In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with counselor and mediator Len McEwen about trauma, anxiety and depression, and how neurofeedback can help treat them.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today we are going to discuss trauma in depth, especially in regards to anxiety and depression. And that is why we have brought on a very special guest speaker to help us really dive deep into this important topic.
Barbara La Pointe: Len McEwen is counselor and a mediator that specializes in trauma, recovery, anxiety and depression, and also grief. So without further ado, welcome Len. How are.
Len McEwen: You? Thank you. Just a sec now. Oh, no. No, no. That’s not funny. Oh, what can I say? I’m so glad to be here.
Andrew Folkler: It’s definitely great to have you here, too.
Len McEwen: Anytime you can tell me just to cool it and I’ll get serious.
Barbara La Pointe: Okay. I will. Well, why is trauma a relevant and important conversation to have?
Len McEwen: Today? Well, if you live in Alberta, it’s snowing, and that’s producing trauma. But it’s really producing trauma on all of those people who have been following the COVID guidelines.
Len McEwen: And I think that that’s probably going to be the most relevant form of trauma and the cause of the majority of anxiety and depression that we’re gonna see for the next number of years. Whenever we go through a major traumatic event, it often takes us between five and 10 years to recover psychologically.
Len McEwen: When we went through the fire in Fort McMurray, we’re about six or seven years out now, I think, and we’re still dealing with mental health problems out of that community. The same is true of Slave Lake, although they’re coming to the end of that term. If I look at my call log, the people who call my office, and I poll it to see what they’re asking for, the majority of them are asking for assistance with anxiety and depression. And unfortunately, most of us these days think that what we need is a really rapid fix when often some of the more natural solutions are not only better for us, but better for the family, better for the community at large rather than in many cases self-medicating or medicating with one of these miracle drugs that the doctors have given us. Did I answer your question?
Barbara La Pointe: You did. Wow. Thank you. Okay then, why does it take five to 10 years to collectively heal from trauma? To me, that seems like a really long time.
Len McEwen: I’m not sure, but when the Slave Lake fire occurred, I was driving into Slave Lake while everybody was evacuating, because I was going up to work with the wildfire teams.
Len McEwen: So I got up there the night of the evacuation. The effect of driving through flames and smoke to get into that community will never leave me. It’s burned into my brain. And so if I didn’t practice some form of self-care to help myself re-regulate, I’m sure that I would be hypervigilant for a long time, just concerned about every bit of smoke that I see.
Len McEwen: Let me tell you a story. I was driving into Slave Lake, oh, about a year ago, and off on the left side of the road there was a smoke plume. Well, Slave Lake, I worked the Slave Lake fire too, and that smoke plume was right in an area that was burning when Slave Lake burned. And you can imagine what that did to me.
Len McEwen: My complete response was threat, trauma, heart rate up, blood pressure through the roof, just ready to fight, flight or freeze. That was what? Seven years later. So, because the family is a part of the title of this program, one of the things that is pretty important is that the whole area of developmental trauma, what happens to young kids often stays with them for the rest of their lives.
Len McEwen: And that cat’s gonna eat you. He’s gonna grab you by the ear and throw you on the ground.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s the beauty of live streaming.
Len McEwen: Well, I should tell you that my office is in a church that has been decommissioned, and the church... So I have an office in the church, but the church has got the usual gymnasiums and sanctuaries and all the rest of it, and it’s got a very big commercial kitchen.
Len McEwen: And today, there’s a restaurant that has rented the kitchen to sell hamburgers out the front door because we can’t eat in the restaurants these days. So every once in a while you’ll hear bang as the front door shuts. But then, because this is a church, now here’s where the trauma comes in. We have to have two cats to control the mice, and those mice are traumatized. I spend half my day working with traumatically affected mice. No, I don’t. Okay. What’s the next question?
Barbara La Pointe: So all right, so you sort of referenced collective trauma at Slave Lake, which is where I grew up as a kid, in the summers. And you’ve referenced COVID, and maybe we could narrow in a little bit on trauma in the family, especially as related to children.
Barbara La Pointe: ‘Cause you said it changes them forever.
Len McEwen: Well, it doesn’t change them forever. It has the potential of doing that. It depends on whether or not mom and dad recognize what has happened and support the child in seeking appropriate support or assistance or therapy. You’re talking in many cases, in most cases, developmental trauma.
Len McEwen: And we’re really talking about attachment, et cetera. Years ago I taught parenting after separation, and there was one component of that that was really important and that was don’t yell at your kids, don’t yell at your partner because it’s traumatizing. And over the years, I’m sure I’ve seen lots of kids who have been traumatized just by the emotional level that is maintained in the household.
Len McEwen: So if you want to avoid bills for therapy, just keep your emotions down, keep your house at a nice calm level and you’re going to avoid most of this. Make sure you demonstrate affection for your child. Remember that bonding is really, really important, and so the whole concept of holding the child heart against heart is really quite important.
Len McEwen: If that’s an area that concerns you or that any of the viewers, listeners are interested in, the best reference book out there right now is probably Neurofeedback. Neurofeedback and Developmental Trauma by Siebert and Fisher. It’s a marvelous book. And if you’re dealing with trauma, you also already know about Bessel van der Kolk.
Len McEwen: And so Bessel van der Kolk, the last video I saw, the last video for the required video for training was Bessel van der Kolk being introduced by Sebern Fisher. A lot of these videos are now on YouTube. I’m trying to think if that one is. I’m not sure. But there’s some really good resources there.
Len McEwen: There’s also some real crap, so I’m glad you’re doing this. Bessel van der Kolk is a good name. Sebern Fisher is a good name. And those people, I really trust their resources.
Barbara La Pointe: Those are great resources. I also like Peter Levine’s work.
Len McEwen: I do a lot of work with neurofeedback.
Len McEwen: You know what neurofeedback is, right? Brainwave biofeedback.
Len McEwen: The reason I do work with neurofeedback is because it works. And if you listen to Bessel van der Kolk, he does a little piece at the end of one of his videos. Somebody asks him why they don’t use, or why doesn’t he use CBT?
Len McEwen: I think that’s the question. Cognitive behavioral therapy. And he says, “It doesn’t work.” And then he goes and he shows.
Barbara La Pointe: It takes a long time as well, correct?
Len McEwen: It doesn’t work.
Len McEwen: Period. It doesn’t work. And he shows you the results of a meta-analysis of the effectiveness, the efficacy of CBT for trauma.
Len McEwen: And CBT takes the traumatic symptoms down, but it never takes it below the clinical level, and then it goes back up again. Six months later, they’re almost as bad as they were when they came for therapy.
Barbara La Pointe: Fascinating, really.
Andrew Folkler: So for context for the average listener who is not psychological enthusiasts like us could we have a brief definition on neurofeedback, and even in contrast to CBT as well?
Len McEwen: Well, so CBT is talk therapy. And CBT, there are very few practitioners that practice pure CBT. It’s just too tedious, I think, and most people practice sort of an eclectic talk therapy. Neurofeedback is totally different.
Len McEwen: Neurofeedback is where you do a brain map to find out how the brain is functioning under each of a number of sites on the scalp. So in my case, well, it depends on what I’m doing. I usually up around 20 sites. And what I’m looking for is what’s the relative and absolute power there? So how much electricity is the brain producing as it thinks or controls or whatever.
Len McEwen: And then how is that particular site talking to another site on the brain? Now, it could be talking too fast or too slow. It could be talking in a very complex fashion, or it could be talking in a very simple fashion. It could have an amplitude that is out of balance with the other site. All of those complicate the performance of the individual.
Len McEwen: And so what we have to do is we have to identify where are the areas that are producing those types of anomalies, and then design a training program that teaches the brain to behave in a more normal fashion. And so it becomes a matter of operant conditioning. We show the person a picture, and we pair it with sounds.
Len McEwen: And when his brain is doing what more closely resembles a normal performance, the picture moves or the person hears a tone or something like that, that produces a reward. And this is extremely effective. These days we still have lots of kids that go in for attention deficit disorder and are given stimulants, Ritalin, et cetera.
Len McEwen: 85% of kids with attention deficit disorder can be effectively trained using neurofeedback so they don’t display symptoms, and there’s no medication.
Len McEwen: 85%. And yet this hasn’t been approved by the government. It’s not a part of many health programs, and it’s expensive because it does take a commitment on behalf of the parents.
Len McEwen: Now, that’s for attention deficit disorder. The same thing is true for trauma. I work with a number of people who are traumatized by industrial accidents or by service in the military or as first responders. All of those people, if they’re coming for neurofeedback, unless they have a really good plan, are paying out of pocket, and so that’s the downside.
Len McEwen: The upside, you do neurofeedback, generally increase your IQ from 9 to 20 points, and it improves your memory. If you happen to play a musical instrument, it’ll advance you about one conservatory grade, so one year of study just by using neurofeedback. That’s how powerful it is.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s significant.
Len McEwen: Well, it’s absolutely huge because of the amount of money it saves, the absolute amount of pain that it saves for the individuals. If you’re dealing with night terrors where every night you wake up screaming because of an event that you went through, and I can relieve that, that’s pretty significant.
Barbara La Pointe: How about for a woman, Len, that never feels safe or generally typically doesn’t feel safe in her own body because she’s had some form of domestic abuse or intimate partner abuse?
Len McEwen: Same thing. If you can teach the woman to self-regulate on demand, then that becomes under her control where the trauma has taken it away from her and it’s placed it under... Well, it’s still under her control, but it’s the body trying to preserve itself. If you’ve been abused, well, here’s the example.
Len McEwen: I think Bessel van der Kolk uses this one. You’re walking down a path and you see an object on the ground that looks like a snake, and so all of a sudden your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up, and all the rest of it, and when you get up to it, it’s just a stick. But what do you remember, the stick or the snake?
Len McEwen: You remember the snake. So if you’ve been hit every time you’ve said no to your partner, you learn pretty quickly not to say no. What you’ve gotta do is now take that and put it under your control. And in putting it under your control, you have to learn how to self-regulate. Unfortunately, we don’t teach self-regulation.
Barbara La Pointe: We don’t at all.
Barbara La Pointe: The concept of down-regulating your nervous system or self-regulating your nervous system is really not common language.
Len McEwen: No, not at all. That’s why I don’t have it here. Do I? Where is it? Now I don’t know where it is right now, but I have a recording that I made of bells, and they are timed to five-second intervals.
Len McEwen: So it goes ding, ding.
Len McEwen: Ding, like that, 20 minutes.
Len McEwen: If you breathe in on the first bell and breathe out on the second, for about 80% of the population you are breathing at your resonant frequency, the frequency at which your heart rate and your respiration rate come into synchronization. It has a pronounced effect on the baroreceptors on your heart which control heart rate and blood pressure.
Len McEwen: So heart rate goes down, blood pressure goes down, and a message gets sent through the rest of the body that says, “Even in these times of pain and chaos, you’ll be okay,” and you get a feeling of relaxation, and all of the brain chatter that you have about how unsafe you are, et cetera, disappears.
Barbara La Pointe: So would brain chatter, I’m just curious, be like a monkey mind or like a limbic loop where you’re just repeating?
Len McEwen: Busy brain. And so if you’re gonna self-regulate, you gotta get rid of as much of that stuff as you can that’s drawing your attention. What’s the first thing that I do with first responders or ex-military? Teach them to breathe.
Len McEwen: There’s a book out by Nestor. It’s called Breath. Everybody should read it. We should read it to our kids in bed. That’s how important it is. There’s another one out by Leah Lagos. Same sort of thing, only this one is aimed specifically at elite performers, athletes, artists, business people, because of the huge impact it has on performance.
Len McEwen: So what my way of thinking about trauma goes is really straightforward. When you are traumatized and your behavior changes, that’s really a good thing because it saved you, or it’s in the process of saving you. But now that the danger has passed, you’ve gotta teach yourself how to live without responding to every stick on the ground, and that becomes lessons in self-regulation.
Len McEwen: And so you use things like heart rate variability. You use the basic four, diet, exercise, drink water, take cod liver oil. Those are really important things if you’re gonna come out of this.
Len McEwen: So, I mean, here’s the question: What’s the most effective method of dealing with depression? Any idea? Straightforward answer. Exercise.
Barbara La Pointe: Exercise, wow.
Len McEwen: Exercise. My father was a doctor in Calgary for 55-plus years. If you walked into his office and said, “Oh, Doctor, I’m so depressed,” he’d write you a prescription for a new pair of running shoes.
Barbara La Pointe: He’s a good doctor.
Len McEwen: That’s right. He ran seven miles a day almost every day until he was about 80. And so when you look at how much trauma a doctor carries with him, and he didn’t have any of those symptoms, he was doing something right. I’ve got to tell you, I deal with trauma on a daily basis. I deal with vivid trauma on a monthly basis.
Len McEwen: Compassion fatigue is something I have to be really careful of because just by hearing the story I can traumatize myself. One of the things that often happens in families is we tell the family story and we traumatize our kids as a result of it.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah, that’s true.
Len McEwen: So when we talk about trauma, we have to be really careful what are we talking about.
Len McEwen: Developmental trauma? Trauma as a result of bullying or abuse? I mean, really, what’s the definition of trauma? The definition of trauma is being helpless when faced with a situation that has taken a life or may take a life. Well, if you’re a six-year-old kid, you don’t know what’s gonna take a life.
Len McEwen: All you know is that it’s dangerous.
Barbara La Pointe: Oh, I’m so glad you defined trauma. Just that was good just to get that definition of it, of what trauma is.
Len McEwen: That’s a pretty standard sort of definition.
Len McEwen: So these have been great questions so far. I’ve gone off topic each time. What now?
Andrew Folkler: Well, one thing I was thinking of, just circling back to one of the points you were making when you were talking about neurofeedback was what are some of the patterns you notice in terms of people who are dealing with anxiety, and maybe even in terms of how people are dealing with depression?
Len McEwen: Well, I mean, we could go through a symptom list, but I don’t think that would help because the likelihood of people having an EEG machine in their office or in their home is pretty slim.
Len McEwen: Although, boy, this is gonna become a commercial. Are you aware of a device called a Muse, M-U-S-E?
Andrew Folkler: That I’m not, no.
Len McEwen: Come on. The Muse. Do I have one here? No, I don’t. A Muse is a device that fits across your forehead and behind your ears. It has sensors here on your forehead and behind your ears, and reads your brainwaves and plays them back or plays back a sound, depending on how your brain is performing, to your cellphone.
Len McEwen: Yes. And you too can have one of these for a mere $250 by going to Chapters, Best Buy, or buying online, Amazon.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, isn’t that neurofeedback in a way?
Len McEwen: It is neurofeedback. That’s exactly what it is. Only, you don’t have control or knowledge to help you. This is sort of a one device fits all.
Len McEwen: Whereas if you come and see me, I have 21 sites, and I’m gonna make sure that we do the right thing at the right site. Okay? But I’ve got to tell you, I have vets that are using the Muse on a daily basis. I have worked with and learned from firefighters in British Columbia who have the Muse as a part of the equipment within the fire hall.
Len McEwen: Other devices that are out there that are equally as important are the heart rate variability trainers that are out there now. There’s a number of them. If you read Leah Lagos’s book, she has one that she particularly promotes. I’ve used it. It’s a good unit. But those sorts of things... Let me tell you a story.
Len McEwen: Is it story time?
Barbara La Pointe: Story time.
Len McEwen: It’s gotta be story time. I worked in a school a number of years ago where a young man, this was in rural Alberta, had taken dad’s rifle out to do some, quotes, hunting, quotes, and through a series of events shot and killed his brother, trauma not only for the little boy, but also for the teachers and the support staff and the students that this young man dealt with on a daily basis.
Len McEwen: And I was asked to go in and work with the school. And when I walked in, I found that the teachers were probably more traumatized than anyone. And so we began doing heart rate variability training with the teachers, and then moved to doing heart rate variability training with the kids.
Len McEwen: And then we added in some of the other magic ones: diet, exercise, drink water, take cod liver oil. And so diet, well, they had a lunch program. Exercise, they didn’t really have a gym or anything like that, so they started dancing. And so they would come in in the morning and they’d do their heart rate variability training, and they’d dance or they’d do yoga.
Len McEwen: And that brought self-regulation back to the majority of the students. As a result of that, when I worked up at the Fort McMurray fire, I advocated for the use of heart rate variability monitors within the schools, and the government of Alberta bought 200 units and put them in the schools, and then started a program where they started training trainers so that they could go out into the general community and teach individuals how to self-regulate.
Len McEwen: They did that in Calgary after the floods. This is now, I think, an important component of any form of trauma relief, and yet nobody knows about it. I mean, this is a medical concept, and I work with nurses and sometimes doctors, and they don’t know about it.
Barbara La Pointe: So correct me if I’m wrong, but is this similar to HeartMath?
Len McEwen: Yeah, that’s what it is.
Len McEwen: Okay? But HeartMath is not... HeartMath has got some wonderful qualities about it. They have a research team that does absolutely amazing things. But if you really wanna get into it, read Nestor’s book, and he will give you a background and suggest opportunity to you that is gonna be profound, have an influence on your life that is going to last with you the rest of your days.
Len McEwen: I’ll tell you, I’ve got an individual right now that comes to see me. He read Nestor’s book, and we’d been doing what I call the bells. That’s heart rate variability training, but it’s using my recording. So he’d been doing the bells for about six months. Liked it, got huge benefit from it. Read Nestor’s book, and Nestor says, “Okay, so breathing at pace is pretty important, but try this.
Len McEwen: Try only breathing through your nose because man was not made to breathe through his mouth. And second, when you go to sleep at night, tape your mouth shut just so you breathe through your nose.”
Len McEwen: Now, that’s pretty scary. The impact on this young man was unbelievable.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s amazing.
Len McEwen: So this is, what are we talking about? Stuff that if I was, oh, what would I say? 1,900 years old, some yogi might have taught me in India. This isn’t new. This is all old stuff, but we’re rediscovering it. And as we rediscover it, it’s becoming more and more important to us because it has a better effect than in many cases than a lot of medications, et cetera.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, I think you’re hitting the nail on the head because trauma’s a fact of life, and it seems to me many of us are seeking relief from trauma.
Barbara La Pointe: But it’s almost like how do you find relief? As if it’s esoteric topic.
Len McEwen: So if you came to see me, I’m gonna give away all my secrets. Anybody who is potentially gonna come and see me as a client, don’t listen to this. Okay, now I’ll tell you. If you’re gonna come and see me, the first thing I’m gonna teach you is heart rate variability training.
Len McEwen: Then I’m going to assess you for diet, exercise, drink water, take cod liver oil, especially the cod liver oil part. Then we’re gonna work out a program for you so that you can do heart rate variability training at least 20 minutes a day, usually in the morning. If you’re going to be a professional athlete, Leah Lagos says it should be 40 minutes a day. And so you move from there.
Len McEwen: If you want to take a look at... Oh, sorry, from there we do neurofeedback. I do an assessment and then we do neurofeedback. But if you wanna take a look at who believes in this heart rate variability training, for instance, search YouTube for neurofeedback Vancouver Olympics. The first thing that they teach in this video is heart rate variability training.
Len McEwen: The second thing is neurofeedback.
Barbara La Pointe: So all of this can be done with children?
Len McEwen: Yeah.
Barbara La Pointe: And so do you think there’s merit in a mother or a parent figure doing neurofeedback and regulating her nervous system, and then that will then tumble down to her daughter or her child?
Len McEwen: Yes.
Barbara La Pointe: Does their brain sync up, I guess, is where I’m going.
Barbara La Pointe: Do their brains sync up?
Len McEwen: No, but they’re attached. And so if mom is all of a sudden calm and the child is old enough to see what’s going on, kids are great sponges. SpongeBob SquarePants just sucks everything up. So they will be mimicking mom, or they will be mimicking dad. And if dad’s wandering around the house yelling at everything and kicking and all the rest of it, that’s what he’s gonna do.
Len McEwen: But if mom and dad are around the house and they’re doing their breathing and they’re watching their diets and they’re doing all of that good stuff, what’s the kid gonna do? If the kid is attached to them, he’s gonna do that.
Andrew Folkler: Actually, I think that would also help in high-conflict divorces as well, considering if, as a parent, you’re self-regulating and not letting yourself be worked up too much.
Len McEwen: See, you don’t wanna get sucked in. My wife deals with high-conflict divorces all the time. Do you know how much the average divorce costs in Alberta right now if you go to court?
Barbara La Pointe: I’d love to know. I only know.
Len McEwen: About 30,000. That’s just legal fees and court fees. So now, if you wanna get something out of your ex, boy, I hope he’s rich, ‘cause he’s just paid a chunk of money, or you’ve just paid a chunk of money, and either one or both of you are living in poverty with your family.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s a sobering reality that most people don’t realize before they begin divorce, that that could happen to them.
Len McEwen: That’s right. Not only could it happen, it is likely to happen. In the majority of divorce cases right now, people are self-representing in front of court because they can’t afford legal fees.
Len McEwen: In Calgary, there is a social worker and a lawyer who have come together to try and teach people how to self-represent themselves in front of the courts, simply because they wanna stop some of the bleeding that’s going on.
Len McEwen: So, I mean, this is a huge, huge area if you wanna talk of trauma and kids.
Barbara La Pointe: We do.
Len McEwen: So I think that’s an important topic, but it’s not a money topic ‘cause I’m not sure that parents are really predisposed to spending money on children.
Barbara La Pointe: How do you mean?
Len McEwen: Well, if you walk into my office and say, “I’ve got a kid who has severe attention deficit disorder,” and I do an assessment and it comes back and it’s true, the kid has severe attention deficit disorder, and I say, “Well, you really have two choices here.
Len McEwen: You can go and see a doctor and he’ll put him on a medication cocktail, or you can do neurofeedback. If you’re gonna do neurofeedback, it’s probably gonna take between 20 and 40 sessions and cost you someplace between 3 and $6,000.” What are they gonna do?
Andrew Folkler: Pump him with Ritalin is usually what they do, ‘cause they want a silver bullet.
Andrew Folkler: There’s also a bit of gatekeeping from insurance and the pharmaceutical industry as well.
Len McEwen: Absolutely, but those of us who do neurofeedback, many of us, belong to an organization called the International Society for Neuromodulation and Research. And that organization has produced a white paper that summarizes the research in neurofeedback for insurance companies, and more and more we’re starting to see them being willing to pay.
Len McEwen: Because once you do neurofeedback, for instance, it’s done. You don’t ever go back. There is no refill. It’s like heart rate variability training. Once you do that, your body adjusts to it. And yet we don’t do that.
Barbara La Pointe: Exactly. So earlier you...
Len McEwen: But this isn’t as straightforward as you thought it was going to be, is it?
Andrew Folkler: Never is, no.
Barbara La Pointe: We’re down the rabbit hole with you, Len.
Len McEwen: Speaking of that, as I look out my window, there are four rabbits on our front lawn.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, we... There’s no coincidences in this non-coin- coincidental universe.
Barbara La Pointe: So I’m gathering that trauma is a fact of life, but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence.
Barbara La Pointe: And earlier you had mentioned children that may have developmental trauma, and how might a mom or dad know if their child was traumatized through a high-conflict divorce or otherwise?
Len McEwen: They probably know. They probably don’t want to admit it, but the child’s behavior will give it away.
Barbara La Pointe: Fair enough.
Len McEwen: Okay, so the usual sorts of things, anger, lack of concentration, poor memory, stuff like that.
Andrew Folkler: So I imagine that first step for a parent that does wanna take action would be to admit that they screwed up somewhere along the line and take responsibility for it. What would a parent do next then?
Len McEwen: Well, it depends on where they live. And I hate to say this, and who’s offering what services.
Len McEwen: If they live in rural Alberta, they’re hooped. They really have got to probably wait until a summer period or something like that when the kids are out of school and they can come into the city and work with somebody who does neurofeedback.
Len McEwen: If not, then they should go and make use of medication, although my experience is a lot of the kids will quit taking the meds.
Len McEwen: If they have a neurofeedback practitioner in the community, I’d make sure that practitioner at least is a member of ISNR, International Society for Neuromodulation and Research.
Len McEwen: There are a number of designations that one can get for various types of neurofeedback, et cetera. Those are nice, but the important thing is that you be connected to a group like ISNR, and they should insist on that. They should also, by the way, insist that the practitioner that they go to be a registered healthcare professional, because I have found more and more that massage parlors and places like that are picking up inexpensive neurofeedback equipment, not knowing what they’re doing with it, charging people a great deal of money, and producing no results.
Len McEwen: So I say that, I had a woman come and see me and say, “What’s neurofeedback?” And so I said, “Well, here I’ll show you.” I showed her a little video clip and stuff like that. And she said, “Well, I went and saw so and so because I needed neurofeedback, and I was never assessed.
Len McEwen: Nobody ever put any leads on my scalp. I never saw anything that I was supposed to respond to, and I got three sessions for $1,000.”
Len McEwen: When I heard that, I just about flipped out. But it’s like the computer business. Remember, no, you’re too young to remember this. When microcomputers came out, everybody was a computer expert.
Len McEwen: And there are lots of businesses that really suffered because they had some yahoo sell them a computer that didn’t work for their business. So neurofeedback has been around since the mid-1950s. I’ve been associated with it one way or another since 1996. So that’s a chunk of professional time.
Barbara La Pointe: So I’m just curious, would neurofeedback work on any brain?
Len McEwen: I don’t know. I could... Turn your head sideways, let me look in your ear.
Barbara La Pointe: There’s some space there.
Len McEwen: No, I think we found the first one it won’t work on.
Barbara La Pointe: I wouldn’t doubt it.
Len McEwen: No, it’ll work on any brain. If you’ve got Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s or something, the effect may not be exactly what you had hoped for, but it’ll still... For senior citizens, it’s called brain brightening, and there’s a bunch of literature on how it affects senior citizens.
Barbara La Pointe: Is it opening up new neural pathways?
Len McEwen: Well, it... I guess that’s one way of looking at it. Neuroplasticity is what we’re talking... But you’re asking what is it used for? Well, I have an 80% success rate with addictions. 8-0. The average success rate in residential settings is 7%.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s phenomenal.
Len McEwen: So I have a really good track record with autism. It’s not that I make the person normal, but I get rid of a bunch of the behaviors that detract from that person having a happy life. We’re talking quality of life. And the same is true with people with Down syndrome, stuff like that.
Len McEwen: There’s more and more of that literature that is coming out. The problem that we have is there’s not enough money to pay for it. If you’ve got a Down syndrome kid or an autistic kid, and you have coped with him, unless you’re very fortunate and your partner makes a lot of money, you’re probably just about burnt out and you’ve put almost every nickel you have into the care of your kid anyway.
Len McEwen: And that’s a part of the heartbreak that I face every day.
Barbara La Pointe: That is heartbreaking.
Len McEwen: It is. It really is. So that was a good question. Did I answer it? I can’t remember.
Andrew Folkler: I think we did.
Barbara La Pointe: Would you like to pose any of your own questions with respect to trauma, especially for families that are traumatized in the court system?
Len McEwen: Don’t go to court. I mean, if you’re seriously gonna break up with your partner, sit down with your partner and write out an agreement between the two of you. And the only time you see a lawyer is to say, “Have I done something here that is right out in left field? Shouldn’t do it.” And if he says, “No, but this isn’t in your best interest, and that isn’t in your best interest,” you have to recognize that you negotiated the agreement, and so there are bound to be things that aren’t in your best interest that you gave up to get other things that you wanted more.
Len McEwen: And then take that from the lawyers to the court and ask for a divorce. Don’t fight about time with the kids. Time with the kids, I mean, under Alberta law, and I think this is true in most provinces now, both parents have to be involved in the parenting plans for their kids. Both parents have to be involved in providing financially for the kids.
Len McEwen: So fighting about how much time you’ve got with the kids is sort of pointless. Besides that, I can tell you from better experience that 12 years after they leave you, they’ll phone up and ask you what happened, and you wanna be able to say, “I did my best to keep the family together or to provide as well as I could for you, making sure that you and my other children were okay.”
Len McEwen: You don’t wanna say, “Oh, that SOB, my ex-partner, da, da, da, da, da,” because that just prolongs the traumatic response.
Andrew Folkler: It makes sense. I mean, in reference to one of the topics Barbara and I talk about a lot is something known as parental alienation. And one of the more common things that is spoken about is once the kid is of age, there’s a certain wait period before some of them make a trip back.
Andrew Folkler: And in many cases, it really does depend on how that estranged parent reacts to that initial meetup, considering that sometimes, if they stick to their more unregulated emotional ways, then the child starts to say, “Well, was nice talking. I’m gonna get out of here.” And obviously the more regulated parents are able to start reestablishing that relationship.
Len McEwen: And I think the other thing that’s really important too is that a part of the parent’s job is to provide the child with a set of values and behaviors that are appropriate for a child, not appropriate for an adult.
Len McEwen: And so you gotta teach your kid that it’s all right to go and play. These days, kids don’t play. They don’t go outside and interact with others.
Len McEwen: It’s one of the things that really distresses me. We’ve got helicopter parents all over the place.
Len McEwen: And the helicopter parent isn’t developing the child to be the best that they can be.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s true.
Len McEwen: Absolutely. See it every day. Poor kid comes in, sits down with me, and it’s the first time he’s had a break from his parents. When I was a kid, I used to get up in the morning, pull on my pants, have a piece of toast, and I was gone until dinner time or until the city turned on the streetlights.
Len McEwen: These days, if the child isn’t within 15 feet of the parent, there’s a problem.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, that’s very true, actually. Very true.
Len McEwen: And if you take a look at it, most of the parents say, “Oh, I’m afraid that my daughter will be picked up and raped.” And if you look at the statistics, the likelihood of that happening, I think, are less than the likelihood that your child will get COVID.
Barbara La Pointe: I think there’s more online dangers, actually, than actual physical dangers.
Len McEwen: Now you’ve opened a can of worms, what every parent should do.
Barbara La Pointe: Tell us.
Len McEwen: Should take the television and boot it out the front door. Take all of the laptops and tablets and cell phones and put them in a locked box except for one hour a day.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s very radical for most people to hear, I would guess.
Len McEwen: For people to hear, but if you take a look at some of the intellectual leaders in the world, Bill Gates, that’s how his family works. What’s the guy on Facebook?
Andrew Folkler: Mark Zuckerberg.
Len McEwen: Zuckerberg, that’s how his family behaves.
Len McEwen: Absolutely. You go take a look at some of the historical documents and video on CNN and see what digital addiction is doing to our kids. It’s pretty awful.
Andrew Folkler: Well, and then in context, I imagine it provides a great deal of escapism from whatever ails them at the moment.
Len McEwen: Absolutely. It’s just like taking heroin.
Len McEwen: It tickles all the pleasure centers.
Len McEwen: And so, I mean, one of the things that I think is really unfortunate is that kids don’t come with owner’s manuals. There was a guy by the name of Ray Verge who was a civil servant in the government of Alberta. He worked in culture, youth, and recreation, and he proposed developing a passport for children as they turned into adulthood to fill in all the gaps that parents most often miss. And the passport would have not only information in it, but it would have coupons so that they could go bowling, or they could go, I don’t know, pick a sport, any sport.
Len McEwen: They could go and see an opera. Stuff that kids don’t do these days.
Barbara La Pointe: Even more so right now in the times we’re living in of COVID.
Len McEwen: Absolutely. But you take a look at the struggling artists. I mean, the ESO, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, puts out a newsletter every Friday trying to attract me to some of their things.
Len McEwen: I think they’re brilliant. We need them to be doing that. Unfortunately, I haven’t been in a position where I had time to take to involve myself in some of their opportunities.
Len McEwen: You ask about what do we do for self-regulation? Well, one of the things that we do for self-regulation is music.
Len McEwen: But what kind of music do we listen to these days?
Andrew Folkler: So it’s a wide variety, a wide myriad depending on.
Len McEwen: Well, there isn’t a whole lot of nice, calm, quiet church music, right? Why is that important? Well, it’s important because it helps us regulate ourselves. You asked for what’s one of my quick fixes for anxiety.
Len McEwen: It’s a piece of music sung by either the Tallis Scholars or The Sixteen called Miserere by Allegri. Right?
Len McEwen: Beautiful. It’s a beautiful piece. 12 minutes long.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. And the high C that Mendelssohn put in there is fantastic. It’s a wonderful work.
Len McEwen: Of art. Wonderful piece of music.
Len McEwen: It’s 12 minutes long. You get to sit back with all the lights dimmed down, a candle burning in front of you, a glass of red wine, and some liverwurst on crackers.
Andrew Folkler: And the story is always fascinating to me. For context, Mozart was given the rare opportunity, I think it was, to enter in and hear the piece.
Andrew Folkler: But he was not allowed to notate it because the church deemed it not fit for public ears.
Andrew Folkler: And Mozart listened to it once. I think he was a single digit, right? He had a.
Len McEwen: Photographic memory for music he just wrote it down.
Andrew Folkler: And he was really young, I mean, still into single digits, and he transcribed the entire piece. And then later Mendelssohn, I think was working on it, and he made a few adjustments or a few mistakes or something like that, and that’s where the high C came in.
Len McEwen: And now there has been an original manuscript of it found in the 16 are singing the original.
Len McEwen: And it is equally as lovely. But I had a fella come and see me once. He was so anxious, he was just right beside himself. And so I did a bit of hypnosis with him, and I thought it worked fairly well. And he came back and he says, “Oh, I’m going nuts.” And I said, “Okay.” And I gave him my copy of the 16 singing, Miserere.
Len McEwen: And you know what Miserere translates to? My sin, my sin, my terrible sin.
Len McEwen: Right? It’s the 51st Psalm. Well, his anxiety was because he was, in modern moral eyes, a bit of a sinner. Anyway, I gave it to him and I said, “Listen to this.” And he came back about six months later and he said, “Well, I got a bone to pick with you, McEwen.”
Len McEwen: I said, “Why?” And he says, “Because I have now worn out three CDs of Miserere, and my staff won’t talk to me because I play it constantly in the office.”
Len McEwen: Right? Those sorts of things bring the emotional level down to a place where we can cope. So now I’m gonna have to get royalties from whoever produces CDs, heart math, muse.
Len McEwen: What else?
Barbara La Pointe: You mentioned one to me when we were talking once, and it was called the Calm app.
Len McEwen: Oh, there’s a Calm app, yeah. There’s lots of those. But you have to really watch them because some of them are based on false premises. Calm is supposed to be really good. I don’t use it. I use what I’ve created because I’ve created it for a special purpose, period.
Len McEwen: Calm is a generic thing, really nice stuff, but not for me. In my practice, I want them to use what I call the bells, and the reason I want them to use the bells is because I know what the effect of the bells are.
Barbara La Pointe: Great. Very nice. Any other pearls of wisdom you’d like to share with us with respect to trauma before we bring this conversation to a close?
Len McEwen: What do you mean, we’re finished?
Barbara La Pointe: Oh, God.
Len McEwen: We can’t be finished.
Barbara La Pointe: How have you... On again. We’re finished.
Andrew Folkler: Oh, no. Yeah, we definitely have to bring you on.
Len McEwen: More. Words of wisdom.
Len McEwen: Yeah, don’t put it off. Do it. You have to remember Coué’s law. Coué’s law goes like this: in a contest between willpower and imagination, imagination always wins. You cannot will yourself to do something you can’t imagine yourself doing. So if you’re in a situation where everything is emotionally emotive, start listening to Miserere and imagining yourself not in that position so that your body will begin to emanate behavior that is not emotionally emotive.
Len McEwen: So what does that mean to you? Well, I can... One of the great philosophers of our time, Yoda. What’s his favorite expression?
Andrew Folkler: Do. There is no try.
Len McEwen: There is no try. There is only do. Why? Because as soon as you say try, you give your brain an excuse for failure, right? So you have to do. Do. I’m gonna do my homework.
Len McEwen: I’m gonna try and do my math. Guess what? You don’t care about your math. So the brain can’t tell the difference between reality and imagination. Whether you believe it or not, if you say something to the brain, it will take it as truth. So Coué got a group of students together, split them in two groups.
Len McEwen: The experimental group and the control group were matched for athletics, academics, and social ability. Those three things. Controls went off and they did whatever controls do, and the experimental, he had do one thing 20 times a day. At the end of the experimental period, which I think was 60 days, brought them back together and reassessed each of them.
Len McEwen: The experimental group beat the control group in every measure that he tried. Now, for 20 bucks I’ll tell you what he told them. No, I’ll just tell you. Geez. He told them to say to themselves, “Every day and in every way, I’m getting better and better.” That’s it. Say that to yourself 20 times a day. The brain doesn’t have to believe it.
Len McEwen: You just have to say it. So here’s the final nugget, right? Everybody is interested in losing weight and being fit. So this university, I can’t remember which one it is, designed an experiment to strengthen the weakest muscle in the body, which is your little finger. And they designed an apparatus where they put a pipe here and a glove for the rest of the hand.
Len McEwen: So you put your hand in the glove, and then you strengthen that finger against the pipe for half an hour a day. So again, two groups, experimental and control. They measured them both before and they measured them after. So they’ve done this... Now, the experimental had the pipe. The control group just thought about doing it.
Len McEwen: Didn’t do it, just thought about it. At the end of the experimental period, the experimental group increased the strength of that muscle. I think it was 35 or 38%. Pretty good. The control group who just thought about it, didn’t do it, just thought about it, increased their strength 18%.
Len McEwen: So do you realize what that means to the fitness industry? I’m gonna open fitness centers that have nothing but La-Z-Boy chairs.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, it always amazed me when I used to work out and my trainer would help me to lift a weight, but after I lifted it, she’d said I wasn’t even touching the bar. But just the thought of her touching the bar would allow me to power up and lift it.
Len McEwen: There are lots of experiments like that. We don’t make use of any of that. If you’re gonna be an Olympic athlete, one of the things that they teach you is visualization. My COVID project is to learn how to play the banjo. So I hear in my mind the tunes that I’m trying to play, right?
Len McEwen: All of that is helpful to us. How much of that do any of us do? Not very much. All right, just a sec now. Well, I don’t have a pocket, so I’m out of nuggets.
Barbara La Pointe: That means you’ll have to come back on another day, Len.
Len McEwen: Well, I don’t know. This has been so taxing. I wonder how many lies I told you.
Andrew Folkler: All righty, Len, if people wanted to contact you or reach out to you, what would be the best way to do so?
Len McEwen: Well, I have three websites. They could go to any one of the three websites. One of them is bereavementsupport.net, one of them is Highlander Counseling and Mediation, and one of them is Trauma Alberta.
Len McEwen: And my email address is on all of those sites. Just send me an email.
Len McEwen: And if they’re really nice, if they say wonderful things about me and how they really enjoyed this interview, I’ll send them a copy of The Bells, and I’ll throw in a copy of Trauma Informed Yoga that was developed for the firefighters in British Columbia.
Len McEwen: What a bonus.
Barbara La Pointe: I would personally love either of those bonuses, so that is incredible.
Len McEwen: Send me your emails.
Barbara La Pointe: Awesome. Thank you.
Len McEwen: Not a problem.
Andrew Folkler: All righty, everyone, that is all we have time for today. Once again, thank you for taking the time to be with us. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel, either on YouTube or through our podcast through the various podcast streams.
Andrew Folkler: Don’t forget, we include a downloadable document below summarizing all the golden nuggets that Len has shared with us today for your loved ones to help you deal with these challenges of trauma, anxiety, and depression. Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way to do so?
Barbara La Pointe: Barbara@barbaralapointe.com.
Andrew Folkler: If you wanna reach me, you can email me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. As always, thank you for taking the time to be with us at the Broken Families Podcast, where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships.
Andrew Folkler: Have a wonderful day, everyone.