For Brain Retrainers

On the intersection of brain retraining and trauma recovery – a bit about my journey and what I’ve found to help my brain retraining work better for me. I have a history of severe complex trauma, and then had a toxic exposure that was the thing that just pushed my limbic system right over a cliff. I used DNRS without a coach for 7 months, and I got some improvement on a couple of things, but was really stuck on many others and sensed there was really something I was missing. When I started working with my (Gupta trained) neuroplasticity coach, we incorporated many things to make the retraining practice gentler and more respectful of my nervous system capacity, and this is where I have really made so much healing progress.

I’ve been walking a healing path from my childhood trauma for a couple of decades and am a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach through the International Association of Trauma Recovery Coaching. I have other somatic-based, trauma-specific certifications and much training in this area, so adding the brain retraining in a way that is trauma-sensitive made a whole lot of sense to me, and was my missing piece. Trauma is imprinted on our nervous system, and often we have been left in patterns of fight/flight, freeze, fawn or a combination of all of these from past traumas. DNRS wasn’t totally working for me because I wasn’t respecting and nurturing my nervous system.

Symptoms of embodied trauma states stuck in the nervous system encompass just about every mental or physical health diagnosis we can think of, including depression, anxiety, emotional dysregulation, chronic pain, and a whole host of illnesses. The mind/body connection is huge, and when we have unresolved trauma states residing in our nervous system, this affects everything, body and mind -thought patterns, sensations, emotions, etc.  

When people say that they believe a lot of retrainers have childhood trauma, I wholeheartedly agree. Here is a nervous system already stuck in a chronic stress state from unresolved trauma when something else (or a series of things) comes in and absolutely takes this vulnerable nervous system and pushes it over a cliff. It’s the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.

In the trauma recovery realm we talk about the nervous system’s “window of tolerance,” or as some prefer to call it, “window of capacity.” Depending on the amount of trauma imprinted onto the nervous system from prior events, our nervous system window of capacity can be very small. When we are going through life with a narrow window of capacity in our nervous system, and then face another big trauma (emotional, physical, environmental), the new trauma will far exceed our capacity, and send us into a high-alert fight/flight state that we get stuck in. This is exactly what limbic impairment or injury is, and, based on all the latest neuroscience surrounding trauma and trauma recovery, it makes a lot of sense to me that so many with limbic injury have a history of trauma. In other words, most of us did not get here from going along in life with a sense of ease and high capacity for stress, and then just have one toxic exposure or one bad thing happen.

The thing about trauma is that there are so many factors that contribute to how a person is able to release the trauma from the body (nervous system) and recover ease in their lives. There isn’t space here to go into all of those factors, but just know that some people have more stacked against them in their ability to recover from trauma – everything from personality, attachment patterns, level of support in recovery, etc. For some people, they will be able to use “just” retraining and recover. But for other people who have gone for a long time without addressing what may be years of accumulated trauma, we must work to bring the physical body into a sense of safety at the level of the nervous system. Addressing the trauma with body-based modalities that help calm and regulate the nervous system and widen the window of capacity is truly necessary.

So, for those with significant trauma histories who have tried retraining and are running into walls and not getting better, we must understand that even slow, incremental retraining introduces stressors that may, no matter how small, be too much for a system with virtually no capacity. Even the tiniest moves we make to retrain the brain can send signals of danger rather than safety at first. To help this, I strongly suggest addressing trauma stuck in the nervous system through body-based trauma healing modalities. If we approach limbic retraining from the view of nervous system capacity, and the idea that we might have a very tiny window of capacity starting out because of a complicated and complex history of trauma, and we aim to expand that capacity first, AND THEN bit by tiny bit work on retraining, without pushing, this is how healing happens.

There are several elements that we can add that help us go with respect towards our nervous system, working gently with expanding our capacity. This is the goal – calm and regulate the nervous system, and expand capacity for stress, always aiming to send signals of safety to brain and body. Here are just a few of the ways we can do this:

Calming the Nervous system at the beginning of rounds

Bringing in a sense of grounding and ease at the start of your rounds through somatic tracking, emotional tracking, heartmath or other breath practices, and anchoring practices that bring the body on board in the process.

Some free resources to get you started with this:

The Pain PT on Youtube has great videos of somatic and emotional tracking and so many other videos on calming the nervous system. He deals in the realm of chronic pain, but I feel so much of his work applies to any condition because he’s using the principles of neuroplasticity and nervous system regulation together to quiet the fear response: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5pzU-xL78NVCOvZfuaB_HQ  

Using the practice of heartmath: I recommend buying the monitor and using it daily, with rounds. This is hugely helpful in learning to attend to heart rate variability and breath, bringing the whole system into gratitude and ease. More info on their website here: https://www.heartmath.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=branding&utm_content=heartmath&network=g&utm_term=heartmath&gclid=Cj0KCQjwjPaCBhDkARIsAISZN7TKjHLdQv9xwviUbSvXdAnO3X-m0yVWSwUBFojyW2SerMReSNz7eisaAiIBEALw_wcB

Learning to sit and listen to what’s going on inside us as we begin our rounds, and being with whatever arises with kindness

The voices of shame, the inner critic, the perfectionist, the part of us that is impatient and pushes - and working with this first, really listening, and bringing in tons of kindness and self-compassion. We find that it’s not kind to keep pushing ourselves when there are legitimate concerns within that need to be heard. When we push, or rush, or get impatient with ourselves, we are sending our nervous system more cues of danger, keeping those fight or flight defenses locked in, making it impossible to forge new neural pathways. Just pushing through is not the answer here – but starting to attend with kindness and moving more slowly, with compassion and attention to our inner world is important here!

It comes down so much to whether our system feels safe in the world, and safe with us and the choices we are making. Internal Family Systems work is great here, because it lets us know these different parts of us and how they show up in the body and allows us to meet them with kindness. As I understand it, Gupta brings in this concept a bit, and can be much gentler to use with those who have trauma and aren’t getting anywhere. DNRS is wonderful and has helped many people, but for some of us, the very language used (ie. Boot camp) is language that sends cues of danger to very sensitive systems. Language matters a lot. In fact, this is a place to slow down and pay attention to even the tone of our voice. Many of us need a soft, gentle, kinder way of speaking while retraining.

I have taken many hours of training in Internal Family Systems, but am not a certified practitioner. If you’re interested in working with a certified IFS practitioner, I encourage sorting through their list to see who you might click with as each person has a different style: https://ifs-institute.com/practitioners  

For the self-compassion piece I recommend anything by Kristin Neff and she has some free meditations on her website as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUMF5R7DoOA and https://self-compassion.org/

A lot of people also really love Tara Brach, but so far I don’t personally connect with her.

Connection, internal and external

Trauma at its core, is disconnection – from ourselves, our bodies and from others. It takes connection with another safe human to heal trauma, truly. We learn to connect to our true selves and make those internal connections, and if you have a spiritual practice, then this is a good place to bring this in - that understanding that we are held by something greater than ourselve as we do this work. For some people, the sense of internal disconnection is so strong and their patterns of disconnect in the world make it so that they will need someone else to help them learn to stay present to their own thoughts, emotions and sensations. This is another place where professional help is often very useful, working with an attuned practitioner who can help you learn to stay present to your own thoughts and emotions and sensations, guiding you by helping you titrate those experiences, pendulating in and out of them, as you build the resiliency to be able to stay with difficult emotions and sensations in order to address them and bring them into your retraining process, as discussed above. This is especially helpful if dissociation is an issue. Here, it matters not so much the modality used, but that you work with someone who is truly attuned to you, and a trauma recovery coach or truly trauma informed therapist can be wonderful here.

If Chronic Pain is one of your issues

This has been huge for me, so I have lots of wonderful resources here.

The curable app for chronic pain is a great, neuroplasticy, mind/body approach to healing chronic pain: https://www.curablehealth.com/ I recently signed up for a clinicians’ account with them and am able to give anyone a six-week free trial with them. If you’re interested in this, I’d be happy to do this for you – I just have to submit an email address.

The Pain PT – see above

Nichole Sachs Podcast called “The Cure for Chronic Pain”

Tell Me About your Pain Facebook community and podcast by the same name

Every single resource and idea offered here is trauma-informed and based in the principles of neuroplasticity. Since there is such a significant number of retrainers with a history of trauma, I truly hope this information will be helpful in sorting through and finding what will work best for each of you!