My Life in Brain Injuries

          It took me years to self-identify as a head injured person. Heaven knows I had had plenty of injuries – some that rendered me unconscious for extended periods – but the message I received when family and caregivers were involved (most of my injuries were untreated at the time they occurred) was simply that these things happen. You get over it and move on. I never connected the injuries with the myriad problems I developed through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.

It took decades for researchers to learn that brain injuries are a process, not discrete events.

          I hold a master’s degree in Behavioral Medicine and I am a board-certified neurofeedback provider.  When I took my initial training in neurotherapy, the repeated caveat was to not to do neurofeedback with anyone who had a history of head injury. The caveat came from a fear of the unknown – how will an “injured” brain respond to biofeedback? Our trainers did not know, hence their advice to avoid the possibility of unforeseen problems.

          The caution was almost impossible to follow for the simple reason that most people do not consider themselves “brain injured”. People seek out my services for a variety of complaints including anxiety, depression, disrupted sleep and attention deficit disorder, but in those first years, rarely for a brain injury.

          I do an extensive intake including questions about possible brain injuries. The vast majority of people say they have no history of an injury. At this point in my career, I prod. “Have you ever fallen out of a tree? Been in a car accident? Flown off a bike? Been hit by a baseball bat? Been thrown from a horse? Gone without oxygen for any length of time? Broken your nose? Have you ever been unconscious or seen stars?” Even with probing, people may not remember.

          But initially, because I was naïve and believed what people told me –  and certainly could not imagine people would not know they had a brain injury – I went ahead and did neurofeedback. I used frequency and amplitude specific neurofeedback in the low to mid beta ranges – twelve to eighteen cycles per second. Almost universally, people found their complaints resolving – overcoming ADD symptoms, mood dysregulation and sleep disruption.

          I often followed up the Beta training with Alpha/Theta training. Alpha/Theta training invites the brain to dwell in the frequencies just above sleep and allows processing to occur over a period of thirty to forty-five minutes. Reinforcing this lower range often allows one to access information not available to the conscious mind.

The resulting data give a read-out of the lower frequencies produced by the brain: Alpha, Theta, and Delta. The Delta information is included to discern whether a person begins to drift off to sleep, a situation that would turn the session into not much more than a nap. When falling asleep, Delta rises rather sharply. I came to recognize another form of Delta – a constant level present from the onset of feedback – which seemed to correlate with the residual effects of some head injuries. (Not all brain injuries result in high amplitude Delta.)

          Early in my career, I was staring at my own EEG read out from an Alpha/Theta session; noted the “low cloud cover” of Delta that hung at a steady rate across the screen and thought, “Hmmm. That certainly looks familiar.” The Delta frequency, from zero to three cycles per second, is the speed of a newborn’s brain but, as we age, the dominant frequencies of the brain speed up and we dip into Delta only when in deep sleep – unless the brain is injured. Delta can, but does not always, become the dominant frequency after an injury.

          A brain “stuck” in Delta has a hard time accessing the frequencies required for engagement in the external world.

          Could these slow waves be why schoolwork had been such a struggle for me? Could this be why I had difficulty reading? Could this be why my emotional life had been chaotic? I had an academic understanding of the disorganization of an injured brain, but seeing this pattern in my own EEG signal brought it all home.

          It’s been many years since I saw that revelatory EEG. I now specialize in working with brain injured people and I have sought treatment for myself as well. Recovering from brain injuries is an on-going process.

          I am painfully aware of the statistics. Brain injured people are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia; Parkinson’s; chronic pain and gastrointestinal disorders and, cruel but true, brain injured people are more likely to incur more brain injuries.

          In the following posts, I will address a bit of central nervous system anatomy; the myths of head injuries; you will meet clients who have worked hard to overcome the limitations imposed by brain injuries; I will recount aspects of my own journey, including seemingly inconsequential injuries I incurred as a child and young adult; we will explore the concept of “impediments to cure” – the seemingly unrelated issues that can thwart recovery, and we will address supportive measures that make on-going recovery more effective.

          I write this blog in the hope that I may raise awareness regarding the pervasiveness of brain injuries. I want to give people beyond my practice information that may help them, their families, and friends. Nothing works for everyone, but if even one piece of information I share makes someone’s life better – lightens a load or helps something make sense for someone – I will consider this time well spent.