Children
|Many parents bring their children to receive neurofeedback training. They usually come because of some self-regulation issue and often that issue is causing a problem in school. Someone who has worked with me told them that this might help.
Teachers and administration officials are pressuring the parent to get a ‘diagnosis’ and perhaps even have the child put on some medication to ‘change’ their behavior. And this is understandable if you have a class full of other children and a child is disrupting the learning atmosphere or that the child is suffering and cannot stop their behavior even when they are told to.
The problem is that these children cannot change their behaviors because the behavior is only a relief valve for something deeper that needs addressing. When any human takes on more presure than they can deal with, there are compensatory behaviors that will happen as an means of coping. What do you think over-exertion is? Why do you think that some folks go and go until they exhaust themselves or become ill. They can’t help it because the overload in their psyche causes the ‘relief valve effect’ in order to attempt to resolve the pressure or the system burns itself out.
The other concern for me is children and medication. There are really few test trials of medication and children. Your children may not react well to medications as many parents tell me; some do, some don’t, although we don’t know how they will fare in the long run. I am seeing a 15 year old now who had an allergic reaction to medication. And the side effects can be daunting as well as the fact that medications consume large quantities of our biological energy in order to make them work. So you really don’t know what how a particular child will respond.
With NeurOPTIMAL neurofeedback training, we never diagnose because a single diagnosis puts an individual in a box; and often the belief that they are that diagnosis is a self fulfilling prophecy. Since all brains function in exactly the same way, by providing feedback to that individuals brain about how it is behaving, that brain can make its own changes because that is how it is designed; self regulating and completely adaptable via direct experience, or simply said, neuroplasticity.
Other neurofeedback approaches diagnosis as well, and then try to push the brain in that direction and this can bring about side-effects. But we never push the brain. We simply give it feedback every time it loses present moment contact and begins to produce what we can call wobble which is an over expenditure of energy (called a phase shift or perturbation in physics), and it stops producing that event, and comes back to the present moment to assess if there is an actual threat or not, all instinctively. Our brain is designed to learn and thus evolve from experience and learn it will. This is called the Orienting Response and is a survival response that we use all the time, but since it is instinctual, we are mostly unaware of it.
Call me to speak further to see if this approach can help your child to function better and really, be happier in his/her life. A brain that can stay relaxed and come back to relaxation faster is going to experience more ongoing satisfaction and happiness in daily life. And see what parents say about their experience of NeurOPTIMAL in the What Clients Say section.
