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

by Steven J. Bartlett

* assisting stutterers by helping them become aware of unnecessary and interfering muscle contractions they have come to make habitually when they speak and teaching them how to relax these muscles

* reducing tension and pain in arthritis patients

To date, of all the areas to which it has been applied, biofeedback has been most successful for patients who are physically paralyzed or have movement disorders.

PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC APPLICATIONS

Biofeedback has been used successfully in psychotherapy in these ways:

* teaching general relaxation methods, which can be useful to many people who have problems that involve anxiety, depression, or phobias

* assisting people with insomnia, also through relaxation techniques

* teaching people how to recognize effective meditation by making them aware of periods during sessions of meditation when their brainwave patterns slow (see the last section in this chapter, on meditation)

Increasingly, biofeedback is being used to treat emotional disorders in conjunction with both psychotherapy and medication. It is one of the ways available to us to enlarge the range of our conscious control over ourselves and our lives.