Neurofeedback

This is the most fascinating thing to read about @Phoenix_Rising and I feel very lucky to be able to follow along with this so thanks for taking the time to share it with us. I have eleventy billion questions so I am going to do my research before I ask you anything, and try and get my head around this a bit more first! I am reading with interest though!

@Phoenix_Rising that is so interesting. I would love to see results I would get. I have no doubt that further back in my trauma I'd have been absolutely hopeless, I'd be interested to see now how I would go and try to improve on it over the sessions. So you have a year of these? Is that right?

By the way thank you so much for sharing. It really is fascinating, thankyou.

Tooky

@Former-Member Do you reckon eleventy billion is more or less than a bazillion???

@Former-Member Hopefully I will have 18 sessions. I am getting them fully-funded under the ATAPS program. I will definitely get 12 sessions, and the psychologist is pretty confident that ATAPS will approve a further 6. I guess depending how it all goes, I would then be able to have another 18 sessions next year.

wow @Phoenix_Rising fully funded! That's fantastic! So we have a lot to look forward to with you posting your session experiences and journey. Yay! 😄

that sounds so great @Phoenix_Rising. thats amazing i really hope it works for you. you seem super determined which will help as well. So happy for you. im glad your doing well in this. keep it up !!! just keep swimming little turtle

Good morning @utopia, I saw you floating around on @BlueBay's thread and I figure you might still be floating. Utopia...I feel very odd. Not BAD odd by any means...just odd. I feel CALM!!!! My whole inside feels very calm...and it feels very very odd!

I think the idea of neurofeedback being turbo-charged mindfulness is very accurate. I still know it isn't magic...but I definitely feel very odd the morning after my first real session.

You asked if I was keeping a record of how I feel after each session. My plan is to do that here. Hopefully no moderator or anyone will accidently hit the delete button on my thread.

I would definitely recommend neurofeedback to anyone. I have real issues with the way we seem to constantly go on about distracting, self-soothing etc. I want to FIX my muddle. I don't want to "live well with" it - I want to FIX it. I think part of the issue with MI is that so many MH professionals have low expectations about what "recovery" really looks like. I know that in many circles, "recovery" is actually defined as "living well with...". That makes no sense to me. If that is all that MH professionals are aiming for, then that is all their patients/clients will get. Perhaps not everything is fixable...but we will only know if we keep moving forwards in the belief that it is. Here endeth the lecture.

@utopia, I definitely don't think that one treatment is THE thing that will solve everyone's issues...but I do think the MH community should strive to move beyond the idea that recovery = living well with. I don't expect that to happen in my lifetime, but I do think that in 100 years, they will look back on how MI is currently treated and laugh, in the same way that we laugh about how many physical illnesses were treated a hundred years ago. It just bothers me that a lot of MH professionals seem to think that what we have now is the best we can aspire to...rather than honestly acknowledging how hopelessly inadequate our current level of knowledge is.

It also really bothers me how much faith some people seem to place in psychiatrists and other MH professionals. Some people seem to naively believe that psychiatrists know more than they actually do. People end up with a whole word salad of diagnoses and yet never seem to question whether there is one thing (I personally would suggest trauma) that explains the various aspects of their struggle. People seem to forget that a psychiatric diagnosis is made based simply on ticking various boxes...and the reality is that there is a lot of overlap in those boxes between diagnoses. So...to me the aim should be to get to the root issue that explains all of those boxes, rather than just having different combinations of the boxes under different labels and then handing someone numerous labels.

I'm glad EMDR worked for you. I got no effect from it, but I know that for many people it is lifechanging. I am hoping for a similar outcome for myself from the neurofeedback. Maybe I am being particularly idealistic this morning because I feel so strangely calm inside. You know what it's like - everything is either all totally 100% bad...or all totally 100% good...not that I have black and white thinking or anything.