Obsessions and Compulsions

The OCD patterns in your clients are tertiary–they’re defenses against emotional drive issues. In neurofeedback we would focus on resolving the emotional drive, then the OCD may melt away or be easier to train away.

Obsessive thought and compulsive behaviors are often used as a way of covering over either anxiety or depression, so you need to be sure to deal with what is underneath the defense before you just go in and blast it away–if the brain LETS you blast it away. The TQ is a great way to start, because you’ll get a better idea if you are looking at depression or anxiety as well as what the pattern is that is related to the O/C behaviors.  Some clients will show a hot cingulate (shows up at Fz or Cz); others will have high fast-wave coherences.

Start training what is underneath first, and the intellectual defenses will usually recede before you even start messing with the symptoms.  Then the O/C material is much easier to train.

The brain is not actually wired like a toaster.  It forms and terminates connections constantly, so the idea that there is faulty wiring or circuitry is probably not terribly helpful.  The brain learns responses/strategies for dealing with challenges, and these do show up in the activation patterns of brain energy, where they tend to be quite stable.  However, to suggest that OCD, which is generally a strategy adopted by a specific brain to block excessive depressive or anxious feelings, is anything other than an increasingly dysfunctional strategy has no real basis of which I’m aware.  It is already an overly frontal-lobe oriented attempt to intellectualize experience to avoid feeling it.  Hence the anterior cingulate, which performs the function (among others) of serving as the spigot which determines how much or how little emotional material from the limbic system gets to the prefrontal cortex to be integrated into the decision-making process, is already over-working.  That’s why it gets “hot” with excessive fastwave activity–and later “burned out”.

The idea of brain training is that one can identify the places where the excess limbic energy is showing up cortically and train to reduce those levels, which reduces the “pressure” of emotional drive and allows the cingulate to perform in a more functional way.  Since another function of the cingulate/basal ganglia/orbitofrontal cortex loop is to send messages to the pfc when a task has been completed, the previously overworked cingulate now has more capacity available to handle this task and the “skipping” which characterizes OCD–not recognizing when something is done so the PFC can move on.