I reached out for support due to the extreme anxiety I was confronting in anticipation of…read moreaccompanying my husband to Seattle for a bone marrow transplant. The plan was for us to find a house sitter in CA, put my private practice on hold (for an indefinite number of months), and then become Henry's full time caregiver, protector, and lifeline while he was slowly recovering within a scrupulously sanitized, sterile environment after his immune system had been completely wiped out.
I was terrified of watching him go through this process, and I was especially feeling ill-equipped to succeed in such a perilous "life and death" situation/assignment. I pictured that, under duress, in a medical crisis when we were living all alone, 8 miles away from the nearest hospital, my own "red alert" reactions would cause me to exponentially exacerbate the problem instead of being a calm, steady, effectively caring presence. Just thinking about this possibility triggered a flood of flight and freeze signals associated with severe anticipatory PTSD.
So, I tried several of the biofeedback options offered by Santa Cruz Neurofeedback Center after an initial individualized brain mapping session. I discovered that a technique which involves working to subtly control the volume and clarity of a piece of music, while holding the corresponding intent to modify my paralyzing reactions in anticipation of specific situations, actually did allow me to gradually "reset and self-regulate" even when focusing upon the most dreadful possibilities.
My biofeedback assignment was to experiment with feeling into "finding" a center point inside which was a combination of "calm", "intentional", "highly focused and aware", but "lacking any sense of effort".
As I managed to stumble upon an internal approximation of that designated combination, this, then, naturally lit up certain parts of my brain which were correlated with those attributes. In turn, when the necessary parts of my brain lit up (painlessly connected to electrode sensors), this somehow caused the music I was hearing through headphones to become less discordant.
Rather than stopping and starting, or becoming almost inaudible, the musical soundtrack played smoothly and optimally, subliminally training my brain to progressively "dial in" a desired set point - something which I don't think I would have ever fine-tuned this well, or this easily, in a simply rational or a more willful way.
These results gave me a lot of comfort and encouragement, and also, as a bonus side effect, I was able to achieve much deeper, more visceral benefits from my lifelong meditation and mindfulness practices - even though I had been pretty successfully working with these methods for many decades - just with less dramatic progress.
Throughout this biofeedback treatment process, I recurrently observed how reimagining and then experientially implementing some familiar, lifelong spiritual approaches and concepts assisted me very practically in achieving our targeted treatment goals while also opening new doors and windows into some other positive, but entirely unanticipated insights and breakthroughs.
Henry had a brain tumor removed which neurologically impacted regions related to balance, impulse control, executive function, and judgment as well as something like the breakdown of his Wake/Dream barrier.
However, he was still able to tap into an observer self - and sometimes capable of acknowledging these kinds of deficits, not just experiencing the consequences. One benefit he gained from regular Neurofeedback sessions included an empowering sense of exercising clear intent and agency during a time when he was terrified of losing these capacities. He set a goal of actively working toward "shifting his relationship with" increasingly intrusive altered states that caused him to see, hear, and sense non-consensual phenomena as if they were physically present.
Henry described a reduction in his anxiety whenever the Neurofeedback process mirrored his capacity to identify this type of intention and then offered measurable evidence of progress (i.e. when what happened on the training screen during a session visibly responded to his intent). His mood responded positively to the musical component of his customized protocols as well which utilized a long list of his all time favorite songs.
As an LMFT, I have also referred many clients to Santa Cruz Neurofeedback to facilitate everything from more effective management of chronic anxiety to better addressing ADHD symptoms or otherwise enhancing variants of intentional self-regulation which significantly benefit mood stabilization, better focus, or concentration. There are numerous other potential benefits - plus Langdon, Aimee, and their whole treatment team are highly skilled, delightful people with whom to collaborate.
