BSC 2014: Bob Grove on Clinical Skill Development

by Siegfried Othmer | December 11th, 2014

by Siegfried Othmer, PhD

BSC Conference 2014
B ob Grove is one of the encyclopedic minds in the biofeedback field, one who has been involved in software development for some decades, but he has also been steeped in research and practice. The research involvement has tended to be unheralded, as his contribution tended to be in background through the development of the required software. On this occasion the talk dealt with the tactic of thought stopping, or thought interruption, to deal with worry. This technique dates back to the early eighties. Thought interruption (ideally within five seconds) is then followed by a shift of attention toward internal states, and to what is prominent there with respect to internal sensation. The mere shift of attention to internal states in this way already gets the physiology shifting in the right direction, toward calmness. But one can also engage more actively to manage the sensations.

This procedure can become a habit that maintains physiology within the bounds of good regulation throughout the day. It is accessible to everyone, and does not require instrumentation. As such, it is one of many such tactics that could readily be taught in schools and thus introduce people very organically into the concept of self-regulation. The people who actually show up to see a biofeedback clinician are likely to need more than this, but for them this exercise can be a demonstration of what is possible in order to get buy-in for the biofeedback.

Bob talked about the different traditions that have developed within the field. There is first of all the “feel-good” tradition in which the objective is to relax and desensitize the person. There is the psychotherapy tradition in which BF is used to diminish stress reactivity. Alpha-theta training fits into this category as well. Then there is the flexibility tradition in which the objective is to enhance resilience. And then there is the whole conditioning tradition in which the brain is taught to live in different states. The list is not exhaustive, but the time to discuss it was!

With respect to feedback, Bob cautioned that the signal of real interest might well not be the one chosen for feedback. The fact that a person’s stress reactivity can show up so differentially in the various measures of peripheral physiology means that the optimal variable may well not have been chosen for feedback unless a stress profile has been obtained. Of course the different measures also complement each other.

I would add to the above that one might also choose a training variable because of its utility in training rather than its sensitivity to physiological state. The EEG is a case in point. We do not expect the EEG to reveal the person’s autonomic status with any sensitivity, and yet it can be a good training tool for diminishing reactivity. The brain finds information about the EEG to be very useful, so different criteria apply depending on whether the information is intended for us or for the brain that made it.

Siegfried Othmer, PhD
drothmer.com

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