When You Don't Know Where to Turn / A Self-Diagnosing Guide to Counseling and Therapy

by Steven J. Bartlett

BIOFEEDBACK
In psychotherapy, especially useful for clients
with problems involving anxiety, depression,
phobias, and insomnia, who will benefit from
learning how to lessen their own tension.

Most of us can draw a relatively clear line between the physiological processes we can control and those we cannot. Unless an illness or accident or handicap interferes, we have voluntary control over many muscles, but there are many that, fortunately, work without our conscious intercession: the heart beats day and night, our lungs fill and empty, our digestive processes are automatic. Except for people who have voluntary control over the muscles that move their ears, we are all more or less equally endowed, and equally limited, in what physical processes we are able to influence.

Until the development of biofeedback, there was only one way to extend self-control beyond the normal range: through a disciplined and time-consuming practice such as yoga. Experienced practitioners of yoga claim that studying yoga over a period of years has given them a sense of personal integration and mental centering similar to what we will see in connection with the practice of meditation. Physical and emotional flexibility also seem to result from long-term yoga practice.

Some yogis have extended their range of control over inner, normally involuntary processes in dramatic ways. Some can cause their heart rate to increase to five times its resting rate. Some are able to cause a ten-degree temperature difference between the thumb and little finger of the same hand: one side is flushed and hot, the other side cool and pale. Many other forms of self-control have been documented,[[6]] but acquiring these special skills through the practice of yoga takes years of discipline, concentration, and tenacity. But the years of dedication seem also to be indispensable if one is to develop the qualities of inner tranquility and strength sought by yogis.

[[6]] See, e.g., Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958).

Biofeedback has greatly shortened the yogis' road to conscious control of some physical processes, and, in turn, it has become the main contribution technology has made so far to psychotherapy. Many of the physical processes that biofeedback training can help you learn rather quickly to control influence your emotional well-being. Biofeedback equipment can enable you to learn, for example, how to will a state of muscular relaxation, how to gain a measure of control over your physical response to stress or pain, even how to raise or lower your blood pressure or heart or respiration rate.

To use biofeedback equipment, electrodes are taped to the areas of your body that are to be monitored. They may measure such things as skin temperature, skin moisture, muscle tension, pulse and breathing rates, or brain wave patterns. The feedback from which you learn to control normally involuntary processes occurs when the measurements made by the instruments are externalized for you: you are able to see a pattern on a computer monitor or oscilloscope or hear a changing tone that gives you immediate information about your physical responses. In other words, biofeedback is an electronic way of representing inner processes externally that are usually automatic, involuntary, and unconscious.

PHYSICAL APPLICATIONS

Frequently, and relatively quickly, many people are able to learn how to control many of their internal responses very well. Biofeedback can sometimes be an alternative to using medication to reduce tension or pain. Its range of applications has grown tremendously. Here are some examples of its uses:

A woman was badly injured in an automobile accident. On one side of her face her facial nerve was severed, leaving her unable to move any part of the left side of her face and unable to close or blink her left eye. Surgeons decided to splice the severed facial nerve to a nerve in her neck-shoulder muscle. Once this was done, the woman could shrug or twitch her shoulder, and in this way cause the paralyzed side of her face to move, and blink her left eye. However, the movements of the left side of her face were uncoordinated, spastic, and not synchronous with the movements of the uninjured right side of her face.