Neuroplasticity: What You Need to Know in PTSD Recovery by Michele Rosenthal Truthfully, that title is misleading. There’s no way to tell you everything you need to know about neuroplasticity in one blog post. I will, however, tell you upfront the most important thing you need to know: Recent developments in the field of neuroplasticity prove how your brain is hardwired and genetically designed to heal, change and rewire itself after all kinds of traumas, including brain injury and stroke. Research also explains very explicitly how your brain changes, which means it also illustrates how you can collaborate with your brain and support it’s posttraumatic growth and development. How You Can Alter Your Brain Back in the 1930s a Canadian behavioral psychologist suggested that learning links neurons (the foundational element of your brain and how it sends and receives information) in fresh ways. As Norman Doidge writes about Hebb’s suggestion in THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF, Hebb… “Proposed that when two neurons fire at the same time repeatedly (or when one fires, causing another to fire), chemical changes occur in both, so that the two tend to connect more strongly. Hebb’s concept…. was neatly summarized …: Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Hebb’s entire theory argued that experience can change neuronal structure. What does that mean to you? It means that while trauma can alter your brain – and hence, the repetitive brain processes of PTSD – the basis for this change is experience. Following that philosophy and Hebb’s suggestion, the idea that emerges is that the brain can change again, due to new experience. That has enormous implications for PTSD recovery. One of the most disheartening (and untrue!) statements I hear from too many professionals and survivors is that, “Once you’re broken you can’t be fixed.” That may be true for some people but when it is, the fault isn’t necessarily that the brain is the problem. The brain likes to change. Sometimes, it’s people who don’t. Recovery is challenging. Not everyone commits to it or follows through. Not everyone wants to give up the lifestyle that PTSD offers. In the words of one of my clients early on in her (successful) recovery: “If it weren’t for PTSD I would have to go to work, take care of my family and do what every friend asks me to do. It’s easier to live my life if I stay in bed.” If she had chosen to stay committed to that idea she would never have healed. And yet, it wouldn’t be because she couldn’t. It would have been because she, on some conscious or other level, chose not to. Healing is hard and messy and often feels really, really crappy. You may get worse for a while instead of better. You may feel better and then have a triggering episode and think you’ve lost ground. You may use modalities that make you process in ways that leave you feeling raw and unprepared. You may experience all of these things and then decide it’s not worth the fight. Still, it wouldn’t be because your brain wasn’t willing. It would be because you weren’t. As someone who literally took almost a decade to heal – because I fought the process, didn’t engage in the process, and fought my diagnosis – I, too, might have been one of the many people who don’t move through the recovery process and out the other side. Again, it wouldn’t be because my brain wasn’t willing but because I wasn’t. Everyone’s recovery is different. How you move through it is unique to you. Still, the opportunity to feel better, scientifically speaking, is available to you. Experience got you into this mess. With neuroplasticity as your guide you can learn that it’s entirely possible focused, strategized experience(s) can get you out of it. At the very least, supporting your brain with new and good experiences while you seek your recovery path can be a positive, balancing and economically accessible way to (re)train your brain. Start firing neurons associated with positive experiences and you will start strengthening those neuronal structures in your brain, which can deeply impact your recovery process. ----------------------
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 23:30:50 +0000
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