For Some It Takes More than a Relationship - Neurofeedback Organizes and Calms the Brain
After speaking at the Wellington County Learning Disabilities Conference this October, I had time to reflect on the content of my plenary talk during a three hour flight to Newfoundland to care for two of my grandchildren. The next few paragraphs include some of the material on which I wish I could have spent more time.
The time has come - we must stop seeing problems as simply "behavioural" or "cognitive" or "emotional". Many kids (and adults) are profoundly impaired in their ability to regulate their emotions in a civilized way. They are also severely limited in their ability to use their parent(s) or a therapist to help them to discover how to manage their powerful emotions. As babies many of these people simply never had feedback from their mothers or primary care-givers that told them that their sensations were reliable and could be trusted. They now have a limited understanding of, or access to, what drives them. Full of fear, there is a sense of "motherlessness" and they have no one, whom they would trust, to provide empathic attunement. Neurofeedback shifts the burden of affect regulation to a brain training situation and it can open the door to therapy and safe emotional relationships. The following is the pathway to understanding neurofeedback and how it can help calm and organize a brain when a relationship can’t.
Brains organize themselves through rhythmic oscillations. It is in these electrical rhythms or waves that brain plasticity lives. If the brain is dysregulated or too aroused to concentrate or to stay calm and alert, then neurofeedback can access this plasticity, change the formation of the waves and help the brain to become quieter.
Beneath every thought, feeling and behaviour, the brain is firing. Difficulties can be seen in the brain long before they become apparent as cognitive or behavioural issues. We need to address the root of the problem and focus on training the brain waves with neurofeedback.
First, here is the briefest description of what is involved in neurofeedback. The client sits before a computer screen and has three sensors attached to his/her head by means of an electrolyte paste. One sensor is attached to each earlobe to provide a ground for the neural circuit; the third sensor is placed on the very top of the head, midway between the front and back of the skull. The sensors are connected to the computer and the computer analyses the electrical activity going on in the client's brain. The result of this analysis is displayed as brain waves on the screen. Waves move from left to right with time, and up and down as the electrical activity rises and falls in the brain. At the end of a session, which can last anywhere from 30 sec. to 20 min., depending on its purpose, the therapist is able to see which frequencies of electrical activity are faster indicating high arousal and which are too low suggesting day-dreaming. Based on this, various activities (which are very much like computer games) are selected for the client to practice. For example, the client may be presented with a realistic 3-D image of a bowling lane. The task is to get the 10-pin ball to roll down the alley and get a strike. If there is too much activity in one frequency range of the brain waves the ball will not move, if there is not enough in another range, the ball will not move. The task is to focus on the ball in such a way that the ball does, in fact, roll down the lane until it hits the pins.
In print, this sounds very abstract; in reality, it is quite exciting to see one's brain-power directing a changing image. Continued practice at this, and other tasks, taps into the brain's plasticity - the wiring which produces the unwanted frequencies stops producing them, and the wiring responsible for the frequencies that are wanted increases its ability to do so. The result is a client with an increased ability to focus and to manage his or her internal mental states. This is the basis of emotional regulation.
When brain development is impaired because of a stressful in utero or birthing experience or a traumatic childhood, functional IQ is actually decreased and the number of learning disabilities is doubled. As well, impulse control, emotional regulation and relationships become impaired.
The relationship with mother organizes the brain of her infant. Dr. Allan Schore (2012) reminds us that in every culture, mother-ease is built-in to soothe the baby from birth so the baby can experience safety. It is this eye to eye, heart to heart, holding and rocking, soothing and attunement which stimulates the development of the pre-frontal cortex. When developed the pre-frontal cortex inhibits limbic firing and thus regulates fear responses. When a baby is born to a mother who is depressed, disengaged or unavailable there is no mirror to give the baby a reflection of him/herself to validate attempts to make sense of the world. Without this presence of an engaged mother, the limbic drivers are unable to shut down and the baby becomes agitated, unable to settle and dysregulation becomes chronic.
Unrepaired attachment disruption is at the core of the most serious psychopathology leaving the disorganized baby in a state of baseline fear and traumatized. There is “no mother” to take care of the baby and if there is no mother around, the child (person) becomes similar to prey for an animal. Fear and vulnerability are signaled in all kinds of ways to those around who might do it harm. Kindling fear circuits become developmental trauma and lead overwhelmingly to high arousal in the brain (this is what is meant by affect (emotional) dysregulation). These primary, sub-cortical and predominately right hemisphere effects are very hard to reach with words and this becomes a limitation to talk therapy. Chronic fear makes self-reflection and a clear sense of self nearly impossible to achieve and makes affect regulation and learning very challenging. By addressing the brain wave frequencies that give rise to over-arousal, neurofeedback helps to quiet the fear.
Current brain research indicates that the capacity for experience-dependent changes in the nervous system (plasticity) remain throughout the life span (Schore 2003b, p.202). We can get the most out of the brain by giving the brain a mirror of it’s own functioning and the capacity to change those functions. Neurofeedback provides this mirror. Beneath every thought, feeling and behaviour, the brain is firing and these firing circuits are measured in frequencies. Simply put, the faster the frequencies, the higher the arousal. With neurofeedback, a person can monitor their own brain's activity and can experience the power which comes from knowing they can alter the electrical activity within their own skull. The brain is devoted to it’s own regulation and when a pathway to regulation is provided, the brain will follow it. Neurofeedback trains the brain to follow a calm, organized pathway. Once learned, the brain remembers.
The gift of neurofeedback is the gift of emotional self-regulation. When this is accomplished, the motherless begin to feel mothered. The nervous system feels mothered and is ready to move toward interpersonal relationships as the foundation of affect regulation. This is the time when therapy for the client is helpful. It is also a time when coaching parents in ways to establish relationships with their child who is learning from neurofeedback. Parents need to become proficient in the art of growing the roots of relationship. When those roots become deeply embedded and a sense of self and other emerges, their child will then have the freedom and desire to relate to other people.
The only safe harbour is relationship. Neurofeedback can set the sails to lead us there.
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.
