Can LENS Neurofeedback Help With PTSD and Trauma?
People suffering from trauma or PTSD have symptoms that affect their bodies in ways that make it difficult to move on in their lives from past events. Painful experiences that happened to them in the past seems to linger into the present day. Trauma is the emotional residue left over from these dangerous or threatening situations. Trauma gets stored in different areas of the nervous system and body that one can continue to experience in the form of heightened anxiety, panic attacks, flashbacks and nightmares even though the person is no longer in any danger.
The reason for this is because trauma changes our brains and bodies in ways that are difficult to heal and reverse from conventional methods like talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
Trauma is complex in how it is stored deep in parts of our body, mind and nervous system in that it cannot be retraced and extracted by an exchange of words that describe the feelings of what happened in a typical talk therapy session. Trauma is a whole body experience. One relives an experience internally, throughout the body and brain, by associating how they felt and reacted with the experience. Complete with the racing heartbeat, shallow breathing and fearfulness that is still present in their nervous and biological systems. It’s the body memory at work.
This is why CBT is not enough for most people and 40% of those with PTSD drop out of treatment.
CBT does help to address: working to associate new realizations from the event, creating a support system of care and removing blame through emotional validation.
But the way to heal from trauma needs to be addressed by a more comprehensive approach.
How Trauma Affects the Brain
Trauma can make changes deep in the amygdala of the brain. The amygdala is part of the limbic system or the primal part of the brain that deals with fear and survival instincts. It is in this region that memories live along with the feelings and emotions associated with the storylines of the past. These are presented as physical sensations that are separate yet integrated with the story being told.
Cognitive behavioral therapy works on the prefrontal cortex of the brain that is responsible for reasoning, logical thinking, planning and learning or the executive functioning center.
PTSD can cause insufficient communication with the limbic system. This means that CBT and talk therapy can help a person through effective language and reasoning but falls short of activating the deeper regions of the brain where the memories and feelings associated with the trauma are stored.
How Trauma Affects the Body
A traumatic event can alter the communication of the bodies biological response to stress by first impacting the hypothalamus.
During a threatening or dangerous event, the amygdala informs the hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain responsible for responding to stress by producing hormones like cortisol. Meanwhile, the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary bodily functions goes into a flight or flight response, where rapid heart rate, feelings of panic, shallow breathing and brain fog suddenly happen. This response can remain engaged long after the trigger is gone.
LENS therapy offers real clinically driven, evidenced based approach for those who are dealing with the affects of neurological and physical stressors of PTSD and trauma.
What is LENS Neurofeedback Therapy?
LENS therapy (Low energy neurofeedback system) is a type of direct neurofeedback that differs from all other forms of traditional neurofeedback in many ways. It was first developed in 1990 as a way to improve neurofeedback therapy. LENS has been shown to make significant symptom reduction in PTSD patients more quickly than traditional neurofeedback.
Neurofeedback in general is a good tool to use to speed the rate of recovery for PTSD and can be used along with cognitive behavioral therapy.
Neurofeedback helps to change unhealthy brainwave activity as a result of trauma to a more flexible and healthy state. Resulting in what’s known as neuroplasticity. It accomplishes this change by training old brainwaves into more optimal ones.
Behaviors are downstream from brainwaves. The goal is to create better behaviors by influencing change in the current maladaptive brainwaves of a person with PTSD. This is where neurofeedback shines. Neurofeedback therapy can work to train or disrupt traumatized brainwaves to rebound back to their healthy state. Accessing deeper brain regions that talk therapy is unable to go.
Neurofeedback therapy is reward-based in that tries to “consciously train and lead” a person into a more healthy state by using appealing videos and audio to reward a person. Much like we train our pets through operant conditioning. It teaches the brainwaves where to go based on what is regarded as normal, taken from statistics of healthy people.
Neurofeedback targets only the trauma stricken area of the brain and works to normalize brainwaves to be more flexible and less rigid. Which relates to better performance.
There are many studies that show neurofeedback used for PTSD is more effective than any medication. It has been shown using brain imaging and fMRI a functional change in a persons brain who is suffering from PTSD after having gone through neurofeedback treatments.
On the other hand, LENS neurofeedback uses maps to locate the trauma areas and then works on the entire brain to “disentrain” and reboot unhealthy frozen brainwaves to reset to a more optimal setting. The LENS maps help speed up progress by relying on the brain itself to lead the way, a term referred to as homeostasis. The LENS signal disrupts the poor brainwaves, left over from trauma, and then the brain reorders itself to a better set point. This is an improvement from the older way of normal neurofeedback training in that LENS works on the entire brain, instead of only certain areas.
LENS resets and disrupts brainwaves and traditional neurofeedback trains brainwaves.
LENS is more direct and streamlined approach. It bypasses the need to educate a persons brainwaves using videos and audio which takes longer. LENS therapy makes it possible to get fast results for PTSD patients and reduces the total amount of treatments by half.
An added feature of LENS neurofeedback is its flexibility. LENS can work on the head and body.
BodyLENS offers a way to go directly into where the trauma is stored by accessing the parasympathetic nervous system and the energy meridians throughout the body to help calm and promote a more restful state.
The goal of LENS and BodyLENS therapy is to have a traumatized person who is hyper-aroused, stressed and fearful, reach a place of calm and relaxation more appropriate with everyday events.
There are levels of healing from trauma that cannot be addressed by talk therapy alone. Neurofeedback is a great additional modality to include in helping one heal from chronic PTSD.
-A Balanced Brain is a Better Brain-