Episode 35 Therapist’s Integrative Tools: Neurofeedback and Biofeedback, with Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge

[CHRIS McDONALD]

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Welcome to the Holistic Counseling Podcast, where you discover diverse wellness modalities, advice on growing your integrative practice, and grow confidence in being your unique self. I'm your host, Chris McDonald. I'm so glad you're here for the journey.

Welcome to another episode of the Holistic Counseling Podcast. I'm your host, Chris McDonald. If you're a new listener to this podcast, I want to say welcome. As a listener, you have access to my free nine-part email course, Becoming a Holistic Counselor. In this course, you'll explore different holistic strategies; how to develop your skills as a holistic counselor, how to attract your ideal holistic clients. Go www.holisticcounselingpodcast.com, scroll down, enter your name and email address today.

Back to today's episode. Today's guest is Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge. She's here today to talk about some amazing therapists integrative tools, neurofeedback and biofeedback. She's a mental health trailblazer, founder of The Global Institute of Children’s Mental Health and media personality, who is changing the way we view and treat children's mental health. She is known for brain-based solutions, which I love for struggling kids and her work has helped thousands reverse the most challenging conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, mood, Lyme, PANS/PANDAS, using proven holistic therapies. She's often featured on dozens of media outlets. Welcome to the Holistic Counseling Podcast, Roseann.

[DR. ROSEANN CAPANNA-HODGE]

I am so excited for this conversation and me too. I love that you have a whole podcast about what I've been doing for 30 years, which is holistic therapy.

[CHRIS]

We need more of this, don't we?

[DR. ROSEANN]

We do need more of this. We do, and we need to help with the acceptance that science backed solutions can be holistic.

[CHRIS]

Amen to that.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Amen. And they can create powerful change for our clients and we ---

[CHRIS]

And you've seen it and I know I've seen it as well. Yes, it's out there.

[DR. ROSEANN]

I mean, I see it every day, Chris.

[CHRIS]

It's fabulous, isn't it? Can you share more about yourself and your work?

[DR. ROSEANN]

So this is actually my 30th year in mental health. It's so awesome. It's like I look back and I feel like a minute past. I've worked in all kinds of place, psychiatric hospitals, agency schools, and private practice for a long time. And I was always holistic. I'm the daughter of Italian immigrant, so food was always viewed as medicine and just like every other therapist I'm traditionally trained and in my doctoral program, we really specialized in kids with learning issues and neurodevelopmental disorders. And I think when you are working with kids that are born with challenges, you just start to realize that not everything fits in the box, that talk therapy and meds didn't always work.

So my program was very open. They didn't necessarily present it but when I wrote in my doctoral program, like natural ways to help ADHD, I think was my big paper that I did, which later became the sort of the basis of my dissertation, my professors didn't say, what do you mean, you're writing a whole section on neurofeedback, which wasn't in my dissertation because it was too complex to do that research. I'm just too logical and I didn't want to be one of those people that took seven years to get their dissertation. So I did in-home counseling parent therapy, which I loved and was also very powerful and just along the journey, Chris, I had cases that were treatment failures and complex. Nobody wanted work with these kids and I just am the kind of person that's like, there is a solution and I'm going to find it. Determined and I had parents that were so willing to do the work.

When you have a family that is like, literally not only saying they'll do anything, but will actually do follow through, I was like, they want to partner with me. I've got to step up. So many years ago I just went to Microfiche and really just started to look at like, what's the science behind supplement? What is working for this specific condition? What does the research say? And I just led a very much a counseling therapy school, psychology, I also, and the certified school psych, everything I did, I went to the research first and that really informed how I treated people.

And I quickly realized there's a whole world out there in these holistic therapies that can be really helpful. Everything from when you think a supplements like essential fatty acids, well, about 35% to kids with ADHD have a deficit in essential fatty acids. That can make a dramatic impact on their brain functioning when they get essential fatty acids. I mean, how can we deny that? So a third of kids could benefit significantly. Another third do have benefits. Only one third has minimal benefits and it's going to help you with other things. So why aren't we educating therapists about options that really create change, that have no negative side effects for kids.

[CHRIS]

I love how you really went into it with a research base too. It wasn't just like, you're just pulling this out of the air. It's, you're really trying to dig in there and find what could work.

[DR. ROSEANN]

I'm definitely a high fact finder. And I think too, when I realized since I truly have been doing this so long that I have always faced pushback from both peers and clients who are like, well, how did you learn this? What is this? I knew that not only did I have to explain it, but we should have science around what we're doing, even if it's an emerging field. And there's not a lot of research. What does that research say? And if it does no harm and it's something that could potentially be helpful and we educate our clients, for example, I work a lot with people with OCD. So a lot of people want to come to me about supplements.

And please, now I have, in my state, if you're trained in X, Y, and Z, you can utilize that therapy. So I have special certifications or I have certifications in supplements, different natural methods, including neurofeedback. I have a brain health coach certification and I have an integrative medicine certification. So I do have the learning behind it to be able to talk about out these things with our clients. And in our field, people get very upset, Chris, like, should you be talking about essential oils? Should you be talking about diet? You can educate yourself and whether you're just doing psychoeducation, which is the majority of what I do, is people will come to me and say, "Hey Roseann, what do you think about out essential oil for anxiety?" I'm like, "Okay, here's what the research says." And why not have conversations? Why not open the door? Why do we have to say, oh no, let's poo that. Essential oils have been around for centuries.

[CHRIS]

Exactly. I know we were talking about this before we hit record too, but it's almost like the stigma of some of these holistic strategies out there.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Absolutely. And people get shamed. There's a local psychiatrist that will tell his client if they do neurofeedback with me, he will stop treating them.

[CHRIS]

No, really?

[DR. ROSEANN]

Oh yes. He's been doing that forever. And I've had it be like why? They're like, well, I just, I'm not going to do that. You're not going to do that and meds and they're like, but they're not, there's no contraindication between the two of them in certain medications. Why wouldn't you encourage me to do that? That's what happens. This is the world where we live in where ---

[CHRIS]

Yes, and I think you and I were talking, we're both just open minded to different things. Sometimes you got to pull from a lot of different areas to really effectively treat someone.

[DR. ROSEANN]

It's such a great point, Chris, especially when, today people often ask me like, what have I seen in 30 years? What are the changes? I really specialize in young adults, teens and kids. Not that I don't work with adults, but my passion is kids and their families. So many trends that I have seen, but one of the biggest trends is just that most of the time when I get to work with a fee family or a child or a teen, their issue is very layered. We don't seem to see like, oh, he's just got intent of ADHD. He's got intent of ADHD. He's got a history of belly aches. He has potentially OCD.

There's all these complexities because of what is happening around us in the world from stress, just being a daily part of our life. Obviously we're in the middle of a pandemic and there's a whole layer in that. We have really intense academics with little play. We have poor food quality. We have psychiatric medications being handed out like candy to kids and adults. So there's just a lot of things that are making kids be imbalanced, like really having a hard time moving from maybe developmental lags or stressors to not just one clinical issue, but multiple.

[CHRIS]

Yes, and I think with the pandemic too, that's again another layer, isn't it? And I think if you have all these layers, wouldn't it make sense to have treatment that is multilayered and realistic?

[DR. ROSEANN]

Exactly. We are a culture. We think a pill's going to fix it and that's not how it works. So the science behind, the neuroscience behind changing behavior is to regulate the nervous system first, then come in with new learning. So when we try to separate those, oh, you only need to do meds, oh, you only need to do counseling and the person is in like full limbic activation, well, the brain is designed to not process language or you're not allowed to take action the same way. So then why do we try to do talk therapy? That's not how the brain works.

[CHRIS]

Exactly. Yes, I know that that's the truth with, I think a lot of people don't understand that.

[DR. ROSEANN]

I don't think so. I think you're a hundred percent. I'm not sure how much neuroscience education we get. We definitely get a course in pharmacology, but we don't really get, so much of the training I've done and continue to do, I have a team of therapists at work in our center. We work with people in-person and virtually as well. So much of the training that I do is about the power of psychoeducation and psychoeducation isn't a one time. This is your intake. Let me explain what EDD is, or OCD or PANS/PANDAS. You know, these are kind of things we deal with every day. It's literally every session.

It's, okay, do you remember how we talked about how you're in a negative reinforcement loop and how the brain formed a habit and what happens to your nervous system? Not that you're making this choice, but when we understand how the nervous system is stress activated, hyperactivated what happens to decision making? What happens to motivation? And it really is quite empowering for people to understand, well, there's a part in your brain. These systems are not working. Your nervous system is part of that too. So what can we do to get it online? And the great news is the best ways to get your nervous system online are all holistic and science fact.

So there's so many cool things you can do without a psyched med that actually can get you to optimize your brain, get you back online, to be calmer, whatever is going on with you to help it get you back to where you were and if not, maybe even better.

[CHRIS]

So true. Can you talk about the differences between biofeedback and neurofeedback?

[DR. ROSEANN]

Sure. They're often used interchangeably, but they are different therapies. So biofeedback is through conscious control learning how to regulate what we call our autonomic nervous system and neurofeedback is subconscious control. We'll go into that in a bit, but biofeedback, you are using your brain to think about regulating your breath, your heart rate, your muscle functioning, your skin temperature. And when you do that, what's the outcome? So when we do things like, for example, sync our breath with our heart rate, which is called heart rate variability training, and a very, very popular device called HeartMath. It's one of those tools that I wish every therapist used and started with this in their journey to add technology that helps to regulate that autonomic nervous system.

And what is the autonomic nervous system? It's our, it's the stress manager of the whole body. So anytime you were confronted with a real or imagined or perceived, as I like to say, it sounds less judgey, there isn't a real or perceived stressor? Your autonomic nervous system kicks in and says, okay, this is a stressor. This isn't a stressor. What do I do? And it kicks off like a cascade of hormones that regulate how you respond to stress, which is AKA cortisol. And when you have a great autonomic nervous system, your nervous system, if you can imagine being a straight line and at the bottom is the base, and that's a relaxed state, that's what we call the parasympathetic state. I call it the hot tub state.

When you're super relaxed, you feel like you've been in a hot tub and when you have a stressor, so for example, you sit down for a therapy session and your therapist brings up your dying mother, a real big stressor. Your autonomic nervous system goes from a relaxed state to a sympathetic dominant state. That's the stress state. And hopefully in that session, and a lot of times people are very activated for a bulk of a therapy session. You're doing work, but you also should be learning tools in that session to regulate, create a window of tolerance where you have a level of comfort, but you also can recognize discomfort and have tools to get through it. So your nervous system goes up and then if it's healthy, it goes back down.

The problem with today, Chris is that most people are living in this super sympathetic high stress state. And biofeedback is an amazing tool because it's not expensive and through the use of technology, you learn to regulate your nervous system and keep it down, as I like to say, lubricated, and sort of this parasympathetic, okay, I'm in a calm state and if a stressor happens, I activate, I go back down, I activate and I go back down. But when people have like trauma or, and trauma is so broad now, as you're well aware, but, or they have anxiety or they have OCD, they really start to just be in this hyper state, hyper state, hyper state. And everything from that cortisol that's used in the body to how you perceive stress, how you react to things like benign things, everything starts becoming super activated, and it becomes tough to get out of that loop.

More importantly, when you hit maximum capacity, which is very easy to do, you're going to go into a fight or freeze. People often think you have to have a trauma to go into that. We're just seeing this all the time now with people with anxiety or OCD or depression, and you get in there. So biofeedback is a technology that helps to regulate that nervous system. And you need to be conscious about it. You need to use it right, otherwise it's not going to work. It's super safe and you can use it with very young kids and you can use it to the elderly. I loved to use it back in the day. I would use it before a therapy session with a client. I'd have them sit and use it for five minutes before they went in.

Some of my clients I had them use it right in the session and also to regulate how they were when they were activating, what did they do to keep them regulated? It's a great way to have observable data where they can track their sensations to get them down into a more tolerable range and have control. Then neurofeedback, and all of these things have 10 of thousands of research studies, biofeedback and neurofeedback tens. Neurofeedback has 3000 peer reviewed studies and is 50 years old. Biofeedback is more than 80 years old.

[CHRIS]

Okay. I had no idea it was around that long.

[DR. ROSEANN]

People will be like, this is a modern new therapy and I'm like, no, it's not. It's 50 years old. Actually neuro feedback's over 50 years old. So neurofeedback is using technology at the subconscious level. I'm going to explain it and then I'm going to give you an example of how it works, because it's still always like a thing. But the technology is subconsciously regulating your nervous system. You don't have to think about it. It does it for you and outcome is always, you're going to be more focused, you're going to be calmer and you're going to process faster.

It doesn't matter what your condition is. It doesn't matter where I'm placing you. That's what's going to happen. It's pretty freaking awesome and it's used for everything from like peak performance. So the astronauts are all mandated to use it before they go to space. Every major athlete uses it. The Olympians use it. They do a lot of biofeedback to the Olympians because they use it for muscle control to get at their speed of certain particular muscle. They might gain like, a swimmer might gain half a second by learning how to move their muscle differently outside of the water. So pretty cool.

So biofeedback, you're hooked to a computer, I'm sorry, neuro feedback. You're hooked to a computer and you're going to get feedback every time your brain produces a healthy combination of brainwaves. And your subconscious brain, literally from the moment you get hooked up in two to three seconds of getting reinforcement, which we use movies or shows they won't play your subconscious brain will be like, oh, if I pushed this brainwave and I increase this brainwave, I get this Indiana Jones movie to play and instantaneously starts producing that healthy combination of brainwave.

It's definitely something that takes time. Most people are doing two or three sessions a week. They're about 30 minutes. And most people are doing 40 or more sessions. Almost nobody can do less than 20 sessions because the homeostasis, the brain wants to be at an unhealthy set point and unless you're really young, you always have neuroplasticity but beyond age eight, the brain is less flexible. There's definitely things we can do to increase neuroplasticity, but most people are coming to near stress, something's going on. So you're using technology to get reinforced, to produce a healthy combination of brainwaves and it learns to change how the brain is working. You literally rewire the brain and the changes are lasting. The research shows as far as 10 years out, not only are the changes lasting, but the brain actually continues to get better the further you go out.

[CHRIS]

Wow, that's fascinating.

[DR. ROSEANN]

So fascinating. And I've worked with people. I was an approved provider at Sandy Hook. I did a lot of work at 9/11 survivors. I always feel like when I could work the most distressed people and these tools work, then it can work when your child is stuck because they lost their dog or they were bullied or whatever is going on. Whatever is happened that people are so stuck these tools go at that. It takes the bottoms up approach instead of the top down and it's really pulling it out of the body so that the nervous system can reset so that you can actually do the behavioral work in psychotherapy.

[CHRIS]

So cool.

[DR. ROSEANN]

So cool. I love it. And I feel sad that people often are seeing, if I get people that only saw four or five providers, they get to me, I feel like, oh, they, they just got here, but it's not unusual for people to have seen 20 or more providers before they get to me. And we're talking young adults and teens and kids.

[CHRIS]

Yes, that's so sad. I hate it when I see or hear people suffering for so long.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Oh, I feel so sad, so sad for the amount of suffering and especially because more than half of my population has infectious disease, induced mental health issues and their infectious disease, like could now be include COVID, tick born illness, strep, other things and they're just so missed. And their nervous system gets so activated by the infectious disease, which could have been treated. So we do a disservice by letting people suffer so long.

[CHRIS]

Well, I had a question about the biofeedback. I know you mentioned using it in session. I had heard about a little bit about it. I don't know that much about it, but I wondered if do you use it like for any interventions to see how they're doing after an intervention too, that they can check in with their heart rate and their breathing?

[DR. ROSEANN]

100%. So I'm a trained evaluator. I spent all this time doing psychoed and neuropsych testing for 20 something years too, and I love data. We do pre and post QEEG brain maps or brain checks if people are remote, because I work remotely with people all over the world actually doing neurofeedback and I send them the equipment. So I also do like root scales. So what I really like for people to do is chart their behaviors and if you really want to simplify it, I make everybody do a 30-day challenge. I'm like, I teach them about suds, so your subjective units of distress. Most of the time I do a zero to five. Sometimes I do zero to 10, but I find zero to five is good and it gives people less choices, which when you're a overwhelmed, we want to lower the choices.

I just say, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do biofeedback or things that I know they can do outside on their own, breathwork, meditation. And I set a minimum amount they have to do, I teach them how to do it. I reinforce, but I make them chart zero to five for 30 days. And I've never had somebody who couldn't get off of five or 10 the highest. I also set the expectation that you're not getting to zero. And in this culture we think everything is yesterday that like is going to happen yesterday. They think if they're not a zero, they're a failure. So I'm like, you're going to go where you're going to go, but you're a hundred percent going to reduce. So let's focus on reduction. So teaching people how to do that now in a session, it's a great way to measure, you're seeing your heart rate in HeartMath rate.

You're able to say I did this. Sometimes we even do it for exposure therapy with OCD, which is a big part of our practice where in exposure, what happens is the anticipatory anxiety right before an exposure is the highest point of stress and then when we have an exposure, their anxiety shoots down below baseline. So to be able to see that by being hooked up with a device like HeartMath is pretty incredible and gives people that visual that they need because so many of our people crest, they're so caught up in there, we always talk about feelings in therapy. I'm not saying it's not important, but my people are stuck with sensations and struggling with at the sensation level and the thought level. They get these looping thoughts. So these tools can really help us get out of our thoughts and help us have better regulatory control of the body sensations, which are running the show.

[CHRIS]

Yes they are and in the clients I see as well because I was just thinking about with yoga too, that I teach that biofeedback could be really helpful for people to be able to see the comparison.

[DR. ROSEANN]

The beautiful compliment. And what I love about yoga is so many of our people who are really super activated, whether it's trauma or OCD or have panic disorder, those seem to be the ones that I think of, wow, they're just so activated. Or they're so depressed they don't want to get into their breath. People will get into their body and the breath will follow

[CHRIS]

So true. I've seen that as well.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Yes, and kids always are open. I mean, we rarely have a kid that says no, but there's so many routes that they'll do and movement just gets them. You know, there's just so much we know to research on how much movement unlocks our thinking or our patterns of behaviors that don't serve us.

[CHRIS]

I know because I've seen some really tremendous results from just using simple movements and gentle yoga. Now all I do is gentle yoga anyways, but it's just powerful. Until you actually witness that, it's like, you don't know it's such an amazing modality to use.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Amazing. And we do so much work with people with infectious disease like Lyme and also kids that have PANS and PANDAS. And people's lives can be so shut down. And we've done things, we used to have a yoga certified clinician and now we bring in outside yoga people and we'll make little protocols for them like seated yoga protocols, which is just a powerful, powerful tool. I don't think we think about that. We think our client is stuck and they're like, well, she's got to go inpatient. No she's to go to a psychiatrist. Well it's like, wait a second. Let's back it up. What's stuck and how can we unwind that?

I'm super grateful that I have this great toolkit of things that we can do. And listen, as a therapist, learning neurofeedback is incredibly hard. You have to make a two-year commitment and it takes two years just to get out of basic. I mean, I've had physicians tell me it was harder to learn neurofeedback than get through med school. And I was like, my goodness, thank you for validating that. But tools like biofeedback, and also there are easier forms of neuro feedback or making clients to learn yoga or EFT tapping or EMDR, these are tools that get a person to reconnect to their body, to root. They need an anchor and if we don't anchor that boat, everything you try to do is not going to stick.

[CHRIS]

That's true. That's why they go from therapist to therapist and medication.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Absolutely.

[CHRIS]

So what kind of training would you need for biofeedback?

[DR. ROSEANN]

First of fall, there's lots of courses. Even HeartMath. You can go onto their website and you can sign up and they have a great certification course. If you sign up for their list, they often offer it at a discount, especially like Black Friday. You can do that, Google HeartMath training courses. I would definitely recommend it. You want to understand this science behind it, because again, the power of psychoeducation, I get really treatment-compliant families and kids, because I'm always explaining. And I have to always explain, because these people have gone to see at a minimum five other people and they don't understand how things work and they're afraid.

They're so out of hope. They're afraid the next thing isn't going to work. So psychoeducation is a great way to help people be more committed. And I just think everything neuroscience is so common sense. I'm always like really just such a common sense person. Whenever one always says to me, how come nobody ever explained this to me? I'm like, I'm sorry that your other people didn't explain it to you. I'm like, I think they just make an assumption that people walking know. They don't know.

[CHRIS]

Yes. That's why you have to go in thinking that people don't know anything.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Yes. I mean other therapists are like, I'm blown away by these things. So biofeedback is really easy. HeartMath is one. I mean you can do things like, you can go on to Amazon and look up temperature dots, and you can have, this is my first biofeedback, is I would have a kid or adult, whatever, put a dot on their hand and we would practice warming their hand. If you have people concentrate on warming that one part of their body, it puts your, your brain goes into an alpha state. Alpha is like a super happy feel, good brainwave and your body will heat up. So it was a great way to say I'm learning how to feel good. I'm learning how to bring myself into an alpha state. So there's lots of little tips, tools and tricks. You can go to one of the national organizations.

Like I am part of ISNR, AAPB and then I'm part of a regional, which is a Northeast region, biofeedback society. I selfishly think we have the best conferences. We've had [inaudible 00:30:45] has been there multiple times. We're getting some other people. So there's lots of ways to get training and you just have to know where to go. So I'll always go to the top and then try to find out. Then biofeedback is a whole other beast and you would go to the international certifying board to look at what it is. It's bci.org and you definitely would want to get certified. Then you'd find providers. Like I found a provider who was like an hour away and I went and did a five-day training. There's a whole process, just like anything else, whether you're getting certified in anything. Then it's a matter of buying the equipment, having volunteers or low cost people to work on and you have to have a mentor.

This is not, biofeedback is not anything, biofeedback is so easy. You can add it with one class training. Honestly, neurofeedback you'll never want to do on your own. I remember I first started, I got so inundated people were calling me and saying, "I heard you're going to add neurofeedback." I was like, "How did you hear?" They're like, "Oh, Janet Smith told me." And I had to have a mentor twice a week. I didn't know what to do with, of course we're all healers and we want to help people and at that point, the bulk of kids that I had were either on the autistic spectrum or ADHD or had a learning disability. That was my area at that time.

It's a matter of finding a mentor, getting training. It's a long-term commitment and that's EEG neurofeedback. So a lot of neuroscience, understanding this area does this. So when you train here, what's going to happen? You have a person who is this, this and this. Where do I train first? So there's an art and a science behind it and the art really only develops through experience. It's like any other thing. You don't just jump into being a therapist. You got to like get a lot of experience.

[CHRIS]

So the biofeedback, so is that expensive to get trainings or is that about ---

[DR. ROSEANN]

No, it's pretty reasonable. You can have much less expensive trainings that let's say maybe are like a couple hundred dollars. And I want to say HeartMath, I feel like when they do their big sales on their certification, which people love, and I've even had some of my clinical staff to get the certification, don't quote me on that, but I think it's under $600 when it's on sale. I feel like it's over a thousand dollars when it's not. It's very comprehensive. You're going to have, not just how to do it. You're going to have all the science and the tools to go ahead with it. Device itself is super inexpensive. It's like $159.

[CHRIS]

I was thinking yoga training because yes, that's very expensive.

[DR. ROSEANN]

So expensive.

[CHRIS]

I think it prohibits a lot of people, doesn't it, though, that don't want to spend $3,000 to $4,000 for a training

[DR. ROSEANN]

Yes. Neurofeedback is absolutely a $10,000 to $15,000 commitment.

[CHRIS]

Yes. That's more expensive

[DR. ROSEANN]

Because of the equipment, because of the training, because of the mentoring. And I don't want to dissuade people, but I want to be honest. So when I did it two years, I didn't study anything else. I was crazy for it. And I'm glad, and now I know it, like, it's like a instantaneous download and I do those brain maps, which absolutely tell me exactly what's going on, like, is this really a D-Day? Yes or no? Just like a brain that has Lyme, yes or no. That's just because I've done thousands of brain laps.

[CHRIS]

That's fascinating too.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Fascinating. I'm going to tell you that 50% of the time people come to me say that my kid or teen has ADHD, it's not. It's typically anxiety, OCD, or a learning disability. Those would be my biggest ones that it could be. It's not ADD.

[CHRIS]

Wow. Because so I know so many of the ADHD symptoms can parallel other things. So that's incredible that you have that tool to be able to identify.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Yes. And really the FDA lets you use just, not even a full brain map, a statistical average between two areas of the brain that show us the fast wave versus the slow wave. And people with ADHD have too many slow waves and not enough fast waves. So they let you use that as a diagnosis.

[CHRIS]

Wow. I never heard that.

[DR. ROSEANN]

I mean, it's like, I would never just use that, but the brain map is part of a clinical intake. I mean, it's amazing. You can see birth trauma. Most adult males, I get have a history of a head injury I recently had, and these kind of things happen all the time, so I'm not sharing any private information, but I recently had somebody that like their whole life, they thought they were ADD and had tried all these medications and therapies and as soon as I looked at his brain map, I said, you were a birth trauma. They like, yes. And I was like, you're not ADD. You're birth trauma. It's a very, there's no pill for that. Neuro feedback works for that. So they were able to do neurofeedback and get back on track and get transformative.

[CHRIS]

Are there certain issues that neuro feedback is better for.

[DR. ROSEANN]

I look at every clinical condition as a dis-regulation of the nervous system. We are very much indoctrinated by pharma that everything is neurotransmitter. And the further I get out in my 30 years, the less, I see genetics and neurotransmitter as the top of the heap. It's moved to the bottom and I'm seeing stress activated nervous systems and I'm seeing inflammation. And you can see brain inflammation very easily in a brain map. So that dysregulation, neurofeedback is a master at regulating the nervous system. So when you say, is there a clinical condition that it doesn't do well for, or ones that are better, I mean honestly, the more complex the case, the better it works because they're so dysregulated.

Think about trauma. Trauma people are stuck in activation and everything is a trigger for them, like constant activation all day long, a sound, a smell, auditorial, visual replays. So they never get a break. And the neurofeedback walks them down into this regulated state so that their limb system, their frontal lobes aren't so hijacked and they can actually think, do work, put the trauma in its and not let trauma run the show. It's a very powerful tool for very complex, layered things. You know what I mean? To say that it, does it work a hundred percent of the time, I mean, with ADHD, the research is that for the most common symptoms related to issues with ADHD, inattention, distractibility and impulsivity, that it has about a 91% success rate.

And I would say that it is a highly efficacious therapy in regulating the nervous system. But if you had somebody who was anxious and acting avoiding situations, or necessarily harsh to themselves in their internal workings, which is a common thing and they regulated their nervous system, but they didn't change those behaviors, they're not going to feel the same kind of outcomes. You've got to rewire the learning too. You can't just keep doing the same thing. It's like somebody who says I lost weight by doing X, Y, and Z so now I can eat Cheetos again.

[CHRIS]

Yes. So true. Oh my gosh, yes. So what's a takeaway you could share today that could help listeners who might be just starting their holistic journey?

[DR. ROSEANN]

You know what I would say? I would say, get excited. This stuff is very effective. I know my book, It's Gonna be OK, I have 40 pages of research citations to show how efficacious these tools are. Start with one place and go deep and really start to integrate in your practice. I do a lot of things and I know you do too, Chris, but it took time. So if you're going to do breathwork man, really bring it and have your clients chart it, have them require it. I don't use the word homework, the practice, when they're not there, and really support them in that. Don't just do one drop in. Really have that consistency. I think we, as therapists, we've become, as this world is so distressed in a way I've never seen it, we have everybody clinging to us and we just have to keep reinforcing that there's so much they can do and we have to help them by teaching them about how to regulate their nervous system. And these holistic therapies are very powerful tools for that.

[CHRIS]

So empowering, isn't it?

[DR. ROSEANN]

Absolutely.

[CHRIS]

So what's the best way for listeners to find you and learn more about you?

[DR. ROSEANN]

Well, I'm Dr. Roseann everywhere. So you can find me at drroseann.com. I'm on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, all as Dr. Roseann.

[CHRIS]

You're all over social media, aren't you?

[DR. ROSEANN]

I'm all over social media. I do like TikTok. It's a lot of fun.

[CHRIS]

Oh, cool. That's awesome. And I'm sure that reaches the younger crowd too.

[DR. ROSEANN]

They are. There's a lot of, it's not just for little kids anymore.

[CHRIS]

That's funny. Well, thank you so much. I can can't believe our time is up. This has been great.

[DR. ROSEANN]

Thank you for this conversation. And hopefully more people they're all here listening because they are, their minds are opening to other ways to help their clients. And it's just a pretty cool thing. So I wish that every therapist would go down this road and stay down this road because it leads to a lot of change for their clients.

[CHRIS]

Yes, for sure. And thank you so much to my listeners who've already subscribed, rated, and reviewed. If you haven't done that yet, please do so to support the show. This is Chris McDonald, sending each one of you much light and love. Until next time, take care.

If you're loving in the show, will you rate and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform? We just started this and that helps other people find this show. Also, if you're feeling uncertain about your modalities and you want to build your confidence to be your unique self, I want you to join my free email course, Becoming a Holistic Counselor over at holisticcounselingpodcast.com.

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This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.