Attachment Theory, and the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.