Hi @CherryBomb @Shaz51 @utopia @Kurra @Faith-and-Hope @Former-Member @Zoe7@Former-Member...and the people I will remember as soon as I hit "post".
So I had my first appointment with the neurofeedback psychologist today. The appointment was really hard because even though you don't have to tell your whole entire trauma history with neurofeedback, they do need SOME information. However, she picked up pretty quickly that things would go awry if she pushed too much. I was able to give her enough information for her to figure out the muddle is...er...muddling. Part-way through, she called in the guy who will actually do the neurofeedback so that I didn't have to re-tell stuff. Then he and I went and had a brief neurofeedback session so that he could get a baseline picture.
The "game" I had to play involved a picture of a big ball on the computer screen. The aim was to keep the ball at that size. Calm brain waves kept it that size, undesirable brainwaves made it shrink. By the time we finished three minutes later, the ball was microscopic on the screen. 
On the bright side, the electrodes on my head did actually measure brain activity so at least I know something is going on in my head . The guy said that my pattern of brain activity showed a super gigantic spike when the ball started shrinking at a rapid rate. Apparently this matches what I had described as one of my main issues - the fact that I can go from 0 to 100 in terms of distress just by being triggered by a word. I think the idea is to be able to calmly think "oh look, the ball is shrinking" not "AHHHHHHH I'M COMPLETLEY FAILING AT THIS AND THE END OF THE UNIVERSE IS THUS CLEARLY IMMENENT"...or something like that . The guy is hopeful that we will be able to reduce those super strong responses - yay.
For me, the strangest thing about the day was that I told them how last time I tried neurofeedback I got a series of dreams. Um...yeah...apparently neither the psychologist nor the technician had ever had someone do that before. That freaked me out a little bit because for all these years, I've assumed that that was what was supposed to happen. But no, apparently that was very unusual. For this reason, we are going to take a fairly softly-softly approach. My main goal right now is to deal with the depression and thus improve my concentration. Down the track I am open to dealing with some of the trauma stuff more directly if I feel I need to, but right now, if I can just get my mood up a bit and thus try to start finding a way out of my muddle that would be awesome.
Stay tuned for next week's exciting episode of the neurofeedback adventure. Thank you for taking an interest. It is so nice to have people to share positive news with.
