by Lynette Louise, AKA The Brain Broad
In my opinion:
The best scientists are clinicians who were once patients that then studied themselves and their condition well enough to prudently use originality to improve the prognosis. They then saw replication of this success with clients.
The best parenting expert is a parent who has done the work, in this job that is never done. The best parenting expert has children who quote them, children with happier than expected lives. The best parenting expert has raised their children and come out smiling.
The best therapy reflects these same ideas. The best therapies work by making a parent more equipped as an expert-clinician-scientist, because then they can address whatever may come.
So choose your therapies and experts as you choose your colleagues and friends; with selectivity and a desire to be heard.
Use similar “rules of engagement” in all of your health care and lifestyle needs. It is no longer a world wherein being the unknowing patient who simply trusts and obeys leads to the best results.
Research is at your fingertips via the Internet, use it! Then, hire somebody.
My belief that a successful client is more likely to be an equipped informed client is why I choose to teach parents how to use play and neurofeedback in the home–under my guiding voice. Neurofeedback quickly teaches the brain to change itself, while I teach the family to understand their physiology. This combination teaches all the brains to change together with understanding and love. Play makes that physiological improvement grow faster because happiness heals resistance and eliminates socially reinforced feedback loops of negativity.
Many practitioners argue against enabling parents to grow independent and strong by their own use of an intervention. I understand this because some interventions are dangerous. The ones I use are safe; even as the family is still learning how to use it.
Neurofeedback at its core is a teaching modality that comes under the umbrella of medicine because it uses the EEG (electroencephalogram) to gather information and feed that information back to the client via a video game. The client uses naturally occurring shifts in brain wave activity to run the game. And the brain learns.
Play uses repeatedly occurring activities the client sees as fun to add new interests and ideas while engaged and delighted. Games have goals, and when you play any game all players agree on what that goal is.
Putting both “Brain Games” and “Family Games” together creates coherence in any group. A similarly focused group makes quick and easy change in the direction of their mutual choosing.
But it’s even bigger than that:
Taking an intervention into the home environment allows for increased frequency of usage and reduced stress caused by scheduling and keeping appointments. It allows for consistency, immediacy of response (very relevant in panic, meltdowns, seizures etc), and forces a learning curve that demystifies medicine. It is well known and has been repeatedly proven via stringently designed studies that feeling a lack of control is highly stressful and increases the chronic release of stress associated hormones which damage the body and brain. In the spirit of “First Do No Harm,” it is the medical professional’s responsibility to empower their patients.
Having an intervention in the home that you know how to use when needed is empowering. Learning how to use it changes all the household brains through education and makes a team out of what used to be puppets and a puppeteer relationship.
Of course, working in a multi-modal, as-needed style blurs the lines that connect the dots on just which aspect of the therapy is responsible for your healing journey. I don’t care. You’re healing.
Still, many people want to know the answer. So here it is:
What is responsible for your healing? Freedom? Knowledge? Neurofeedback? Playfulness? Practice? Belief? The diversion of a suggested action, which stops you from perpetuating the cycle and allows your brain to heal itself?
YES! All of that. And more.
It’s all about predisposition and what influences you put in your brain/body. What information, nutrition, beliefs, chemicals, people, places; interventions. So what makes the difference in you becoming a healthier happier human being?
In a word: Expectation.
In a sentence: Informationally driven social connection and proactive engagement aka neurofeedback and play in the home.
It’s all about what you put in your brain/body. Information, nutrition, beliefs, toxins, people… interventions.
I suggest neurofeedback and play, at home!