Neurofeedback for Mental Health and Regulating your Nervous System

What if there was a way to retrain your brain for better mental health and emotional wellbeing? In this powerful episode, Jen sits down with Miriam to explore her transformative journey with neurofeedback—a cutting-edge therapy that's helping people overcome anxiety, depression, ADHD, and trauma naturally.

Miriam opens up about her personal struggles and the moment she discovered neurofeedback could change everything. You'll learn how this non-invasive treatment works, what to expect during sessions, and why it's becoming a game-changer for mental wellness.

Whether you're struggling with your own mental health challenges or supporting a loved one, this conversation offers real hope and practical insights. Miriam's story proves that healing is possible, and sometimes the most powerful solutions come from working with your brain's natural ability to rewire itself.

Join us for this inspiring conversation that could be the key to unlocking your brain's healing potential.

To learn more about renting a neurofeedback device please contact Jen at info@exaltedhealth.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Well, welcome back to the Regulate to Your Nervous System podcast. And I have my friend and mentor, uh Miriam Bellamy here with me today. Thanks for being here, Miriam. Miriam is a licensed marriage and family therapist, and she is the one that opened the doors to me for neurofeedback. So I'm really excited to have you here today. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_02: 0:27

It's good to be with you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:28

So share with us how, because you're a therapist, had been a therapist for quite a while when neurofeedback came into your life. Like, what was the catalyst that brought neurofeedback in?

SPEAKER_02: 0:38

Uh it was my own health crisis, really. It my own, and then also my younger daughter wasn't doing very well. Um I had struggled for myself with chronic fatigue for 20 years.

SPEAKER_00: 0:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 0:51

Um, daily massive crashing for almost 20 years.

SPEAKER_00: 0:56

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 0:58

I had tried so many things. Um, you name it, I tried it just about. And then my younger daughter, um really around fourth grade or so, something started sort of dropping off for her. She had problems as an infant. She was failure to thrive, and um she'd gain weight, then she'd lose weight, gain weight, lose weight, all that kind of stuff, fall off the growth curve. And then we hit fourth grade, and something started happening for her for her level of confidence in school. Um, her level her ability to read, write. Um her what we found out later was her short-term memory was in the like one percentile.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40

Wow.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40

And what that means is like you're copying numbers. If you look at numbers six, seven, and eight, or whatever the numbers are, and you you can't remember what the numbers were to copy them. Yeah, imagine that kind of struggle. Yeah. So she hit middle school and she started failing, and um, there were many, many, many things going on for her, lots of anxiety. And yeah, so I needed to do something different. I was I just couldn't do it anymore. I was fatigued and depressed, and um, I needed help for me and for her.

SPEAKER_00: 2:09

Yeah, and the mental load, um, I don't feel like it gets talked about enough. Like it's hard enough just running a family and carrying the mental load. And I think women in general oftentimes carry a lot of that, but then in addition to that, you're a therapist, so you're pouring into other people all day long, which I can relate to in my coaching practice. Um, and there's a point where you're just your brain almost just stops like functioning the way that it should, right?

SPEAKER_02: 2:35

Yeah, oh, for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 2:37

Yeah, you hit that burnout, overwhelm, shutdown. So then how did neurofeedback come into your life? How were you introduced to it?

SPEAKER_02: 2:43

Uh, I was actually so one of the things I do as a therapist, it's quite different from the mainstream is I I practice uh Bowen family systems theory, um, my my own integration of it, but it's very different from attachment theory and that kind of individual focus that's in the mainstream. So I was at uh a conference for systems theory in uh DC, and this was a leadership conference, and there were these top executives of different companies getting up and talking about their experiences as becoming a leader, becoming a more differentiated leader, right? Yeah. And they were talking about this Zengar neurotimal neurofeedback, and they weren't trying to sell anything, they were just uh talking about how this was getting right to their brain and shifting how they saw things, uh, shifting their energy even. They would talk about their own health issues and that kind of thing. And it just people at the Bowen Center, they were people that I really trust. I'd been studying there for a very long time, and I just thought I need something to change. And uh I learned, so I started doing some research. I started just looking into neurofeedback in general, calling around town. Uh, we lived in Fort Collins here in Colorado at the time. And neurofeedback just for my daughter, because that just for one of us, whether it was me or her, was going to be$2,500 just for her for 40 sessions.

SPEAKER_00: 4:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 4:12

And I had already sort of started learning a little bit about neurotimal, and it was much more affordable, and we could do it at home, and everybody could get sessions. Yes. Um, and so I that's what I did. I found um someone who rents the equipment, and and within 10 sessions for me, sorry, it was six sessions. It was after my sixth session, I woke up feeling rested. And I, you don't realize how tired you are until you don't feel tired. Yes, like I have not, even though I knew I was fatigued, I thought I was sleeping fine. Yeah, I woke up rested, and I was like, I haven't felt rested in probably 20 years at the time. Yeah, and that's so and I was like, I'm gonna keep going with it. Like for Ella, this was over the summer when we did this. For Ella, um, we only did about 10, 12 sessions for her during that rental. She went from um in her room, sullen, depressed, angry, to all of a sudden she is out and doing stuff in the kit. She's cooking for herself. Wow. She is incredibly affectionate. She's mildly autistic, so she just sort of had the coil from affection. All of a sudden, she's all over me. I'm like, what the heck? Get off me. This is too much. I'm kidding. Yeah. Um, and so that was over the summer. She started cleaning her room, Jen.

SPEAKER_00: 5:39

Wow.

SPEAKER_02: 5:40

Wow. Like you couldn't walk through, there wasn't a path to walk through before. And she starts cleaning her room on her own. One of the iterations of this was eight bags of stuff. Eight. She clears out. Another iteration was she had my uh her father pull the dresser out so she could get everything that was thrown behind the dresser. Right. Right, her rights. Okay. And then school started. And instead of the two hours of homework that should have taken her 30 minutes or that was taking other kids 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_00: 6:13

Sure.

SPEAKER_02: 6:15

Where she was screaming, crying, so frustrated, so confused, all of a sudden she's quietly doing her homework.

SPEAKER_00: 6:21

Yeah. On her own, independently.

SPEAKER_02: 6:23

Yeah. I think the similar thing happened with your son.

SPEAKER_00: 6:26

Yeah, it did. Yeah. We we started uh over Christmas break and we did it the last week of a Christmas break, and he went back to school. And we'd only done, I mean, seven to ten sessions at this point. And all of a sudden his teachers are emailing me, being like, I don't know what changed over Christmas break, but your kid is so different. Like he has really struggled with executive functioning, he struggles with being organized, he struggles with staying on task. And these are things that we've done years and years of OT therapy, vision therapy. And we'd seen gains with all of them, every single one. But all of a sudden it was concentrated and we could do it at home. And we had done, I can't remember if I shared this with you, but we'd done neurofeedback um about a decade before when we were doing OT with him. But during that time, uh, he had to be, we had to go to the clinic for OT appointments. He had to be focused on a screen and he had to be visually engaged, right? And so for a kid that struggles to sit still, and he was young at the time, he was only like four or five, um, struggles to be engaged, struggles to focus, struggles to sit still, and had to focus on the screen when he had a visual tracking problem. Um, although we saw some gains, we didn't see near the gains that we saw in a week at home. So that was one of the draws to me with um with the Zengar uh Neurooptimal system is that I could bring it home and we could do it. And that the the frequency feedback was audio. So let's just talk a little bit about how it works. So, how does it how does it work from Miriam's perspective?

SPEAKER_02: 8:03

Yeah. So to me, it's another reason I went with Neurotimals because I had been poked and prodded and had stuff done to me for so many years, mostly by really good same, but but not always.

SPEAKER_00: 8:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 8:15

And you can have, you know, real problems when someone makes a mistake or don't they don't know what they're doing. So with Neuroptimal, there's no practitioner who's gonna mess with my brain, right? Feeling very messed with. So that's the the core of how it works is it helps you your brain decide. It gives your brain information, so your brain then decides, and it taps into it's also part of family systems theory is the sort of a foundation of that theory is resilience, it's about personal responsibility. Um, and so this just on a physiological level was also appealing to me. Yeah. Um it just taps into your brain's resilience. And for people who, if they're listening and they've been sick for a while or struggling for a long time, you start like me, you start to lose faith that your body can figure it out. And this was my body figured it out because it got the right information.

SPEAKER_00: 9:14

Yeah. So it just provides the feedback to the brain, and then the brain knows what to do with it, essentially, right?

SPEAKER_02: 9:21

Yeah, and think of it too. Uh my one of my favorite ways of explaining it is you you walk into the bathroom, you look in the mirror, and your hair is out of whack. What do you do without even thinking about it?

SPEAKER_00: 9:32

Yeah, you fix it. You fix your hair, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 9:34

That's what your brain is doing all the time. Yeah, the brain is constantly taking in data. What's the temperature of the room? If it's really, really cold, your your body, your brain is gonna get involved and sort of make sure you're as warm as you can be, or it's gonna say, go get a sweater or whatever. We're con your brain is constantly monitoring for stuff like that. And so with Neurotimal, it just uh holds a mirror up to your brain and your brain will self-correct.

SPEAKER_00: 9:59

Yeah, it's so good. So, one of my favorite things about it is that there's just no contraindications. So, because I've had you know chronic illness, I have been either on medication or supplements the majority of my life, and that gets old, quite frankly. You know, there's more foods that I have to take away, more supplements that I have to add in, et cetera, et cetera. And what this does is that all you do is attach it to your brain, attach it to your scalp, attach it to your ears, and it does the work for you. There's no internal things that you're taking in, the frequency is just providing the feedback to your brain. And for me, that was such a relief, right? For people that have been through chronic illness and just done all of those things for years and years and years, and it can be exhausting, right? Yeah, can you relate to that?

SPEAKER_02: 10:47

It's not a I think chronic illness is a complicated thing, so for me, it's not wasn't everything, but it was it was the game changer. I I have never had fatigue like that again.

SPEAKER_00: 11:00

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02: 11:01

But I do get acupuncture when I go through something stressful or whatever. Like, you know, I do take supplements now, but it's not 20 or 30 a day, right?

SPEAKER_00: 11:09

Same, same, yeah. I went from you know, taking 20 or 30 a day down to just a handful, um, which has been so life-changing. Yep, so good. So it regulates the nervous system, but let's talk about also balancing emotions because that is a gain that I have seen not only in myself, in so many of my clients, where like as a therapist, we work through the wounds and things, and as a coach for myself, same thing. Work through the wounds, the lies that they're believing. But then if if they've carried those for years and years, the neuropathways that align with those lies or wounds or traumas or whatever are still very strong, right? And so believing the truth can be a lot harder. So, what have you noticed in your clients with just like kind of switching over to believing the truth with the neurofeedback?

SPEAKER_02: 12:00

So I I have a marital example, a personal marital example. If I'd be great. So uh God, how many? I don't know how many years we had been married at the time. 17 or 18 or something like that. And I had built up a fair, well, both of us had built up a fair amount of resentment. And resentment, one definition I heard from a friend of mine once was resentment is your resending, re-resending, whatever, resending those same old thoughts over and over, like you just referenced. Right? He's this and he's that. So this particular time I had made a decision, and it really wasn't related to the marriage. It was just, let me see if I'll do 30 sessions in 30 days. Well, that turned into 90 sessions in 90 days. So every single day for 90 days, I was doing sessions, and I was in a session at one point, and I was angry, right? That resentment was going. I was going round and round, and all of a sudden, in the middle of a session, it just was like I don't know how else to describe it, other than that, those thoughts just melted away. Stopped. I I felt this opening in my heart. It was just this massive exhale, and it was like, I don't have to go there.

SPEAKER_00: 13:23

Yeah. That's so good.

SPEAKER_02: 13:28

And that the resentment was gone, didn't fix the marriage.

SPEAKER_01: 13:32

I don't want to scare anybody, but well, I mean, that's real though. It might have helped, but I don't know. Anyways, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 13:39

I mean, but if you can like you're gonna be better off regardless if you can let go of resentment and anger, right?

SPEAKER_01: 13:46

That's right.

SPEAKER_00: 13:47

Yeah, yeah. For me, what I've seen um is that the highs don't get so high and the lows don't get so low. I don't feel like that roller coaster anymore. I feel so steady uh for the first time in my life. And that is something I have worked on for years and years and years. Uh, you know, my home life wasn't fantastic. There wasn't a lot of skills that I had growing up uh to learn how to manage emotions. Um, and so what that did is that I stuffed everything down for years and years, and we know that if we stuff things down, they're gonna come out usually in an unhealthy way. And I had worked on that for years.

SPEAKER_02: 14:25

That was a big part of my fatigue, I think the emotional stuff. I just couldn't deal with that.

SPEAKER_00: 14:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even as a therapist, like and myself as a coach, like I have tools, but we're still human beings, right? And so having this additional tool that can help just bring balance and rational thinking in a whole new way that I had never experienced before. I hadn't been taught that, I hadn't been modeled that. Yeah, I had been working on growing those skills for decades, and all of a sudden it just felt easy when I started neurofeedback. All of a sudden, it just felt like it all the tools that I had been trying to build and work towards and grow in just felt easy and light. Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_02: 15:09

Yes. It yeah, so it can make therapy not needed, or it can make therapy that a person is in way more effective.

SPEAKER_00: 15:18

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 15:19

I've seen that with kids, I've seen that with myself.

SPEAKER_00: 15:22

Um of the greatest testimonies I heard. Um, I read the book years ago when I was really getting going in my practice, um, The Body Keeps Score. Um, and there's a whole chapter on that of uh a therapist, um, the the guy that wrote the book. I'm totally blanking on his name right now. And thank you. Yep, um, something wildly German. Anyway, he uh has researched for years and he does a whole uh chapter on neurofeedback that I'm just gonna share a little bit about. So they did several test studies, and and they did not use uh neurooptimal, the one that Mary and my area talking about. But neurofeedback is neurofeedback, right? There's our there's all different advancements in um technology and things these days, but the particular one that they use, I just want to be clear, this one was not the particular company Miriam and my are partnered with. However, they had done a number of case studies, and they had some clients who, I like I talked about, had been through a lot of trauma, um, who had been in therapy for years. And although they had seen gains, they still felt like they were on that emotional roller coaster. And the only thing that they changed during this time frame was that they added neurofeedback for a certain amount of time. And during that time, all of these clients showed all of a sudden, like all of these tools that they had been trying to work through and trying to grow in and trying to gain, but it felt like an uphill battle. All of a sudden, they felt like they were on the top of the mountain and they could, they felt like they'd arrived. And again, don't mishear me, like we never actually arrive in all of our growth and growing, but they didn't feel like it was so hard to hold on to the healing that they'd gained anymore. And after I listened to that chapter, I was like, I'm 100% in. I'm 100% in because we all know it's hard to grow and change, and then life's still coming at us, and different things are happening. And all of a sudden, if you have the emotional stability to deal with it all, everything becomes easier and lighter. So that's right. Yeah. What's one of your favorite testimonies from one of your clients?

SPEAKER_02: 17:26

Um I know you have your own family, but what about what comes to mind is this family I worked with in North Carolina. It was a foster mom, but she had adopted these three sisters who had had just kind of pretty horrific uh early childhood stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 17:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 17:46

Um I think at the time she called, she the mom uh renting the equipment, the youngest, I think it was the young, maybe it was the middle one, it was violent at home. Um and to the point where they felt they had to send her away um to a like an inpatient kind of a facility or whatever.

SPEAKER_00: 18:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 18:10

Um, if I remember remember correctly, the mom decided not to do that, and they started the neuro and completely shifted it. The older one, now I'm remembering, would get up five, six times a night, wake up her sisters, walk around the house, whatever. Very quickly, she's sleeping through the night. Wow. Um, the youngest had these ticks, would um scratch herself, bloody, um, rip hair out, that kind of thing. All that went away.

SPEAKER_00: 18:44

That's so amazing.

SPEAKER_02: 18:45

Right. And and this is one of the families where the older one in particular just wouldn't go to therapy, just wasn't engage. All of a sudden she is engaged in therapy.

SPEAKER_00: 18:55

Wow.

SPEAKER_02: 18:55

Getting along with friends in the program she was enrolled in, things like that. So this, yeah, it was. I think we wrote up a whole case study on it, actually.

SPEAKER_00: 19:03

That's incredible. That's incredible. Yeah, I would love to see it. And and I think the the great point in that is like this doesn't replace therapy, it doesn't replace coaching, it doesn't replace all of the amazing tools that are out there. What it can do is make them much more effective, right? Makes it much more effective.

SPEAKER_02: 19:22

Life goes on, we have challenges. There's that we get out of that ever, I think really kind of hurts people. Yeah. It's both rails, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 19:34

And yes, yes, and amen.

SPEAKER_02: 19:36

My rails, if we if we only want to be happier, if we can only be stuck in the past, and yeah, that's so good.

SPEAKER_00: 19:43

So good. Um, my personal testimony, I can't remember if I've shared this part of it with you. Um, when I started neurooptimal, I was just coming out of grief. I lost both of my parents in a very short amount of time and had to take care. So my dad died, and my mom immediately got sick with cancer, and we had to take care of her for like 18 months. It was almost 18 months. Um, and it was just horrific. Like she was just circling the drain the whole time. It was very traumatic the whole time and had a complicated relationship with with both of my parents, love them dearly for who they are, but also there was a lot of there was a lot of trauma in my childhood. And so just kind of a very difficult time. And we're talking like two full years of just straight trauma. And although I have a ton of tools and I was using all my tools, I was dragging, right? Like I was trying to run my practice, trying to take care of my family, walking through grief of losing both of my parents and having to, you know, take a ton of time off of my business to take care of them. And I'm self-employed, and that, you know, that adds another stressor. And so anyway, uh, when we started neurofeedback, um I was just walking through that season. And although I was handling it as best as I could, I was in survival mode a little bit. And I like I said, we started it over Christmas break, and within just a handful of sessions, I finally felt like my brain like re-engaged and I could feel joy again because it was had been so heavy and so challenging during that time that all of a sudden I felt like, oh, I feel like myself again. And that's probably the comment I get most often from clients is I feel like me again. I feel like the me that I knew was in there, but I just didn't know how to access him or her, right?

SPEAKER_01: 21:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 21:31

Um, I've seen it uh be incredibly valuable with people that have struggled with substance abuse of all kinds, right? Because what we know as you know, therapists and counselors is a lot of time the actual substance has become an addiction, yes, but what they're doing is numbing um what they didn't know how to deal with and didn't have the skills or you know places that that to deal with them in a healthy way. And all of a sudden, if their brain can handle that, it becomes different, right? Yeah. Yeah. Any last thoughts for anyone that's listening to this and um has questions about neurofeedback, neurooptimal?

SPEAKER_02: 22:16

You know, one thought is that um it's kind of what you said earlier. There aren't any contraindications. It's the it's not going to hurt you. Um it is worth well worth the the investment, the the risk, you know, of not knowing if it's gonna help you or not.

SPEAKER_00: 22:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 22:34

I wish I had done it when my girls were little, even on Ella when she was failure to thrive and going through everything she medically. Um, yeah, I would if I could race the clock or whatever turn back time, I would absolutely go back and yeah, really would for me as a mom too.

SPEAKER_00: 22:52

Same. I was overwhelmed my kids' entire young years, the entire time. And I didn't have a lot of the tools and skills that I have now, but I I wish I could turn back that time. Um, that is leads me to one more question, though. Like, how old can people use this device?

SPEAKER_02: 23:08

I have had moms hook up infants, it hasn't happened much because people are scared, they don't know, right? But I have had moms hook up infants, I wouldn't hesitate to hook up my daughter. Yeah, um, so yeah, it's at any age. I would say, um, if you are wanting to hook up an infant, make sure you're hooking yourself up too.

SPEAKER_00: 23:30

Sure, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 23:31

Um yeah, yeah. I've had clients in their 90s, this old guy named Jim, who I adore. Yeah, yeah. It changed his gait, changed his uh his walk more stably.

SPEAKER_00: 23:45

Yeah, well, when you bring balance to the brain and you bring balance to the nervous system, like our bodies are just signed to heal. So when there's all that survival mode and all that cortisol and adrenaline stops pumping all the time, your bodies can do what they're meant to do, right?

SPEAKER_02: 24:01

Yes, yeah, reaching your own potential, whatever that is.

SPEAKER_00: 24:04

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here today. Um, if people have questions or anything for you, I can certainly direct them towards you. But I just appreciate your time. So thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks, Jen. Thanks for inviting me.

SPEAKER_01: 24:16

You're welcome.