Adler Graduate School Workshop on Using Biofeedback in Clinical Counseling

Adding biofeedback to your clinical practice increases the range and intensity of problems you address. Biofeedback of various types produces very strong responses in most people. Most clients experience a new sense of themselves and their symptoms when using biofeedback. For example, instead of the mysterious headache, the person getting muscle tension biofeedback recognizes that their head aches because they habitually clench their jaw, lift their eyebrows, or frown. This tension is made visible and concrete on the computer screen.

There is often a powerful effect on parents of children with anxiety, ASD, and other disorders of childhood when for the first time they really see the emotional reactivity their child has, made manifest and concrete with biofeedback. Biofeedback becomes part of what we do to help people turn toward useful thinking about their situation.

This workshop gives you the basic skills to be able to use electromyographic (muscle tension), thermal (skin temperature), galvanic skin response (skin sweatiness), and heart rate variability biofeedback. You see demonstrations of each of these biofeedback modalities and volunteers can try them out. You are also introduced to the methods, concepts and instrumentation needed to use electroencephalographic biofeedback (neurofeedback) safely and effectively.