What is trauma?

Trauma is any deeply distressing or disturbing experience, including everyday events that most of us experience like divorce, death of a loved one, the chronic stress of a job, health issue, or a struggling child.

Trauma changes how your brain functions.

Your brain changes in response to traumatic stress. These changes cause all manner of unpleasant side effects like insomnia, anxiety, and depression. When we go through a traumatic event, our central nervous system kicks into high gear, reacting with a stress response - a flight, fight, or freeze reaction. Sometimes a distressing event can, over time, be processed by our brain and stop causing us emotional pain . But sometimes our brain is unable to heal and gets stuck in the past and continues to react as if we’re still experiencing the disturbing event. Our brain’s alarm system is necessary for our survival, and activates our fight-flight-freeze reaction if it identifies a threat. Unresolved trauma increases the risk of misinterpreting whether a situation is safe or dangerous, which creates a faulty alarm situation. People who have experienced trauma react as if they are in danger in situations that are benign. Some of the long term effects of this constant misfiring of the stress response are raised blood pressure, increased stress hormone levels that cause anxiety, insomnia, and addictions, premature aging, immune system suppression, diabetes and obesity.

Neurofeedback is a powerful form of therapy for people who have suffered traumatic events.

In the Body Keeps the Score, Dr Bessel van der Kolk discusses how neurofeedback can help you recover and heal from your trauma. When you experience a traumatic event, normal brain patterns are interrupted. Neurofeedback works by pushing the brain out of stuck abnormal patterns and creating healthy new patterns . Brain imaging studies have shown that traumatic events tend to activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left. The right side of our brain is our emotional intuitive side, and the left our rational , logical, and analytical side.

This may explain why neurofeedback or other methods of brain balancing can effectively heal PTSD when talk therapy alone cannot. This loss of executive function keeps the traumatized person from realizing that they are reenacting the past , rather than experiencing what is actually happening in the present. When the connection between the two sides of the brain is reestablished, the trauma can be resolved and ceases to cause the painful side effects. If the trauma is not resolved, the stress hormones that the body secretes to protect itself keep circulating, and the emotional response keeps being replayed. The person has no idea why a minor irritation causes such an extreme reaction.

What is Neurofeedback?

Our brains are like supercomputers. And just like computers , they can be susceptible to being infected with a virus. In this case, a negative event can cause our brains to work less efficiently or even “crash” completely. These events create new maladaptive pathways in our brains that lead to all manner of painful physical and psychological symptoms. When the pathways are restored to their original state, by removing the virus(trauma), our symptoms disappear. Neurofeedback goes in and removes these viruses so that our brains are restored to their optimal state of high functioning. Insomnia and anxiety are reduced and distorted self talk is restored to positive thoughts about the experience and one’s self. Simply put, the event loses it’s power over you in the present.

Neurofeedback also works for the “everyday” problems that cause low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, feelings of powerlessness, and chronic stress. It can help you work through life transitions, relationship issues, career changes, health issues, phobias, anger problems, and more. Many people don’t recognize that these life experiences can have a lasting effect on your life (Learn more about neurofeedback).

If you or someone you care about is struggling to recover after a trauma, and live in Richmond Virginia, Richmond Neurofeedback can help. Please contact me today to learn how neurofeedback can restore your life to the peaceful, joyous state it was before the trauma.

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