A free Behind the Scenes post on a beacon of hope for the memoir writer struggling with trauma and how a thirty-week healing modality could change your life
Hi and welcome into Flight School:
If you are a memoir writer, you are likely writing about trauma (as I have been doing most of my adult life) and may have noticed writing seems to trigger you. You might feel cold. Go into subtle shock. Struggle with anxiety or depression. You might drink. Or rage. Or clam up and retreat. And though your writing does all or some of this, you press on and eventually write more and still more. You must, you tell yourself. You are a writer. It’s what you do. You might even believe that with each revision, you are moving closer to the healing you trust is out there just beyond the page.
Until this year, I wrote, was triggered, wrote again, and believed I was healing myself. I think I’ve even written a version of that belief in earlier posts right here at Flight School.
I was right but I was also wrong.
Let me explain…
Mid-July, 2023
It starts with fingers parting the hair over the top of my head followed by a firm press on the scalp. One diode-thingy is fixed into place. Four more to go. All on the right side of my head.
Full of hope and faith, I sit in a leather lounger, direct from Dania, I think. Very Scandinavian. The office is little more than a cube of space, walls and ceiling painted a brilliant white. A window to one side, a desk to another, a couple of upright chairs behind me and before me, a broad TV screen affixed to the wall. There’s art hung, too but nothing remarkable. A huge canvas of the tide washing upon a beach of rocks.
She, the woman parting and pressing these sensors, or electrodes, is a neurofeedback specialist—a trim, fit, quiet woman with fair hair done in the stylish way of the day, just above the shoulder and waved to frame her narrow face. Well educated, well trained, well reviewed by others, she is one of those calming types who smiles easily and seems at peace.
“There we go,” she says, fixing the last one in place. She skirts around the room and eases to sit at the desk. Before her, an open laptop.
“What were we watching last time?” she asks.
“Sea kayaking,” I say, “in Ireland.”
“Right,” she says.
A few taps on the keyboard and the video flicks on the screen of the rolling sea and two brave travelers who paddle through a blinding storm.
It’s time to begin.
Mid-May, 2023
Quarter-sized holes dot the topsoil of my raised bed garden where I grow collards, kale, lettuce, cabbage, brussel sprouts, tomatoes, marigolds, zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, potatoes. All these plants wither and blanch under what is a vole assault.
All those weeks of seed starting, heating pads, bright indoor lights set on sixteen hour increments, rotating the starts outside to harden them off, and now this unseen and unstoppable enemy that burrows from below.
In the scheme of things, this is not a major problem. A grocery store is a few miles away. I will not starve. Yet, I cannot sleep, cannot stop clicking around on my phone for remedies, cannot stop talking about voles with anyone who comes near (poor souls). You’d think one of my children was dying the way I go on but that’s how it goes. I fix on small, inconsequential things and like a poorly bred, slightly crazed dog clamp my jaws on crisis and will not let go until it is resolved.
Perseverant, people call me, a survivor. Tireless, others say, but to me it’s a form of mania that burns like a wildfire and results in sleeplessness, worry, fear, my chest weighted down, and light headedness. I’m so stressed, I only sip oxygen and my shoulders live near my ears.
I talk to my dream-based therapist of eleven years and hear her reminders of my oh-so-traumatic childhood that I know all about front to back, top to bottom (hello! I’ve written five books about my life) but knowing these facts do not stop the reaction.
I meditate, which I’ve done for sixteen years, and still thoughts of what to do about the voles skid along the surface of my consciousness like air hockey discs.
A two hour walk on a vast and open beach brings a brief respite and another two hours of knitting paired with a glass of wine helps, too, but I still wake up several times in the middle of the night, thinking, always thinking: Poison? Traps? Vibrating machines?
The final solution is steel mesh. I order yards and yards of the stuff and get to work repotting all the starts, then shovel out all the soil. I put in hours and hours at this task, will not stop though my body begs for rest. To distract myself, I listen to a book far too traumatic to sit and read. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
Several times, especially around sections that detail PTSD responses and sufferings as a result of sexual abuse, I stop digging, pause the narration, hold to one of the poles of the enclosed garden and hang my head. I know these stories of self-loathing and hopeless helplessness.
Eventually, I dig wadded tissues out of my pocket, swab my face, hit play, and get back to digging.
There are eight yards of dirt in these beds and soon, with a mountain of soil in the middle of the garden, I cut sheets of 1/4 inch wired mesh with metal sheers, fit each sheet them into the base of each bed and hammer in tacks every six inches.
That’ll show you, I think about my foes, the voles.
Early June, 2023
A week later, I re-shovel all the soil into the now lined beds and have simultaneously arrived at the second to the last chapter of van der Kolk’s book: Applied Neuroscience: Rewiring the Fear-Driven Mind.
I don’t want to be one of those people who identify as “hurt” or “wounded.” I will not be someone who leads with a diagnosis but listening to this chapter, I stop once more and admit to earth and sky that this is my chapter:
Attachment disorder (adopted and not held by my birth mother and left in a back room to cry for my first year).
Early childhood abuse (adoptive father who put me in cold showers starting at age three for discipline purposes).
Sexually abused (raped at eight by a camp counselor and sexually violated again at eleven by the boyfriend of a cousin).
Hyper vigilance.
Tendency to isolate.
Explosive moments of anger that lead to overwhelming guilt and more isolation.
Me. Me. That’s me.
The cure has apparently been available for fifty years. It’s called neurofeedback.
Twenty sessions of neurofeedback resulted in a 40 percent decrease in PTSD symptoms in a group of participants with chronic histories of trauma who had not significantly responded to talking or drug therapies. Most intriguing was the marked effect of neurofeedback on executive functioning, the capacity to plan activities, to move easily between one task and another, and to feel in control of ones emotions, about a 60 percent increase.
~ Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
"In my opinion, if any medication had demonstrated such a wide spectrum of efficacy it would be universally accepted and widely used. It [neurofeedback] is a field to be taken seriously by all."
~ Frank H. Duffy, MD
The Body Keeps the Score was published in 2015 and eight years later neurofeedback is still no part of the mainstream conversation. My own talk-based therapist, well-educated and up on the latest modalities of healing—including experimental ones—didn’t know about it. For some reason, though it works, it’s waved off as fringe.
I don’t care.
I’ll take the risk and do pretty much anything to end this hell.
Praise the voles.
Praise this book by van der Kolk that I finally pulled off the shelf
Praise audio books and listening to them while performing manual labor.
And praise that I have savings enough to pay the fee because Blue Cross immediately rejects my request for coverage, though they will happily pay for any pills I might need.
No thanks.
With the garden flourishing, I spend the rest of my summer and most of fall driving two hours into the city for two appointments a week. Thirty times I sit in that leather chair and the reserved and kind woman generates a low frequency signal that she adjusts based on feedback I give her about sensations and thoughts, until she gets the setting just right (for me). For about twenty minutes, I watch sea kayaking videos while the screen sometimes goes wide and sometimes shrinks.
What’s happening (according to this woman) is this: “…the brain is observing its own activity at very specific frequencies. The neurons near the electrode sites get stimulated through the observation.” She positions the sensors on the right side of my head because “…childhood trauma largely impacts and stunts the development of right brain areas. [The right side of the brain] hones our internal sense of safety, bonding and connection when we experience these very things throughout the critical infancy and childhood developmental years. The sense of safety as a child gets wired into the foundation of the neural networks. Without safety the brain is anxious, panicked, vigilant. [The sensors] stimulates the areas that didn’t learn to calm. It’s like waking up the neurons that fell asleep, and flexing the muscle until it’s much stronger.”
About ten sessions in, she progressively adds two other configurations for calming fight and flight responses and for deep relaxation.
The results are stunning. I am calm. I am quiet. I sleep deeply without waking up. I am reasonable. I am thoughtful. I delegate. I make friends (me, who used to have about three people she trusted). No more outbursts of fury. No more obsessing about little (or big) things. I’m patient. I start going back to Church and forgive the Church, and religion, for many of the abuses I once experienced at the hands of its leaders and followers to include my adoptive father who was Catholic when he tortured me as a little girl. I pray for that father. I pray for strangers. I make spontaneous plans. I travel. I have a life, at last, that isn’t defined by fear, worry, anxiety.
Late Oct, 2023:
It’s my last appointment with the woman whose name is Noël. Like Christmas. Like new life. Like re-birth.
I want to bear hug Noël, lift her off her feet, and turn her in circles saying thank you thank you thank you, but she is, after all, a reserved person and we don’t know each other that well. Instead, I pass over an expansive bouquet of roses and lilies wrapped in heavy market paper.
“Oh! That’s so nice,” she says, accepting the flowers gracefully and lowering her face into them as any respectable flower lover will do.
Tears of gratitude fill my eyes but I tick them away quickly. No need to make a scene.
Noël eases the bouquet to a shelf behind her desk and motions me to the chair where I sit, tugging the rubber band from my ponytail. Ever on task and with those deft fingers, she parts my hair and asks how my week went.
“I’m going to tell everyone I know,” I say. “My son, who’s suffered, too, and my students and anyone who will listen.”
“That’s how it goes,” Noël says, “people cannot believe it’s so effective.”
She’s right. I cannot believe it but it’s true. I rewired my garden and then re-wired my brain.
All is well. At last.
Thank you for reading this and I hope and pray it will be helpful to you and those you share it with.
~ Jennifer, 💐
PS: Thank you also to Noël for helping me write this post and I hope it convey’s the sincerity of my experience.
If you search for this kind of treatment for yourself, I urge you to do your research and vet the specialist you find, carefully. You can also reach out to Noël and she will help you find a provider. There’s also van der Kolk’s site with more information here.
Wow. I tried to get my HMO to pay for neurofeedback for my PTSD, but they wouldn’t, and then I gave up. Writing my current book is a long, ongoing trigger. Maybe I’ll look into paying out-of-pocket once I’m in a more financially secure place. Thank you.
Excellent post, Jennifer!