Fibromyalgia

See also Pain/Fibromyalgia
Many clients in this category are heavily medicated, so having an MD willing to work with you to reduce and get rid of the meds would be a major plus. That’s one of the first steps, since in many cases getting off the meds is a crucial step and an early focus.

Like many other diagnoses, fibromyalgia is often a kind of catch-all term for combinations of problems and not necessarily particularly helpful in determining what and where to train.

My experience has been that these are some of the issues you’ll be training:

1. At bottom, there is often a trauma or neglect history, so it’s not uncommon to see low levels of 6-8 Hz as the brain has learned to shut off access to the subconscious. Sometimes this is blunted by a tendency toward slow alpha (6-10 Hz instead of 8-12 Hz), often related to the meds.

2. You may find high levels of 23-38 Hz, or again these may have been covered up by meds. These would be, with the low 2-8 Hz, more foundational patterns, but you may only really see them when the meds have been reduced significantly.

3. One of the primary characteristics I expect to see is that the brain has learned to produce a lot of alpha (usually slow and often failing to block with eyes open or at task, and often in the front and left of the brain). This is a self-anesthetizing strategy to deal with the blocked trauma experience.

4. There may be alpha-delta sleep patterns (alpha intruding into delta sleep). Since delta is (in adults usually occurs in only one usually early and usually fairly brief stage of sleep) related to physiological restoration, failure to achieve this deepest state often leads to the feeling of chronic fatigue and maybe also to chronic pain–both common characteristics of a fibromyalgia diagnosis.

5. Secondary gains are often a major block in training. No matter how motivated a client appears to be, I always liked to work with them at the onset of training to recognize what they will lose if they no longer “have” fibromyalgia. It’s great to define what will be gained, but until the client recognizes how expectations of others and of oneself, “excuses” for not having to do things, will no longer be available, there is resistance to changing. Nothing to blame, simply a recognition of the work that will be required and how the entire way the client sees and is seen will change.

So, use the standard approach to getting off meds early in training and establish the expectations.

If alpha is strong, especially slow and unblocked, train to reduce it, especially in the front and over the left hemisphere. These two things will begin to reveal the deeper patterns of anxiety and trauma response, which can then be trained.

Obviously every person’s brain is different, so train what you see, but these are things I would commonly expect to find.