With the establishment of a data base that reflects the results of long-term psychophysiological training, a number of implications for the field of psychology have arisen.
I suspect that the dichotomy between two major schools of psychology, behaviorism and humanistic psychology, may be traced to the fact that each school places its emphasis on a different level of consciousness. While behaviorism focuses exclusively on behavior that is observable and measurable, humanistic psychology interests itself with experience as it occurs and is perceived within the individual.
Behaviorism focuses on manifestations of autonomic consciousness which, by their nature, occur apart from epiphenomenal occurrences such as intention, motivation, spirituality, and self-actualization. To a somewhat lesser degree, the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud, Adler, and Jung "all wound up with biologically demanding needs violated or neglected early in life" (Maslow, 1966, p. 124), and presuppose that "the most real self consists of needs, wishes, impulses and instinct-like desires" (Maslow, 1966, p. 124) which I suggest are characteristic of autonomic consciousness.
Humanistic psychological tradition explores the human condition from the aspect of individual experience and all that it entails, including emotion, and the higher human motives, self-development, knowledge, understanding, spirituality and aesthetics. I suggest that these concerns are characteristic of secondary consciousness.
Another interesting development is the discovery that the personality is not a static, unchanging entity, but is client to self-control and change as a result of prolonged education and training in biofeedback modalities. Traditionally, psychology has viewed the personality as an enduring aspect of the individual, and traditional psychotherapy is generally aimed at management of problematic aspects of personality rather than absolute change.
Analysis of data produced through long-term training conducted at the Bio Research Institute has revealed acute and chronic physiological levels of activity in individuals that may reflect practice and reinforcement of problematic behaviors on a cellular level. Further, some individuals exhibit a periodicity in their psychophysiological measures. This suggests that the physiology of the individual, as well as cognitive patterns, generates behavior.
If psychological conditions previously considered to be chronic can be affected by long-term psychophysiological education and training, as described in Chapter 5, the therapeutic implications are significant. For example, it is possible that individuals may improve their quality of life by greatly diminishing or eliminating psychophysiological disorders through such training. It is also possible that individuals who have heretofore been forced to rely on lifelong drug therapy to prevent life-disrupting episodes, will be able to modify their psychophysiologies so that such drug dependency will be significantly reduced or no longer be necessary. The alliance of advanced psychophysiological training with appropriate medical cooperation could provide a framework for carrying this out.
The data from advanced mind/body training have suggested that psychological attributes are mapped to physiology. Initially, the negative ones appear to stand out more, perhaps because physiological measurements generally appear in terms of magnitude of activity within systems, and I generally associate negative attributes with greater magnitude (excessive activity) while positive attributes generally seem to have lesser magnitude. Presenting complaints are usually associated with excessive activity in one or more systems.
One of the most startling characteristics of the data provided by extended training is the periodicity that appears in some clients' physiological patterns. This raises a question: Where do these periodic patterns originate? One answer may be that they are related to dysfunction in the person's family -perhaps the modeling of psychophysiological patterns of activity by family members promotes the development of corresponding patterns in the person exposed to the model.
For example, the child whose parent engages in binge drinking every Friday night, becoming subsequently abusive, develops a "psychophysiological strategy for survival" to cope with this phenomenon. This strategy involves a noncognitive development of specialized physiological activity that provides protection and soothing, which is utilized every Friday night. Even though the child may leave this situation, or the parent may work his or her way out of alcoholism, the child may well carry this psychophysiological strategy for survival into adulthood.
In addition, the notion of psychophysiological periodicity suggests that studying the habituated cellular structure associated with the behavior of the criminal and drug-using population might provide part of the answer to the problems of recidivism and sociopathy unamenable to rehabilitation. Traditional rehabilitation is exclusively a social and intellectual effort -- the psychophysiology of the individual is not addressed. Rehabilitative efforts including a psychophysiological dimension might alter the distressing numbers of criminals who seem unable to "break the habit" of criminal behavior.
This possibility is particularly exciting since observation of long-term training suggests that established cellular relationships are interrupted and new ones become possiblepeople who have undergone extended mind/body training tend to make "good choices" without particular guidance from the trainer/therapist, as their consciousness is freed from the effects of chronic activation and sustained dysfunctional patterns.
Certain evolutionary programs such as the "fight or flight" response that once served to provide human beings with the responses necessary for self-protection in a challenging physical environment are today the root cause of a reduced quality of life as well as many stress-related illnesses. These illnesses often respond to biofeedback training as individuals learn to self-regulate the systems involved.
In addition, extended training provides benefits that go beyond symptom reduction. These benefits include relieving the brain of two burdens: 1) maintaining a constant habitual level of arousal, and 2) trying to bring mind/body systems into appropriate homeostasis after inappropriate arousal.
Clients who have engaged in long-term biofeedback training at BRI have reported making significant life changes that they might never have considered previous to training. These changes have tended to be in the direction of assuming more responsibility for their own welfare and taking prudent risks, i.e., one client decided to become self-employed -- to pursue a course of "right livelihood" -- instead of continuing to work at a job where he was unhappy but which he had felt too insecure to leave. Although he initially began biofeedback training in response to a purely physical symptom (tension headache and hypertension), he was able to take what he had learned and extend it to other aspects of his life.
I have observed that clients who have successfully relieved presenting symptoms and gained control over body systems previously thought to be beyond conscious regulation are more inclined to assume broader responsibility for their well being in other aspects of their lives. This feeling of empowerment, coupled with increased energy due to a reduction in the energy required to maintain previous levels of arousal, has encouraged many clients at BRI to make more "right choices" in their lives.
Extended mind/body training provides a number of ancillary benefits that enhance the individual's ability to deal with many aspects of life. They include:
Feelings and emotions occur in the body and the mind simultaneously and indivisibly, yet throughout life we learn to cognize our feelings as soon as we have them, shifting our experience to the cognitive realm as we judge whether or not the feeling is appropriate, justified, or safe to express. In extreme cases, people have decoupled entirely from their feelings and perceive their existence through mental processes alone (alexithymia). When we do this often enough, we tend to lose our initial ability to experience a feeling on an emotional level; we distance ourselves from it by translating it instantly into an intellectual phenomenon.
The BRI protocol for comprehensive psychophysiological evaluations and training offers more than an opportunity to gain a clearer perspective of the way an individual's mind and body systems are currently operating. The comprehensive evaluation provides a means of looking back in time, both in the individual's life and in the life of the species.
The variability of psychophysiological measures across clients indicates that each person creates a specialization of the genetic design for coping with stress. These strategies may be traced back to the prenatal period, in which the developing child responds to the mother's psychophysiological condition and thus establishes its own coping mechanisms in response to its environment. The infant carries this strategy into childhood, adapting it in accordance with the specific influences that affect the child during this developmental period.
Cellular memory determines our characteristic psychophysiological condition and the way in which we respond to internal and external stimulus, frequently without the conscious knowledge of the person involved. Examining the activity as represented in the comprehensive evaluation and during training reveals what may be called the psychophysiological memory of events that have occurred in the life of the individual and influenced his or her development. Of course, this activity also represents the species design for coping with such influences, including the fight or flight response.
Analysis of sufficient data may eventually allow us to look at comprehensive evaluations and training experiences and derive information on specific traumas that occurred during the individual's early development. Lack of awareness of these traumas (perhaps resulting from repression) can undermine a person's self-actualization process. If a clinician were to observe psychophysiological activity that was indicative of significant childhood trauma of which the individual reported no awareness, it would be possible in an appropriate setting to bring this information to light at such a time and in such a way that the person could integrate it.
I suspect that in the future it will also be possible to extend this tool to the point where we will be able to reconstruct not only the kind of environment in which an individual developed, but the evolutionary strategies for survival and development that shaped the human species.