Sense of Soul - The Cluster F*ck Brain

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

Today on Sense of Soul podcast we have, Connie McReynolds, PhD, she is a licensed psychologist, professor, certified rehabilitation counselor and  podcast host of Roadmap to the Brain. She has a proven track record of improved symptoms related  to ADHD, anxiety, anger, panic disorder, conduct disorder, depression, chronic pain, cognitive  decline, trauma and PTSD using Neurofeedback. These corrective programs can be performed in clinic  or remotely. She also consults with parents and schools on government or district-sponsored or mandated  programs. She is the author of Solving the ADHD Riddle: The Real Cause and Lasting Solutions to Your Child’s Struggle to Learn,  a #1 Amazon bestseller in eight categories, is available on Amazon.com. Learn more at www.conniemcreynolds.com  Visit www.senseofsoulpodcast.com

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world, sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we have Dr. Connie McReynolds. She's a licensed psychologist, professor, certified rehabilitation counselor, and the podcast host of Roadmap to Brain.

She is also the author of Solving the ADHD Riddle, The Real Cause and Lasting Solutions to Your Child's Struggle to Learn, which I can very much relate because this is something that I struggle with. So please welcome Dr. Connie McReynolds. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited. I need you. I have ADHD. Throughout the years, I've done a lot of cognitive therapy. I did a lot of mindfulness. It's kind of what set me off on my spiritual journey, just learning how to be present. But yeah, so I would love to learn about you and how you fell into this work. Do you struggle yourself ever or with anyone? I haven't, but as you know, I talked about in the book, my mom, you know, taught second grade for 32

years. So I kind of saw a lot of it coming up in the world. And it just, and my background kind of saw a lot of it coming up in the world and it just, and my background kind of dragged me into this, like one could say. My professional career. So. Well, you know, thank God for people who are curious because they're the ones who are out there trying to figure out, you know, how to help people, you know, and live successfully, even if they have different ways of experiencing the world, you know? Absolutely.

And, you know, I did get your book, Solving the ADHD Riddle, and I found that there was a lot of things within the book that helped me learn a bit about myself as well as my daughter, my youngest daughter, who I'm kind of going through trying to understand what she needs in school, you know, to help her be a successful child, because she's very intelligent. She just learns a little differently and needs accommodations, which a lot of kids do. They do. And unfortunately, of course, schools are a little limited in what they're doing these days, in my opinion. So you probably get a little bit of my education background here. I respect what's going on in the educational systems, but I also believe we've got to retool this.

Yeah. You know, I was not as aware with my older children. It's something that I talk about often because, you know, because of the huge, I mean, my oldest young is 15 years apart. You know, I've grown so much. But the school system to me now today doesn't really sit right with me in so many ways. And this younger generation is really, really aware as well. And so, you know, they're little advocates for themselves too, as well for the world. And yeah, but you know, I had to fight for, you know, some of the things, you know, that have been beneficial

for my children, like the 504, not really really fight for it but no one was ever going to recognize it in her like I had to as a parent right first well and I think that's a lot of the challenge that parents are running into with schools is that they know their child better than the school does. And yet their opinions and their knowledge isn't always well received, appropriately received or honored or valued. And so there becomes this push pull between parents and teachers. And that's really kind of a secondary aim of this work is to help get rid of some of that push-pull. Because if everyone can get on the same page and understand what's going on with this particular child, then everyone's pulling together instead of kind of pulling apart.

And that's what I'm seeing so much of is this kind of pulling apart. It's kind of a rarity, but I will have to qualify this because obviously i'm not working with everyone on the planet so there could be situations and places that it's working very well which is why i don't ever hear about it so just to be fair you know that could be there but i suspect that it's more the children who are able to fend for themselves and do well in class that uh parents don't necessarily have to encounter this. And those children who are struggling more are the ones where the parents do encounter this and trying to advocate and find pathways, you know, for their child to succeed and not get

labeled or discouraged or put down. And so many parent stories over the 15 years that have come in my doors are just troubling at some level and sad at others. But you know, the parents persevere. And, you know, even with legal intervention, sometimes there are areas that don't want to respect that for some strange reason. I kind of find it baffling that, you know, we have all these federal regulations that stipulate, at least for public schools, what they're supposed to do, without a lot of pushback. They're not really supposed to be giving a lot of pushback to this. They're really supposed to be collaborative in finding solutions. And it's the pushback that I find particularly, I guess, intriguing at some level, but frustrating at another for my world as well. But this assessment and I can get the kind of data that I

know represents the child, then I'm more than willing to help advocate, writing a letter of advocacy, whatever it might be, to help parents be able to, you know, navigate with the school district perhaps a little bit better. I've worked with some attorneys as well on kind of how do you look at this. And a lot of attorneys are well versed on this. And so my assessment data can come along because it's much more concise than what some of the other assessments are provided. The ones at school, I think, are kind of very traditional is how I view them. And, you know, this is very evidence-based data that doesn't take that long to get to. So I get to it in under an hour. There's so many kids that are suffering. So there's a lot to be researched. Well, there really is. And with this work,

what I'm finding is that, you know, we can really dial in on these 37 areas of auditory and visual processing, as well as some membrane conceptualization and sequencing. And I get that in an hour with children and adults. So this applies to adults the same as it does to children. Just so your listeners know that our youngest is three, but our oldest is 93. So I cover everything in between. And I have a neurofeedback station embedded in a retirement center in a county here.

So, you know, we can help a lot of folks. We really focused on the book with children because I felt like it's such a critical place. If we can really help turn this narrative in a different direction to one of collaboration and investigation, instead of maybe blaming, shaming or complaining, kind of the three we talk about. You know, if we can stay away from those three and really focus on where do we need to go? What does this child actually need in order to succeed?

And when we can focus on that, then I think everyone can pull together. It's like, well, what's in the best interest of this child? You know, do we need some one-on-one instruction in the classroom and how do we provide that? If this is good, you know, will the neurofeedback be a solution for some? And I can do that remotely.

I can do it here in my clinics. So we have capability to really help people kind of wherever they sit. I'm really careful about some certain aspects of this because I don't get into a lot of diagnosis. And there's a good reason for that. My background comes from rehabilitation counseling and rehabilitation psychology. And certainly diagnostic criteria can have some benefit. But what I find is it can also have some real limitations and detriment to people. So I far more prefer to focus on really what is, you know, the underlying causal factors of what we're seeing, what children are experiencing. Wow, I love that. And, you were speaking, I mean, I really wish that I would have been diagnosed as a child. It would have made life so much easier. I mean, school so much easier. Oh,

my Lord. And what came up for me, space cadet, airhead, lazy, a lack of motivation. These are the things that I heard from the outside. Not paying attention, right? Lack of interest, anxiety. In fact, I was just talking to my oldest daughter who was diagnosed with ADHD in middle school. And in middle school, when she was diagnosed, we didn't quite get the support that we needed so much, but at least we had gotten the diagnosis. But when she got to high school and we did the 504, everyone came and sat with us at this table. And basically they said to her, what can we do to help you live up to your potential as a student here? I know for myself, I mean, it was almost emotional to have other adults care about my child. And I know she felt supported.

And really there was only a few things that she needed. And those things really helped her. And she also was an AVID. Are you familiar with AVID? Yes. So, and that really helped her too, because AVID holds you accountable to certain things. So like she had to do binder checks every week. She had to learn how to write in her planner. These are all things that, oh my gosh, I think every child should learn, not just Avid. But I mean, she became so successful using all of these tools. She learned tools. And she also learned how to advocate for herself. Even in college, she advocated her 504. We didn't shame

her on it. And I feel like she's one of the most successful results of what can happen if you learn tools and to advocate for yourself. It's absolutely very important. And that is an example of, you know, a school, a team coming together in the right way. So I love to hear those stories, because obviously, I'm kind of on the other end of it. Where I hear we've got an attorney, and they still they've got all the data, they have all the assessments, and they're still saying no, they just flat out say, No, we're not going to do this and it's like this is public school and you don't get to say no that's so sad to me because you know to see how successful lindsey has been and she learned she still uses all those tools every day and she's also been able to just

kind of be honest with herself that i learn a little differently than you do. So this is what I need. And so that does kind of help my youngest daughter. And I know with autism, it tends to be more males than female. Is there something with gender where with ADHD? I don't think so. Okay. Well, because what I have come down to kind of realize and understand over the years is I think boys are more obvious. Okay. I would say that everything is. They're more obvious with what they're dealing with and the frustration because it's we're still, you know, boys are still okay to act out girls are still kind of programmed it's in your dna it's it's you know it's kind of a a different track still

in our society as much as we meant what to say it's different we still have threads of that and girls by and large tend to be quiet and these are the ones I almost put a chapter called the lost girls in my book, because they get lost. And so unless people are very astute, and I hear this happen so frequently, they'll say, you know, my daughter, we've kind of been wanting to, see how she's doing. And we talked to the school about this is, she didn't pass anything oh well let's just let her go ahead because she'll catch up well what's happened then is this is a child who now is behind more and the belief is oh she'll catch up and part of that is because she's not making a a deal of herself in the classroom she's quiet She typically they sit in the back of the room, they hide, they withdraw. They don't make any noise. They don't complain. And parents think that because there isn't an obvious problem in the classroom that she's going to be okay.

And I can tell you, she isn't. If she has learning problems, she's not going to just be okay. And just kind of passing her along just moves the problem to the next grade level. And by the time this girl gets to junior high, things are really rough. And this is where these girls start dropping out. They start getting in trouble in the community because they're not feeling good about themselves. They've already created a very negative story about themselves. And the research shows that girls who are not identified actually fare far worse later on in high school than boys do. They become more engaged in self-injurious behavior, cutting and other types of really negative behaviors that are not productive and they don't know how to get out of it.

And they're also the ones who end up more likely to become pregnant. They're much less likely to go to college for obvious reasons for all of this, because if you can't learn very well, then you're not really destined in your mind to be able to get to college for obvious reasons for all of this because if you can't learn very well then you're not really destined in your mind to be able to get to college so I think it's really important that parents pay very close attention to their daughters and what the struggle is even if they're quiet they're the quiet ones but if you have a feeling that something is off with your daughter and she isn't really learning don't just let the school say, oh, she'll get over it. Oh, she'll grow out of it. No, let's not go down that pathway because there's a chance she may not.

And then where were you going or are you going to be in 10 or 20 years with that kind of decision? And parents just don't know. They trust that. OK, well, you know, we want to think that she's okay and that she's going to be fine. And so we're going to take the word of that and believe that. And, you know, we'll keep pushing forward and, you know, being attentive to this, but there's another thing that may need to be happening here. We may need to figure out what's really going on. So we have worked with people with all types of diagnoses. Because

if underlying that are some auditory and visual processing, and there are some brainwave ratio dysregulations, and we can figure that out. And we can help train the brain on that we've worked with a number of children who are diagnosed with mild to moderate autism on the spectrum, the old term Asperger's. We worked with kiddos who, you know, were on that diagnostic criteria. And, you know, I don't ever claim that we're curing anything, but what we are doing is getting at the root cause of processing problems. Get away from the labeling sometimes. I've had children come in with four or five diagnostic criterias, you know, under the age

of 12. And I've had children come in on a host of psychotropic medications as well. And we start looking at this and kind of peeling all of this back, we run these assessments, and then we start looking at the data, I meet with the children, I can get a feel for a child pretty quickly, you know how they're interacting with me, it's pretty quickly, you know, how they're interacting with me. It's pretty telling, you know, how they are. I had one child who, he could lobby one day, apparently had crawled under all the chairs and pulled out the plugs for the screws

that I didn't even know existed, walked into the conference room and threw them across the conference room table. And I didn't even know what they were. It's like, what are these things? Where did you get them? Oh, underneath the chairs. Okay.

So you can learn a lot just by meeting and talking with a child for a little while and get a flavor for how they're organized. And that helps us. And then we do the assessments. You know, I'm trying to understand it for myself because each one of us have such different, we have a, you know, we're, we're, it is like a spectrum even with ADHD, right? And we're also different, but yet there's similarities. So we often talk about it. You know, it's me and my girls. I'd say that my son, Ethan, who is on the spectrum, he has the diagnosis of ADHD. It's hard to even compare. It's on a

different level. But maybe you can even speak on this. Like, what are some things that you would recognize? Because some people say, oh, you know, that's just a really hyper child's had a lot of sugar, you know, I need to change their diet, and maybe that'll work. Or it's genetic, you're just like your dad. That's really the goal is to really figure out what's going on. And how can we improve a person's quality of life? And so you're just like your dad that's really the goal is to really figure out what's going on and how can we improve a person's quality of life and so you're talking quality of living was what you were dealing with and so it wasn't that it was a bad quality of living but it was that you were swimming upstream a lot it's still hard i'm going to be honest i'm still sometimes swimming you're saying like it's in past tense but you know it know, it is still, you know, there.

It can be, you know, when we don't quite know what this is that we're dealing with. It has a label. And it's so difficult for people to sometimes put into words what this internal experience is. Because it's all you've ever known. So how can you describe something if you don't have kind of the comparison or the contrast internally to have that ability to say, okay, there's this and then there's this. If I've only known one thing,

it's hard for me to share that necessarily with someone else in a manner that they can step into my shoes to understand it. When we do the assessment, it's fascinating. At first, I was just kind of gobsmacked by it because in the beginning, I always stay in the room with the parents. And then I have a technician or a clinician take the child into the assessment room to do the assessments, a computer based assessment. And so the parents will tell kind of the story. It's like this is when I can get the story because I've got a good 30 minutes with them. We're we're honed in. You know, we are really diving in to what is happening with this child and we get the story of this child and there'll be descriptors

and adjectives they know and behaviors and problems and things that are provided for us to really kind of look at and talking points if you will and then in comes the assessment which is about a 15 page document that we've obtained within 20 minutes. And I start going over this with the parents. And in a not infrequent situation and timeframe, the exact words that parents have used to describe their child, I am now reading back to them from this assessment. And they are just stunned. They have answers.

And they'll say, we've been through all this testing. This is the first time anyone has really got to the root cause of what we're seeing in our child. We always knew this. I say, yes, your child's brilliant. However, brilliance and processing don't necessarily flow together. If you have processing blockages, if you think about it in that way, you can't demonstrate flow together. You can't, if you have processing blockages, if you think about it in that way,

you can't demonstrate your intelligence. You're pushing up against a blockade of sorts that you can't demonstrate what internally you know to be your truth. This is watching Jeopardy for me. I knew that answer. I just couldn't do it that fast. That's right. What happens, as you know, is possibility is that if I can't get this out of me,

then people are judging me for what I'm putting out. It's true. And if I can't put out what the expectation is, then there's going to start forming a narrative around who and what I am. And that narrative often is a derailed narrative. So we're just on the wrong track because we're misinterpreting what's happening. We're using an old paradigm that really didn't really have a whole lot of foundation to begin with. Because as a side note here, diagnostic criteria in this world is a clustering of symptoms. And it's a it's a best guess scenario, when people are being diagnosed within the DSM five. And everyone kind of knows that, but we don't talk about it a whole lot. This is not a hard, fast, like you take an X-ray.

Oh, yeah, you broke your arm right here. It isn't that way in this world. It's very subjective. And that's why there's very poor inter-rater reliability, a test of how valid the diagnostic criteria are. So there was a study, I'd have to go get it, but I don't remember it at the moment. But they sent a case study out to a number of professionals who do diagnosis. And however many went out was how many different diagnoses came back in. And so you're looking at the same data,

but everyone has their own lens of perception for what they're seeing. And I talked a little bit about that at times in some articles I I've written in some places because behaviorist is going to see behavior problems. The psychiatrist is going to see medication needs. A psychologist is going to see perhaps behavioral interventions. Social worker is going to see family structure. So what do you have? Well, all of them, there's a part of all of that that might be accurate, but none of it is the big picture. You know, I have an issue with word finding. There's always all of these little, it's almost like if you look at a computer, downloading it really quick to find the word so I can catch it.

And all of this has to also do with listening. So as much as I have a hard time speaking, Sometimes I have a hard time listening. So I do, I have tools. I mean, I look at people's mouths when they move sometimes and I often laugh because I'll be looking at them and trying to listen. All of a sudden looking at, oh, I like your lipstick, which I've already noticed. I noticed your teeth because I'm trying to listen to you.

Like it's something that I actually have to make a conscious decision to do. It doesn't just happen naturally for me. Being a mother of four children and busy, you know, don't talk to me while I'm doing 5 million things. I need you to make sure you have my eyes. I won't hear you. And that was after lots of failed attempts of them trying to tell me something important and me not hearing it. So, I mean, it really affects your life, your relationships between your siblings, your family, your partner, God, everything.

It does. It's completely consuming in a person's life because when someone is struggling with the auditory processing or struggling with visual or has both, which is a common factor, you can do okay in one area. And then you kind of think, well, if I can do okay over here, I should be able to do this in the bottom falls out over here. And the same for children in the classroom or at home. You know, parents and teachers think, well, you can do this over here. What's's the matter over here you're just not paying attention well what i've come to realize is that for some children i think of a hopscotch board you know where you kind of land and you've got you can land here and you can land over here but you can't land here and you can't land here or i also thought about the swiss cheese piece as well it's like so, so you've got Swiss cheese here.

So you have a task over here that hits on the cheese. This is great. If everything could hit over here, you wouldn't have any problems at all. Problem is not everything hits over here. There are things that are going to hit over here where there's a hole. And the hole is just a weak processing area.

It's an area that for some reason, just didn't get tuned up the way it needed to be. And so that's what we do with neurofeedback is we figure out where the holes are. And then we build a training plan to strengthen those areas, just like when you go to a gym, you probably work with a trainer at the front end to kind of figure out what you need to do. And then you go through your plan targeting those areas you want to strengthen. This is a gym for the brain. It's the same concept. It's just repetition.

Once we figure out what's going on, then we can tackle it. And I'll always tell parents, it's like, particularly if there's a lot of findings, it's going to be a little bit of a rough go for them emotionally and psychologically i'll say you know yes we've got a good news bad news bad news good news is bad news is yeah there's quite a bit of findings here we've got a lot going on here and the good news is we found it and there's something we can do about it and everyone's different so you do have to treat everyone i don't know you can't just realize everything because we're so different. And I think that's one of the things I hate about the school, right? Is that everyone has the same curriculum.

And my daughter made a great point the other day. She was like, oh, I really, she loved this science project they were doing. She was telling me all about it. She was so excited. And then like come the end of the week, she didn't want to go to school on Friday. And I was like, why? She was like, well, you know how I had so much fun with that science. She was like, now we have a test on it. And now they just ruined all the fun. Now when she has to sit down and prove herself, I told her you can use your 504, you know, and that's kind of what I've been trying

to teach her is to advocate and use that. I mean, I don't know how you feel but I bet you if I went into that classroom every single one of them can use a 504 well because and this is you know this is this what I'm getting ready to say comes from a lot of decades of experience my mom taught second grade for 32 years in the same classroom. It's a kind of joke that I grew up in second grade. And then I spent 25 years. I grew up in second grade. And then I spent 25 years in academe at a university setting.

So my aunt was a dean of a college of education, a professor. My uncle was a professor at a university. So I get teaching. I get classroom. I get it. I also get that our educational system is a little bit sideways and backwards and upside down right now because we put too much emphasis on the wrong things and we're not paying attention to what the children truly need. And when we're not paying attention to that, they're not being taught to pay attention to the things that are important either. It doesn't mean we don't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. It means that how we go about it is the most critical part, and the how is where we're falling down in these educational

systems. Now, there are some systems, some of it tends to be more private, some of it Montessori, I mean, there are different approaches for different people, but this is generally kind of what I'm talking about is the theme through the education, public educational system. But that, you know, I'm running into problems in charter schools too. And part of the difficulty with privates and charters is that you have a neat advocacy for 504s and IEPs. They don't have to do that. So there's no mandate that they have to do that. And so you really have to start asking questions at the front end before you sign on those contracts. If you have a child

who's struggling, because there's even less regulation over those particular school settings to get what you might need for your child. So it's a mixed bag out there. And it's a tough time for parents to try to walk through what's almost a landmine of educational systems that aren't working to find what is working for your child and find those ways of making things better for your child. It's challenging. You know, just last year, our governor, Paulist here, said all the schools needed to test for lead in their drinking fountains in their water. Kensley School had 18 different faucets that had high levels of lead. And that was just at the elementary school level, but all the old schools did. You know, how much is genetic versus environmental? Or do you have an opinion? Huge. That's the first i've heard of that happening

but you know i will say good for them for getting on it um that's going to cost a lot of money to fix and it needs to spend they need to spend every cent it's going to take to get that out of there because we know lead is poisonous uh so big big problem there they need to start bringing in the bottled water because you got to get off those water fountains. They need to just probably shut those down. I'm not an aromalist. Yeah, they did immediately. Yeah, you have to with that.

But as far as the nature nurture age old question, and people will ask me, is it nature or is it nurture? And I'll say yes. Yes. Yes. Because we can't rule out one or the other. We can't separate a child from the environment that the child has grown up in. And we can't separate the child from the DNA. So it doesn't mean that all is lost, though. It just means, okay, this is where the child is today. And that's really where I come in. It's like, let's just figure out where you are today. How we got here, we can't undo, we can't, you know, reverse that out. What we can do is go forward from today. So let's figure this out. Let's get

a plan in place. If there's something that we can do that's going to help them, then let's get on it and make it happen. Because usually, for children, it's usually about 20 hours of brain training, and they're good to go. And so with this system, you don't have to keep coming back. Because what we do is literally train the brain, just as anyone has learned everything in their life, they've done it through repetition, right? That's how the brain learns. And so when we find the holes, we build the training plan. And through the repetition of this generally twice a week, 30 minute sessions, we do 20 of those, which equals 10 hours of brain training. And then we come back and reassess. So then what we're looking at are the data points. So we run by evidence, we literally are evidence

based intervention here. This assessment has been validated. It's been researched. It's very easy for us to run this. And quite frankly, there really isn't any reason for an elementary school to be doing this for every child they've got. And the license isn't that much. If they had someone qualified to do it, you're going to change the world. And that's really the essence here. Let's get this narrative changed. Let's get this into systems that can make a difference for these children. Because if you don't know what you're dealing with, you're not going to use the right intervention. Are we talking about being successful with or without medication in the future? Absolutely. Because what most people are doing that come to my clinics, they fall in one of two camps. One, they've tried everything that's out there and nothing has worked. The other is they don't want to try everything that's out

there because they don't want to go down that road. They want something that's going to get to the root cause of what's happening because they've heard, they've read, they're informed, and they know that for a lot of people, these medications have side effects. And I put that in the book. And so I'm an academician. So when I put it in the book, there's a reference to the article where it came from. So I haven't made any claims anywhere that haven't been referenced or based in my own experience in this book. So I thought, you know, people just need to know. It's not that I'm dissing any particular intervention because it could be working for a lot of folks. And if it is, great.

This is for the folks that either don't want to go that way or nothing has worked. And there are a lot of them out there. There are millions of people that fall into this category where this hasn't worked. Those traditional interventions, the traditional approach, the traditional diagnosis has not resulted in positive or lasting outcomes. Well, what's funny for myself is that I went off all the meds, like it was in my 30s. I said, I don't want to be on any of these meds. So what's my alternative? And they're like therapy. And it did work. I mean, cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy was one of the biggest things ever for me, actually, in the beginning, because I was like, holy cow, I didn't even

realize there was this other voice that was talking shit to me all day long. That was huge. It is huge. And that's my kid. That voice is what gets started early on in children's lives when they're struggling in school. Because they start internalizing whether it's said or not. Children are so astute in classrooms. They know if they aren't able to do something that their peers are able to do, they see the difference. They know it. Yeah.

And then some children, kind of depending on how rough it is in the school can end up being targeted for bullying. Yeah. You can get that both physically, but now, you know, we mentioned social media briefly. It's a brutal world. There's no reason a child should be on social media anytime through K-12 in my world. Right. There's no reason. Here's the thing too.

So I feel like with my daughter she started with minecraft in that building and then it turned to roblox and especially during covid that was the most social she had ever been and she's not a social person and so you know her friends would meet up on roblox and they would build together and you know and i saw that it was positive but there's so many dangers you know but the thing they're the way that they're learning is so different than their teaching is not really meeting the needs of how their brains are developing now the world has changed so much but the educational system has not kept up the pace no and you know certainly the creative video games

are different from the social media platforms where they're getting bullied and beat up and, you know, just really horrific types of things. Oh, yeah, you can easily report somebody, and they do. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It's just, you know, pretty tough for a lot of children. They don't have the resilience to be able to emotionally and psychologically navigate some of that and we've had to I've treated teenagers who actually have been brutalized through some of those systems and so it you know it's always a

cautionary tale in video games it's a cautionary tale the ones you mentioned aren't aren't typically the ones that cause a lot of the difficulties, although anything can cause a difficulty if abused. But in the book, I talk about some of these violent video games, and these are really intense, what I call high-impact video games that absolutely can drive addiction. And so for a child who is short on dopamine, that becomes a very fulfilling experience to where every time they're on there, they get these dopamine hits that actually were measured back in the late 90s,

get this, that a hit of that kind of dopamine is equal to an injection of amphetamines in the bloodstream. So it's a serious thing, and parents just are not well-versed on this. So the type of video game is really important. And if these are high-impact, what kind of call, first-shooter games, children can get very addicted to this. And I actually have had dads who are as equally addicted as their children are boys anyways guys like my son and his friends yeah so part I've actually treated children who have an addiction to the video games and in one case out here it's called a 5150, where a child is actually institutionalized for a period of time, or an adult, because the behaviors were so severe for

this child that he, every time the parents tried to limit this, he had become so addicted to these games that he would destroy the house. So they limited him, and he got a hold of his father's work computer and destroyed it. And there he would damage the house. The mother was afraid of them, which was, you know, another whole situation and it can turn ugly. So I've seen enough of that end of it that I just issue a cautionary tale to parents and I speak about it for a little bit in the book, just here's the checklist so I gave them a checklist that came from the addictions work that I think green Dr. Greenwald did maybe mispronouncing his last name but it's in the book where he did a study on this and they did brain

scans and they were able to see how the adolescent boy's brains literally changed in two weeks in using violent video games versus non-violent video games and the literal changes in the brain functioning that had happened and what happens is the frontal lobe can get shut down with this because it drives adrenaline and it drives all these other kind of fight and flight kind of response patterns and dopamine. There's such a series of levels with this. So one of those is that if a child is addicted to these games because they're short on dopamine, which is attention. So there's a problem with attention.

They're able to succeed with this. It feels good. Then over time, it becomes a situation in the brain where they need the game in order to create enough dopamine to feel good. And when the brain gets the signal that it has the dopamine that it needs, then it starts shutting down its own natural production. So now you have an inversion situation to where the brain itself on its own will not will generate even less dopamine, which means you need more of the addictive behavior to get up to normal,

which is a true definition of addiction. And so now we have medication probably is important at the beginning. It's only for some people. I'm hesitant about some of the medication, just because there are some side effects for people. So in this case of this boy that we were talking about, I think they needed a lot more interventions. They may have needed some in patient, long term care for him to kind of get this re regulated because the addiction was so severe. and the behaviors were so out of control. Now, fortunately, that's a rarity.

Most of the time we don't see that kind of a situation. But I do have situations where a mom will come in and say, well, he's just like his dad. You know, all they do is sit and play video games all weekend long. And it's like, well, we've got a bigger problem here. You know, that's a little outside the scope of what we do. But you may need to get into some family support systems to really help tackle some of that because it's a big deal. This can be a problem. So my daughter has never liked to take meds. She felt like it made her angry. You know, there was, I always did fine with meds, but I mean, I never had side effects like she did. My

oldest son, he doesn't swallow pills. So that didn't work. The patch, I mean, I never had side effects like she did. My oldest son, he doesn't swallow pills, so that didn't work. The patch, I mean, he has sensitive, he's got a lot of sensory issues. The patch didn't work. The youngest refuses. And that's fine. I'm not an advocate for it at all. But my daughter was doing some talk therapy during COVID. I mean, she was taking all these supplements from Dr. Amen, who I really love him. And then just last night, her and my daughter were drinking something that she's always researching different things. They were drinking cherry juice and she put magnesium in it and some other thing. And she made like this drink and she said it was going to help them relax, sleep better

and something else with the magnesium and bringing calmness and you know, whatever it was. But they both like almost overslept. So I don't know if there was something in that, that maybe they should have taken that earlier in the night. But there's a lot of things you can do natural now. Well, there really are. And that's the lot of things you can do natural now well there really are and that's the beauty of these alternatives like ours is non-invasive so this is the brain learning how to strengthen itself through these processes and when you rewire your own brain and your brain learns how to do that then it becomes the natural way of your brain functioning, which is why people don't tend to need to come back at all.

So we'll do a few hours of sessions and usually about 20 hours is what most people need, some less, some more. So it's really individualized on that. But we always do it in 10 hour blocks just because it takes the brain a while to be able to get a hold of the new pattern and get that literally wired in. So what we're doing is wiring in the changes. We're wiring in the neuronal pathways. We're adjusting some of the brainwave ratios there that actually support the ability to

function better. And then if we find the auditory and the visual processing problems that are underneath it all, then we tackle that as well. And we work with anxiety. I do a lot of work with trauma. So I've worked a lot with veterans with trauma, children and adults with trauma. And the neurofeedback is really,

I would say it's the best thing I've seen in 30 years in helping trauma because sometimes talk therapy doesn't get to the heart of that at all. It can make things worse for a lot of people. And there was a belief for a long time, I think within some aspects of the VA that you could only do talk therapy. And there's a good solid amount of research now that says talk therapy can be the worst thing ever done for some people. And I saw that in veterans. They didn't necessarily do very well

with it in some cases. So with this, they don't have to talk about it. But we can retrain the brain, we can calm down the amygdala system that works for anxiety, we deal with chronic pain, we help with depression and senior aging aspects as well. So we can tackle a lot of things that really is about the neuroplasticity of the brain, brain's ability to change. And the good news is it changes all the time. And there's no time that we couldn't help someone now, unless they're, you know, in an Alzheimer's unit, where there's been so much damage that's happened, there would be some limitations there. And they do need to be able to sit at a computer before 30 minutes at a time. But other than that,

we really can help affect a lot of change in a short period of time. Amazing. I think a lot of people ask sometimes, what is the difference between ADD and ADHD? And that's a little confusing. And I would say that, you know, some people kind of just assume that that hyper means that you're like a hyper, hyper person, like the little kids crazy. But I think it's more of the brain constant going, am I right? Yes. And we assess for that. So I that's one of the points that we're looking at in this assessment is if there is what's really kind of referred to as fine motor hyperactivity. So it's a hyperactivity that takes place in the brain. And yes, it's kind of like static that you

don't even know is there. And so it just interferes with a person's ability to attend, to concentrate, to focus. And they don't know why they can't explain it. Because if you've always had static outside your window, you don't know the static is there. Until someday someone shuts off the engine and there's no static out there. And then you're going, wow, what happened? The white noise. Yeah. So true. Well, and when, you know, one thing that I have that I always think is so weird, cause it is hard to explain, but I can have, I can really be OCD

too on certain things. And then you could look in my closet and go, whoa. In some cases and up on my website, I have a video of a young man, a teenager, who was treated with neurofeedback here in Southern California. He wasn't ours, but I thought the video was so good because he doesn't break it out into auditory and visual. But when I watch it, I can tell when he's talking about having auditory problems in some area and he's talking about visual processing problems than another. So he talks about, so he's articulate. He's a handsome young man, clearly very bright. And then he talks about what his life was like. And he didn't know how to make a bed. He said he'd be told to go in and make his bed. He said he'd walk in the room and he'd stare at that and said,

this is going to take forever. I have no idea how to make this happen. And he said, after he did neural feedback, he walks in and goes, well, this is simple. You just take off the covers. you take off the sheets, put the new sheets on, put on the covers. He said, but before that, he looked at that and he thought it was a task that would never end because he could not figure out how to organize that. Well, that's a good example of visual processing. I know that feels, yeah, it's overwhelming. And you just look at it and you're like, there's no way I could do it. And like someone else, like my best friend, Mandy, who used to be a co-host with me, I had like this corner of like stuff. And a lot of it had emotional attachment too.

There was a lot of emotional attachment because this corner had stuff that my dad, after he passed, that I kept. And I mean, it's crazy stuff. Stupid, really. And she's like, can I just help you with that? And I was like, dude, that would just take forever. And I've got all this anxiety coming up as soon as she's even mentioning it. Did she went in that corner and remove that in less than two hours? I mean, it was so easy for her.

I wish I could be that way. And I even remember talking to my doctor and saying, can I get a brain surgery that they might be able to just like fix something in my brain that I wouldn't be this way? You don't need brain surgery. I know. There's another way you can do it. Your book is called Sol solving the ADHD riddle. The real cause and lasting solutions to your child's struggles to learn. What's the riddle? The riddle is people don't know what's going on. They don't know how to put the pieces together. And it's mystifying.

And so a riddle means you don't easily find the solution. You have to really kind of work your way through it to get to the answer. And that's really what it took me a number of years to work my way through when I was looking at all this data. Because people would come in, these interventions, the traditional ones weren't working. The stories were unique. It had similar threads of, you know,

everything we've tried hasn't worked. We don't know what to do. We do this assessment. We do these brain training exercises for people we reassess and the behaviors i'm measuring the behaviors as much as i'm measuring the data points because to me we can get great data points but if this isn't translating into the person's life in a day-to-day world then we're not sure how much effect have we made. And so we really are looking for those anecdotal stories about what's happening. And what we see for children is the behavioral interventions start going down at school. Well, you can't make that up. You can't make that up.

You know, suddenly they're picking up their toys or doing things differently, and all the writing in the last 10 years didn't make a difference. And so suddenly there's a difference. Well where you can't make that part up either. And it isn't that you're imagining this is that you are observing things have changed. There's less frustration in getting the homework done. Your child comes home, sits down,

does the homework in an hour instead of the five hours that used to take every night. Yep. That was my daughter. I'm not going to lie. I used to even say sometimes to her brother, well, you just finished it really quick because he could do his homework in two seconds. She's been in front of it for like two hours. Then it's 10, 10 problems, you know? Exactly. So that is a measurable day-to-day quality of life situation that has

changed for that child, that parent and that teacher. So things have changed. And the good news is it tends to hold. So if we can literally kind of patch up those holes in the Swiss cheese, give a person those neuronal pathways that are working a little bit better, they're stronger, the more you use them, the stronger they get, which is why people typically don't need to come back if they've been trained you know in a system that really addresses that there are a lot of different types of neural feedback out there and i actually put a little cautionary note in the book about you know check it out it's not all neural feedback is created equally ours does something very unique from most other systems so the software developer the clinical

psychologist and a computer programmer kind of an interesting combination so he was able to identify you know a very long time ago that some of the EEG equipment and systems that are out there are not zeroing out facial muscle movement so it's called facial artifact. So eye blinking, tongue movement, facial movement can actually that's called EMG data can actually from some EEG systems be picked up. And they can think that it's EEG. So if a child learns to sit still, with some of the systems, you can look like you're doing well with that. But all you've done is just learn how to hold your face still. And so with our

system, it's actually zeroing that out every time we sit down with this child or this adult, so that we know that the data that we are getting is true EEG data. And I think that's what makes our system faster, more effective in some cases. I'm not dishing anything that's out there, but I'm just saying that's what I've noticed to be different about our system and possibly why we're able to affect change the way we can. Your book, it has all the things that you've spoke about, all of the research and the studying and the identifying, but I think it also teaches people to be the advocate for themselves and for their children.

It does. That I think is, I have goosebumps all over because that I think is the most important thing. Well, thank you for that feedback. I appreciate that. There was a lot of thought that went into that. It was 15 years of work that went in to this.

And I wasn't going to write this book until I had a way to help people that were outside of my 20 mile drive zone over here so that's when we got that two years ago and we were able to work with people during the pandemic because some people couldn't come in we were able to that's a blessing isn't it it was there a lot of there was a lot of things that happened during that pandemic I'm not too crazy about but there are other things that happened that I think propelled us forward. And it certainly propelled me forward. It propelled me to be able to write the book because once we got that we had a few months of work under our belt with that and we were getting the same results as people sitting in my clinic. it's like, okay, it's time to go with this. It is time to get this out. It's time to let people know that we have

some hope. We have some alternatives and that really we can help people succeed in ways that we haven't had available to them. Thank you so much for putting it out there. You know, I'm trying to write a book right now to being a busy mom and having a podcast that is probably the biggest job I've ever had. Very busy and making space for that I actually just had to take off like a whole month. And it slimmed down my schedule. Because I'm also, you know, a yes person. So, you know, learning to have some boundaries and making space for myself has really been a big part of, you know, how to cope with this ADHD and find time to write a book and be able to get past even, you know, each chapter is very difficult.

Yeah, it's an endeavor. Yeah, it's a true labor of love when you do that. And I remember there was a point my whole house was under construction when I was in the middle of writing this. And I just set up and moved everything to the table in the dining room and got centered looking out my door, you know, in the morning. It's like, okay, peace there. All the jackhammers and all the other crazy stuff happens here. So, yeah, it really makes a difference when we're able to really anchor in

and be able to focus on those goals that we want to set for ourselves and then to be able to get our messages out. And so mine really is a message of hope that there's a different way that and I really want to change up this educational systems and help children. I think maybe that's the legacy of my mother teaching second grade, you know, for 32 years is that I think about these elementary children. And we know that up until the end of eighth and third grade, that children are learning how to read. And if you haven't succeeded in this and you're not on grade level by the end of third grade, by the time you go into fourth grade,

you're reading to learn. And this is where things start breaking down with a lot of children. So we get a lot of kiddos, 10, 11, and 12, who managed to get through elementary school, but now they get into four or five and six and suddenly things are a lot harder for them. And they get on up, five, and six, and suddenly things are a lot harder for them. Then they get on up into junior high, seven, eight, and nine, and things can really start falling apart in a bad way for them. So if we could catch these kiddos in elementary school

and figure this out, and if they have auditory and visual processing problems, imagine being able to get that turned around in elementary school. Because when children who haven't been succeeding, get on this system, and they're running a computer with their brain, it's a very self empowering experience, and they start realizing success right away. So they're challenged, but then they get success as they move along through this. And it's a real builder for self confidence and self esteem of children who've been a little bit self-damaged because they question you know if they're smart enough and that's where children always go they always eliminate that right you're not good enough you're not enough right i mean and so you're going to be eliminating that negative narrative that a lot of

us have and also you're going to give us tools. Then by the time you get to those hormonal ages, which is what's happening in my house, where everything is so dramatic and everything, you know, go brush your teeth. Oh, you think my teeth are ugly. What? No, I just brush your teeth. You know, there's so much suicide in the world right now. I can't. And younger. I mean, I've heard of kids like 10. Yes. I mean, I didn't even think about that kind of stuff when I was younger.

It's really the stakes are much higher, I think, in today's world because the information is so much more easily accessible. So where maybe someone didn't even know that was there, you know, then they have this, they get depressed and thinking, oh, well they got out of it.

I'm going to get out of it. This really is too painful for me. I can't manage this. I need some relief. And what they don't realize is just a temporary situation that they can move through, but they choose a very permanent solution to this. And,

you know, that's the tragedy of this. And again, if there's one life that we could save for a child who's struggling, why not? Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for all what you're doing. Tell everybody where they can get your book and where they can find you.

And more importantly, if they want to do this, rather the others. Mm-hmm. So my website is ConnieMcReynolds.com C-O-N-N-I-E M-C-R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S. Good Irish Scottish name there. It's kind of long on that website, then is a link to the book right at the front. So it's on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, online distributors primarily. And then there's also a contact form on there. So if you fill that out and you want to reach me, please include your phone number because

I'm going to give you a call. I have found that the email system is pretty limited when it comes to the depth and breadth of the questions that most people have around this. And I do a free 15 to 20 minute consult with anyone who has questions and I usually can pretty much get it answered in that period of time if this looks like it could be a good match for someone there's also a free brief assessment on the website that if people just want to kind of tap into that to see okay is there something here then they can start there and in the book there are a couple of chapters that have extensive checklists the

auditory processing chapter and the visual processing chapter have those more extensive checklists so you can go through that and you can see okay is this more auditory if it's more visual typically there's a bit of you know combination of both and then there are a lot of tips in the book for parents so if you're dealing with auditory you can tell teachers okay if this is more of an auditory thing here's what we need to do to kind of structure this for my child if it's visual it's a combination of both then you've got that information available to you in the book and there's some resources in there. There's a lot of research that went into this on all the different chapters that really, and a lot of case studies.

So in that book, there are true case stories of children that I have worked with. Obviously, their names have been changed and some of the specifics have been changed, but it includes the data points of what we saw and includes the stories of the outcomes, the story about how they presented, how they came in, what was going on. And then at the end, what happened? You know, if you wait for somebody else to do it for your child, you know, it could never happen. It might not ever happen. It might not ever. Right. In the 504 and the IEPs, and I talk about public public school and then there's kind of an individual service plan that private schools might use but again there's no compelling reason for them to do what's right for your kid like not for what you think that's right you know outside is going to

thank you you really do yeah well thank you so much you've been such a blessing and thank you for doing the work that you do. Well, thank you for having me today. It's been great having a chat with you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. And thanks to our special guests for joining me. If you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com where you can work with me one-on-one or help support sense of soul podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.