Trauma

I don’t worry too much about looking for trauma indicators, since I agree with Von der Kolk:   I don’t know that I’ve seen more than a few clients who wouldn’t qualify as having trauma experiences. If trauma is defined as a situation where the brain enters fight-or-flight mode but can’t run away and can’t fight–in other words, it is limited to a freeze response–and perhaps where this experience is not followed by an episode of trembling–then who HASN’T experienced trauma?!  Maybe it’s even a normal part of life.   The question for me is how has the brain adapted to those experiences and how can we train it to unlock the response and release the material.

If there is really a history of PTSD here, I’d expect to see high beta, especially in the temporal lobes. Sometimes excessively high alpha around the head (often a precursor to physical conversion effects); often high high-beta specifically in the temporals but often around the whole head as well.  Those would be a couple right off the top.

When you see a scoop at 6-8 Hz, I would usually assume that there is subconscious emotional material that the client does not wish to face.

As for training, you could try the temporal lobe training without the 6-8 Hz activity and let your client start to develop that with alpha-theta sessions perhaps every fifth session.

There are a number of folks on the list who have used the TQ8 to develop training plans for veterans (and others that have head injuries) and have gotten excellent results.   Of course they can’t re-do a Q to see if they got excellent results; they have to base that judgement on the fact that the client is better and happier and more stable…so they may not be right. If someone has PTSD and RAD, I would expect to see lots of very fast activity in the temporal lobes, perhaps a very hot right side, possible alpha distortions, etc.

One way to handle memories like that is to re-experience them and process them, the psychological approach. But in many cases I have found that as the client changes the appropriate brain patterns these issues are released “in the background. Training the existing activation patterns first, to make them more flexible and doing A/T every 5th session or so, as most our training plans recommend, old material often goes away.