In science fiction, time traveling is a popular theme that allows the imagination to flourish and juxtaposes different eras with consciousness and experience that transcend the boundaries of time. Our rational minds know that this is not physically possible; but, for some, the idea of traveling through time provides an exciting escape.
In real life, we are always navigating mentally and emotionally between past and future, trying to juggle and reconcile what we’ve learned and how that can be applied to a better and more secure future. Collectively, we study history and plan for the future as families, communities, and societies. We review the past with nostalgia, regrets, evaluations, and sensitive memories. We anticipate the future with hope, caution, fear, excitement, and a plethora of emotions and attempts at control.
Actually, most of us struggle to be present, despite the irony that each present moment is all that we can experience. Everything else must attach to the now. The continuum of present moments forms us, gives us a legacy, a character, and a predictive motif that tends to govern our behaviors. The challenge of being present—living in the moment, rather than succumbing to endless distractions, worries, anticipations, and memories—leads to a variety of disciplines, practices, and techniques to shape the habit of experiencing the fullness of each moment, the now, unfettered by interferences from attachments, opinions, and mind chatter.
Abilities to be in the present moment notwithstanding, traumatic experiences can pull us back into the past, restimulating memories fused to intense emotions that can be upsetting. Traumas call us to relive vividly jarring experiences because the emotional brain responds as if the event is still happening. With trauma, the event that never fully went away lurks unresolved, sometimes to regurgitate, haunt, and overwhelm. This aspect of trauma that becomes stuck is timeless. The gap between the traumatic occurrence and the present becomes fluid, such that it can influence current functioning and future expectations. In this sense, our traumas make us unwitting time travelers, sometimes becoming uncomfortably or even frightfully locked in the grip of the past or fearfully projected into an imaginary threatening future.
Our minds are powerful and versatile time machines, able to transport us, not physically but emotionally, into previous and forecast realms of experience that are multidimensional. Nostalgia and reflective anticipation can morph into painful and fearful traps that induce helplessness and the reliving of the traumatic and overwhelming happenings.
When the mind travels through time, it can follow intentional reminiscences, become yanked by triggered emotional provocation, or simply drift digressively through aimless associations that detract from being present and fully focused. Each of those occurrences persuades us to experience perceptions and feelings anchored to things less tangible that what is happening at present. These distractions contribute to diminished self-control and often to limited productivity and purposefulness. As well, recapitulating past trauma or fearing future adversity induces a negative mindset and heightened nervous system arousal.
Dealing with the time traveling mind has been the object of countless spiritual and scientific disciplines. Meditation, prayer, drugs, physical regimens are among the many attempts to divert the mind away from random or upsetting activity. Though the arts and literature provide imaginative and creative escapes through which to channel memory and fantasy, they do not suffice to eliminate the anxiety and trauma that can overrule the nervous system.
For decades, I’ve been using safe and advanced technologies in my practice that effectively free the mind from the autocratic governing pressure of attentional drifting and emotional trauma. These methods—EEG neurofeedback and Voice Technology—eliminate trauma, develop neuronal self-regulation, enhance mood and focus, and allow people to live more fully and frequently in the present. This results in better performance, improved health and functioning, and more satisfying and nurturing relationships.
Living in the present does not mean that we disconnect from past experiences, previous learning, or future planning and anticipation. Nor is the objective to be so fully absorbed in the moment—through stimulus or instinct, as in a dog chasing a squirrel—that we fail to integrate the past and future. Instead, the idea is to be in the moment, using full faculties of cognition, emotion, and memory so that we can address the situational needs with appropriate and purposeful inner composure and outward response. The more we can do that, the more time we spend “in the zone” where appropriate responses, shifts, and flexibility makes fully engaged and with minimal stress.
For the majority, functioning “in the zone” is fleeting, if it occurs at all. Most people are highly stressed, and this state of being has become so familiar to the brain that it becomes the default mode. This is unhealthy, unhappy, and unnecessary.
For many, the time traveling states of mind are haphazard, intrusive, and not always predictable. For others, there is the intentional departure and dissociation from present pain by means of dissociation though intoxicants or self-harm.
Whether intentional or incidental, mind abduction by dwelling “elsewhere” becomes a habit of absence or intrusion that diminishes life’s quality and functionality.
Using advanced technologies, I address the fundamental causes of time traveling traumas, dissociations, and distractions. Our brains and nervous systems are biologically wired to use electrical microcurrents to fuel nerve cell transmission. Ordinarily, we are unaware of these processes, just as we take for granted the work of the heart and circulatory system in nourishing and oxygenating our cells. However, disruptions and distortions in nervous system function can occur from life’s intrusions, traumas, injuries, medical interventions, and genetic and developmental influences. These contribute to disregulation, the erratic flow of neurological transmission and balance, resulting in distressing symptoms and dysfunctional conditions.
Our nervous system has brakes and accelerators—checks and balances that regulate and stimulate arousal and relaxation. These functions are complex and interactive, allowing he brain to behave and govern at thousands of different speeds and combinations. Just as the vehicle you drive has many speeds (measured in miles per hour), your brain has thousands of speeds. (Scientists measure and describe these in terms like frequency, amplitude, phase, etc.) To drive a car safely and comfortably, you must shift among different speeds, depending on what is appropriate for constantly changing conditions. Similarly, the brain must navigate and adjust among many different speeds. Traumas, negative emotions, and disregulation tend to “lock” the brain into habitual and inflexible speeds, thus producing and maintain dysfunctional states. Examples are the “fight-or-flight” mode that characterizes many forms of anxiety, fears, panic, obsessiveness, and insomnia; also, there are instability modes that underlie migraines, seizures, and psychotic episodes.
EEG neurofeedback is an elegant solution that trains the brain to shift readily and flexibly among brain states. This process is implemented via short training sessions in which you watch entertainment while observing your brainwaves and neurological activity livestreaming digitally over the entertainment. The brain subliminally recognizes and internalizes more efficient patterns and practices them, thereby building more robust and resilient brain functioning. After a certain amount of practice, the brain maintains and generates the more functional patterns across internal neurological transmission, as it applies to changing states, conditions, and external challenges. (I have written extensively—as have others—about neurofeedback; you can read more by exploring my books and articles.)
Although we have decades of research and empirical evidence that this treatment works reliably and effectively, even the experts cannot fully explain or chart the exact mechanisms. We know that the human brain and body can heal itself when given adequate support and intervention. In the case of the brain, this requires information about how it is firing neurologically: information not ordinarily discernible, since we process outwardly without adequate inspection of underlying internal processes. Neurofeedback supplies this information to the brain in real time, harnessing biological mechanisms with the physics timing processes and rhythms that pervade nature.
Giving the brain repeated practice in observing and correcting disorganized electrical patterns facilitates the automatic shifting among speeds can combinations of firings that comprise adaptive brain states. When given relevant information, the brain intuitively knows how to do this, and it adapts to the requirements of changing conditions. Think of riding a bicycle: no one consults a set of instructions about how many degrees to lean in which direction and for how long! In combination with gravity, your inner ear vestibular function and sensory feedback help you respond on the fly to ever-changing conditions almost automatically. Once you learn to ride, you can navigate territory you’ve never seen before.
When functioning optimally, your brain operates principally in the present, consulting and integrating its resources and memories to invoke previous learning and to plan for future events with uncertain and uneven probabilities. Traumas keep you locked in the past—as if those events are still occurring, stimulating and maintaining the nervous system alarms that accompany negative emotions and inflexible brain states. Neurofeedback training optimizes brain flexibility, essentially reverse engineering the locked-in dysfunctional neurological states.
When traumas and overwhelming negative emotions induce alarms in the brain, no amount of logic, deep breathing, or cognitive reframing is enough to make it go away. Thankfully, there is a treatment that can resolve traumas very quickly. This treatment, Voice Technology, works by eliminating the fundamental cause of thoughts and memories that become fused with lingering negative emotions and flashbacks. The causative agent that elicits the negative affect is the series of perturbations in the thought field—that is, cellular disruptions that link the thought/memory with disturbing emotions. Voice Technology decodes the perturbations, allowing the application of manual and digital neurological intervention to sever the connection between specific thoughts and negative emotions. The process is rapid, can be done by phone, and has a success rate of 95% (complete elimination of symptoms).
Our minds are amazingly versatile. The human brain has intricate backup and recovery mechanisms woven into its evolution. Despite traumas and injuries, the brain is able not only to compensate, but to recover functions and augment integration and harmony.
The time traveling your brain does may be natural and helpful (as in dreaming or restorative pleasant reminiscence and fantasy); or, it may be infused with painful and distracting emotions and mental disorganization. I am reminded of two sayings that highlight the pain of the brain in errant worry and imagination:
Yiddish:
Vos der mensch ken alts ibertrachten, ken der ergster soyna im nisht vinchen.
English:
What people can think up for themselves, their own worst enemies couldn’t wish upon them.
I’m an old man, and I’ve seen many horrible, terrible, awful things—only most of them never happened. Mark Twain
The safe and effective technologies using EEG neurofeedback and Voice Technology will help you eliminate being stuck in the past, reduce obsessing about the future, and seamlessly organize your thought and emotional processes to live maximally in a comfort zone in the present. After all, each present moment is all we are truly meant to experience. The time traveling your mind does should be under your control and be edifying and enhancing.
— Mark Steinberg, PhD
Part of Dr. Steinberg’s trauma treatment resources.
