Psychoneurology for Children

Psychoneurology provides drug free alternatives and solutions for children who have been diagnosed with what psychology refers to as learning disorders or labels such as ADD, ADHD, OCD, fears, phobias, stress and anxieties.

Psychoneurology’s approach does not call for a diagnosis or labeling of the child. Its foundation is that each individual human being is already perfect and complete as opposed to broken or diseased, and it therefore also looks at the children as already whole. Instead of putting the focus on the, "problem“ (like the pathology driven approach does), the psychoneurologist helps the child to develop new resources or learnings that become the child‘s tools for navigating and growing through life’s challenges in order to reach the highest level of expansion and success. Thus the labeling becomes irrelevant.

Psychoneurology merely asks the question: What is needed? What is required to help this child thrive?

Let’s look at the label of ADD which we understand is a fight or flight processing we call “High Beta”:   by adding the resources of being able to go into a calm, relaxed and focused state (which we call “Alpha“) we aautomatically negate or overcome the child‘s automatic process of going into the nervous, tense and very distracted „High Beta“ state.

The basic understanding is that you can‘t be stressed and relaxed at the same time.  So if you create a “relaxation” response, you negate the “stress” response; if you create a “stress response“, you negate a “relaxation” response.  Therefore the solution to helping these children is to consistently create a relaxed, calm and focused state of interest and fascination in their nervous system and to consistently teach them how to move into that state automatically, so it becomes second nature. Not only do the children develop new resources for studying or learning that way, but even more importantly they create a strong sense of self and trust into their own innate abilities to help them navigate through life’s challenges. Instead of turning to a pill, they learn how to trust themselves.

There are many ways in Psychoneurology to help a child assess these resources. Sometimes it is as simple as teaching them to go into a relaxation response. Other times it is working with unconscious patterns and introducing new learnings on that deep automatic level.  All of these processes go hand in hand.

The pathology driven approach will strive to identify and diagnose the "problem" at hand: the child is being labeled as having a particular learning issue and then usually given some form of psychoactive drug to inhibit their body’s ability to create these responses. By doing that the child loses the ability to navigate through life’s challenges with their own inner resources.

Imagine your child was 12 years old and every time an issue came up you gave them a shot of whiskey. Let’s pretend for a moment that there were no side effects in alcohol (which we know isn’t true, just as we know it isn‘t true about psychoactive meds). Every time the child encountered an issue and they were given a drink of alcohol to help them feel better, how will this compromise their growth in the long run?

The general answer is that if a child started implementing these kind of responses at the age of 12, by the time they are 15 years old they will still have the coping mechanism of a 12 year old. The life experiences that were meant to help them grow were navigated to numbing them out.

There is also a big difference between a drug induced calm that is created artificially by overriding the child‘s natural nervous system and a relaxed focus that is actually generated by their body and mind functioning properly. The best we can hope to accomplish with psychopharmacological intervention is to hinder the brain from performing the functions that it is attempting. To date, no one in the field of allopathic or other medical endeavor has ever managed to come up with a medication or chemical that is able to actually educate or teach the brain to do something new.

Psychoneurology is a path that empowers children to have the resources and learnings to help them grow for a lifetime as opposed to just merely eliminating the “problem“. Psychoneurology definitely eliminates the problem, but it does so by giving the children new strengths and an ability to believe in themselves.

So many lives changed!