How does Neurofeedback therapy help with developmental trauma for ACAs?
As an adult children of alcoholic, I grew up in chronic stress that wreak havoc on my nervous system. I struggle with severe anxiety, nightmares, muscle tension, loss of attention and focus, being overly sensitive to sensory stimulation etc... Talking about what happened to me back then doesn't help, even though I still want to believe; "If I told someone what happened to me and they believed in me, I'd be okay." This trauma lives in the body, is a developmental disorder, now I am getting neurofeedback therapy weekly and reading Sebern F. Fisher's book on neurofeedback, I am understanding it better.
When you have talk therapy or share at an ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families) meeting, you get it mentally but your body doesn't seem to grasp it fully. People go to meetings for decades and are still struggling with same old learned survival patterns that drives us crazy because I, personally blame myself for being stupid for not getting the point time after time. But it's not about being stupid, it's about not stimulating the certain electrical activity parts of the brain during talking. This is a different mechanism, chemical drugs and electrical activity can change the brain, talk therapy barely does it, if any.
Today my therapist gave me some tools in the beginning of our session. I 'got' it on a logical level but I didn't feel it fully. At the end of neurofeedback session, he repeated the same tools and I had a sense of getting it fully. Because I felt it what it's like to experience in my body during the session. We are just working on calming the pre-frontal cortex at the moment, from 15hz to 12hz now to 11hz only. Even that made a drastic improvement on my ability use my brain better.
Long story short, I wish more ACAs and people with high scores of ACEs would consider getting neurobiological based psychotherapy options; Bessel Van Der Kolk, Peter Levine, Sebern F. Fisher and my dear therapist, are all amazing heroes in lives of such sadly hurt children who weren't lucky enough to born into families where they could securely attached to someone safe and wise enough to explore the world safely. Instead, we were forced to survive the neglect and all levels of abuse in our childhood and once we become adults, we still don't feel belong to this world thanks to 'dissociation' to help us survive horrendous stress of our childhood. I felt fully present in my body today during the session, and I felt what it is not like to be in a dissociative state. I am having choices now, my brain is learning to adapt a calmer, safe state and I choose to be fully present more rather than constantly being stuck in the pain, fear, anger, shame of my hurtful past. I cannot only survive, but choose to thrive over learned survival mode. I still cannot fully believe it is possible to recover from all of this, but slowly I will 'get' it and feel it in my body too.