Sublime

In my experience, physically reexperiencing the past in the present and then reworking it in a safe and supportive “container” can be powerful enough to create new, supplemental memories: simulated experiences of growing up in an attuned, affectionate setting where you are protected from harm.

(You can read more about the fascinating history of neurofeedback in the Jim Robbins [2000] book, A Symphony in the Brain.)

Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while others are too numb to absorb new experiences—or to be alert to signs of real danger.

Trance states, during which theta activity dominates, can help to loosen the conditioned connections between particular stimuli and responses, such as loud cracks signaling gunfire, a harbinger of death.

The way a mother holds her child underlies “the ability to feel the body as the place where the psyche lives.”8 This visceral and kinesthetic sensation of how our bodies are met lays the foundation for what we experience as “real.”9

Projecting your inner world into the three-dimensional space of a structure enables you to see what’s happening in the theater of your mind and gives you a much clearer perspective on your reactions to people and events in the past.

When those areas are deactivated, people lose their sense of time and become trapped in the moment, without a sense of past, present, or future.

Often there is excessive activity in the right temporal lobe, the fear center of the brain, combined with too much frontal slow-wave activity. This means that their hyperaroused emotional brains dominate their mental life. Our research showed that calming the fear center decreases trauma-based problems and improves executive functioning.

If the amygdala is the smoke detector in the brain, think of the frontal lobes—and specifically the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC),12 located directly above our eyes—as the watchtower, offering a view of the scene from on high.