The Evolution of Emotion: What Science is Telling Us About Separating the Brain from the “Person”
It is time to take a fresh look at brain circuitry and the impact it has on emotional regulation. Frequencies at which brains fire underlie every behaviour, every feeling and every thought.
Separating out the brain from the “person” reduces the pressure from being blamed that emotional eruptions are behaviours controlled by one’s will. On the contrary, brain dysregulation is the foundation of emotional, cognitive and behavioural disorders. The brain can feel like it is on fire when relationship disruptions occur between a child and the primary relationship - from infancy to adulthood. A tangled web of complicated symptoms can emerge: hostility, rage, fear, social isolation or self-destructive behaviours such as eating disorders, cutting, and suicidal ideation. Until recently, talk therapy or psychotherapy was one of only a few modalities to use as an intervention. Unfortunately, trying to “talk sense” into most people doesn’t always work!
Locating the problem in the brain and not the person clearly frees the client to consider learning more about how his or her brain/body talks. Neurofeedback is the window into the brain and it can train a person whose brain rhythms are “off” to control them. Over time, the brain becomes heavily conditioned. In many contexts, the brain has habituated a reaction which results in moving into the same “parking spot” (depression, anxiety, rage) time and time again. The symptoms experienced are the brain trying to work itself out.
All of us can become emotionally regulated by paying attention to ourselves. Neurofeedback allows the client to see his/her brain wave patterns on a screen; they can then train their brain to operate at different frequencies which are experienced as different states of mind. The rhythms of the brain’s circuitries can change with practise and this fosters a healthier more stable state of mind, emotional regulation and the capacity to focus. The rhythms of the brain change, the body and mind interact differently, attention and focus stabilizes, fear diminishes and with persistent, committed training, the person can be back in charge of his/her brain.
Neurofeedback does not replace psychotherapy. Neurofeedback provides the brain with information about itself, how it is firing, and how it can change how it is firing.
Psychotherapy or talk therapy encourages the emergence of the person who can consider the others’ reality and who can assist in increasing the capacity for meaningful, reciprocal, and empathic relationships. Together, these two resources may be the key to healing the ruptures in relationships that create emotional dysregulation and a brain that is on fire – a fire with no extinguisher nearby.
Relationship is the only answer. Repairing the emotional damage of relationship ruptures from birth thru death has neurofeedback as a new and effective tool, one that considers the power of the brain to heal itself instead of blaming the person.
For recent research on the effectiveness of neurofeedback in treating various disorders such as attention disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and panic attacks please see:
www.isnr.org/resources/comprehensive-bibliobraphy.cfm
www.aapb.org
www.aboutneurofeedback.com
www.ncbi.nih.gov/pubmedhealth
Copyright 2015, Susan Dafoe-Abbey BIS, MED, RMFT, RP, Authorized Neufeld Practitioner. Permission to use this material, either in English or in translation, for educational purposes, is hereby granted.
