Neurofeedback

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Have you ever baked something in your kitchen, and just as soon as you place it in the pan and scrape the bowl, you realize that you forgot to an ingredient? There have been times when I’ve made cookies and left the vanilla out. That is not as big of a deal. With out the vanilla the cookies will still rise and bake correctly. They may have slightly less flavor, but it usually ends up being no big deal.

I remember one time when I was a kid (probably around ten) my mom forgot to put the yeast in the bread. Yeast is an ingredient that has to be added at the beginning of bread making process. It can’t be thrown in after the bread is kneaded.

It happened to be St. Patrick’s Day and my mom had added green food coloring, just for fun, which made this bread dough unforgettable! After she had mixed the dough and allowed it time to rise she returned to see that her mixture in fact did not rise. At this point she didn’t know what to do to salvage her mistake, so she rolled some of the dough into flat rounds that resembled pizza crust and baked the bread anyway. That night we had a meal with beef, potatoes and dense GREEN flatbread.

It just wasn’t the same!!! From my memory pretty much INETIBLE!

An analogy that leading into this post…

Imagine that you have a old family recipe card and a corner of it caught fire from the flame on your stove. You quickly hit the flame out with a nearby kitchen towel, but in the end you were only holding half of the recipe card.

This was a familiar recipe. Something you had eaten many times before, so you tried remembering what the ingredients were on the other half of the recipe card. After this incident, you made the recipe again and again, guessing and measuring and trying different ingredients to create a complete recipe—the cookie, or cake from your memories.

Each time you make the recipe it didn’t quite turn out right. The flavor wasn’t rich enough, or it didn’t rise properly. Or it was too salty or acidic. But you were determined to get the recipe just right, so you kept trying again and again, guessing, by using sense of taste, sight, and smell along the way.

Often this is how healing is. You are aware of what it feels like to feel good! You know you are missing something! You can’t get the equation quite right—then why keep trying? Why keep spending the money on the ingredients? Or risking the feeling of let down— a feeling that you have felt continuously for years now?

What is the motivation for trying to get the formula right?

At the end of this post there is a recipe that I have made fifty times in the last two years. I wanted to record it for my own personal record. It is a recipe that I played with a lot as I was figuring out what ingredient fit and when to add them in. (And the final product is GREEN!) —NO pun intended, mom!

Along with a recipe, I wanted to record an experience that I had a year ago while the emotions are still fresh and the implications of my choice are still being resolved. In my personal experience there hasn’t been one right recipe in my healing journey. But there are principals that I follow. One of those principals is “everything is working out the way it is supposed to“.

Have I wanted the complete recipe? Sure! —I sure have! But there hasn’t been the complete recipe laying in front of me. It has been a process of trying, and navigating and gaining more understanding and vocabulary.

What has motivated me to keep trying?

I REMEMBER what it feels like to have energy to make it until the end of the day!

What motivates me to keep on going? Faith and belief in my body.

My goal is to walk without pain. (My pain has been debilitating me for a long time.)

The emotional drain of disappointment after starting a new therapy or exercise routine can be so draining….So I keep trying to rewrite the recipe, hoping one day I will find the ingredients that help my body (and my emotional state of being) feel more complete!

Reflection after a year of a personal deep dive

Last year, February 2022, I found myself continuing my journey of discovery by trying a new therapy. Seven years previous to this I had started my therapy journey with talk therapy. I had tried physical therapy multiple times. I had been consistent with a variety of low-impact exercises. I had at least four different massage therapists. I had seen chiropractors and homeopathist. I had an MRI, and multiple CT scans looked at by doctors and neurologists. And I had recently had a baby.

The baby is healthy. She came six years after her older brothers. She is adored! But her birth brought a new level of discovery to my life. I had been working on my own healing journey from chronic pain for over eight years by the time she came. Her arrival and my recovery hit a new level after her birth— a new layer of the healing onion was about to be revealed.

By 2022 I was available and educated enough to take my healing to the next level, so I thought I would try an older modality of therapy, that seemed to be effective for a majority of patience that needed to heal from hyper-vigilance, perfectionism, redundant thoughts, and even chronic pain. This new (for me) therapy is called Neurofeedback. It was researched and began being used in the 1960’s.²

This seemingly easy “brain training” takes place in a chair, with a few conductors placed on the ear lobes and in the hair, and the therapy takes place while watching TV. It seemed simple enough to me (but I have never felt like the average case through my whole healing process).

I had my initial scan that with my understanding showed my brain was working in reverse. The left side seemed to be firing when the right side should have been. There were obvious issues that revealed themself on the scan.

I was open and willing to try this therapy. After all, Bessel Van der Kolk recommends it as an effective therapy. I really respect his work. He is known for his research and discovery in neuroscience and trauma history.

My first treatment was on a Friday. I remember because the next day I went to a comedy on stage, with my husband on a date, and I twitched the whole time. I was stimulated because I was laughing. (The play really was funny!) But my sensory problems were elevated and my skin felt like it was being attacked by bugs. My clothes were driving me away from sanity and I couldn’t stop jerking, shaking and jolting.

This play was at the end of the day, so my brain was tired. But even with a tired brain, the reaction was still extreme.

After this experience I called my Neurofeedback practitioner and told her about the side-effects of the treatment. She brought me in for another initial scan on another computer that she was more familiar with. After weeks of disorganized communication and the twitching incident, I settled in to receive the care that could help me.

I had been on a nine year journey. I was fatigued. I also am a mother of three and I have a part time job on top of pain and chronic anxiety. I still don’t believe how deep and down this therapy took me. I really can’t even believe that this experience happened to me—to my body, at this time of life.

It was the deepest-darkest-rock-hard blessing that has brought me to this point in my recovery.

The result

Making the decision to spend money on a service or a product is an interesting one. Each person has a different reason and story behind why they spend.

The way be spend or time may have a similar story. A lot depends on how we grew up, our personality plays into it as well.

Without taking a deep-dive into human behavior I wanted to list a few reasons why I continued my journey with neurofeedback.

The number one reason was:

I felt stuck!

So I was trying something new.

The second reason was:

there was so much resistance to it, I figured I would summit the peak and see amazing results on the other side!

And this was not the case—immediately.

To make a long story short, I received Neurofeedback treatments twice a week for six weeks. From my understanding the practitioner told me that that she was going to do a calming protocol on the lower area of my brain, closer to the brain stem.

This is not my expertise, so I agreed. I walked in the door from treatment number five, sat down on the sofa, swung my legs across so I could lay down. I felt half alive, half dead.

I had felt the effects of disassociation before, but at the time I didn’t have the word to use for what I was experiencing.

Also this what a different type of disassociating. When I had experienced this out of body sensation before, I had found a sense of peace. I remember laughing and feeling removed from my pain. It was almost like my spirit had been floating in the right corner of my room. I made a joke to my husband that I didn’t know if I was ever going to move. It felt to good, and at peace to lay there and feel serenity.

This day was different. It was a depressed disassociating. I called Curtis on my phone. (He was working downstairs in his home office.) This what I said to him:

Curtis walked away from his desk early and came upstairs. He went to pick up Scott, then when her returned home we went for a walk. It was an attempt to get my brain revved up again.

I drug my feet, shuffling my steps, and cried the whole time we were on our walk.

Something was wrong…I wanted to figure out why I was being put through this.

This was not the first time I had physically felt like I was being pushed under deep water. Slowly I continued to move forward, wanting to listen and trust and feel my intuition through the process. I was NOT trying to fake that something wasn’t wrong. (This was obvious to anyone who saw me during this window of time.)

I just hadn’t found the process yet, but I knew one thing. Neurofeedback works. It effected me, just not in the right direction. There was a disconnection that could be best described as a nervous breakdown.

Forward Movement

I returned to the practitioner and assertively said, “Something has to change”. I told her about the disassociation. She told me that she would ask her Neurofeedback practitioner community about my side-effects and see if anyone had some insight in what to do next.

The next couple weeks were a mess. I was completely checked out half of the time, continuing insomnia, unable to get out of be before eight in the morning. I went to get a few more treatments to see if anything could change.

I prayed, asking about what I should do.

There were financial implications to all of this. This type of mental-health intervention is usually not covered by insurance. The initial appointment was almost $300, and then each 20 minute treatment after that was $75.

While writing this I returned to my calendar and I had been treated nine times by the time I discontinued treatment. I spent almost $1000 for THE RESULT of having my brain shut down.

I don’t think that it is all about the money, but I needed to mention money here because there are a variety of factors while making these types of decisions.

With out going into much detail, it clearly effected my family as well.

Answers

After many tears, prayers and discussions with my husband the answer to discontinue came clearly through signs.

The longer I got to know this practitioner I could see how disorganized her personal situation was. She didn’t leave her disfunction at home. It carried over in her work. She text all her clients one day telling them about her parents’ health problems and that she was so sorry that she couldn’t move into her new office space until the next weekend. The text was so long with inappropriately shared stressors.

The new office space that she chose to move to was much further from my house then the initial office space that I had gone to.

When she moved, I didn’t continue. It was an easy decision for me. Things naturally resolved and I didn’t reschedule again.

I never heard her follow up about the Neurofeedback community’s response. I really don’t even know if she got online to ask about my condition.

The whole thing was a mess.

The long hard resolution

It is hard for me to finish this post. There are a lot of reasons that I started writing on this blog, but this incident pushed me to the point where depression could rule my life…OR I could use my skill and all the information in my brain and sharing my experiences.

Here is a link to the first post where I really expressed what this depression feels like.

It has been a year since I purchased my domain and started down this path of writing online. I’ve been struggling through it! But today I can proudly say that I am finding more ingredients for my healing recipe that I will continue to share!

I’m sure I will write a follow up post because there is more to share about all the implication of this therapy!

If you have tried Neurofeedback and had a positive experience, will you share it! There are so many cases with positive results! This is why I tried it in the first place!

Thank you for being here!

Questions for Self Discovery

What decisions have you made, that had consequences, that still aren’t resolved?

Is there one thing that you can start doing today that can help you feel like you’re making forward movement?

If you make the following recipe, will you let me know how it turns out?

1. What is neurofeedback therapy? Neurofeedback is a non-invasive treatment that encourages the brain to develop healthier patterns of activity. The goal of treatment is not only to change how you think and feel, but also to change your brain on a biological level for better functioning. Source: Chandra, Suruchi: https://chandramd.com/what-is-neurofeedback/#:~:text=What%20is%20neurofeedback%20therapy%3F,biological%20level%20for%20better%20functioning.[↩]
2. What is neurofeedback therapy? Neurofeedback is a non-invasive treatment that encourages the brain to develop healthier patterns of activity. The goal of treatment is not only to change how you think and feel, but also to change your brain on a biological level for better functioning. Source: Chandra, Suruchi: https://chandramd.com/what-is-neurofeedback/#:~:text=What%20is%20neurofeedback%20therapy%3F,biological%20level%20for%20better%20functioning.[↩]