Post-Traumatic Stress (PTSD)

Sue Othmer: Neurofeedback & PTSD

Regaining Control: Neurofeedback & PTSD

Fight or Flight: Using Neurofeedback to Treat PTSD & Substance Abuse

A traumatic experience occurs when the survival of the individual is threatened or the threat on the life of those near and dear is observed.

A traumatic experience that is not integrated will keep telling the body of the individual that his ability to deal with survival is uncertain. To deal with the anxiety, the person often develops addiction in order to try to find positive expression.

Neurofeedback can be helpful

“Through the process of rewarding low EEG frequencies under appropriate circumstances, treatment helps the person to encounter his “existential self.” – Siegfried Othmer.

The Alpha-theta neurofeedback is often used. It has been first researched by Eugene Peniston, a psychologist then employed at the Fort Lyon Veterans Administration facility to work with Vietnam veteran alcoholics. His research that was extended to PTSD in 1991 show the significant benefits of the Alpha-Theta protocol over PTSD and addiction behaviours.

“… memory is state dependant, and state depends on the frequencies at which our brain is firing. When we are infants and small children, or when we are adults in shock, we are making slow waves, delta or theta, as the primary rhythms. These frequencies hold the archives of how it was then and what happened then. Alpha-Theta training gives us access to these archives by giving us acces to these rhythms. Athmospheres and events that are recovered are not so much repressed or even forgotten as they are inaccessible. Alpha-Theta training gives us access.” – Sebern F. Fisher, (2014) Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma

The role of Alpha-theta training is three-fold:

• It physiologically, psychologically and perceptually distances the environment and allows the person to calmly focus inward.
• It quiets cortical function in general and the verbal self-sensor in particular.
• The EEG becomes more coherent over larger brain regions, which enlarges the subjective boundary of the self.