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When you witness or experience something threatening, your amygdala fires off signals to several areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, indicating that you should be frightened. The prefrontal cortex responds by integrating information from other areas of the brain, like context cues or prior memories, and signals the amygdala to, essentially, calm down. This is the healthy response to a stressful event. In a period of trauma or prolonged or intense stress, however,  this circuitry instinctively rewires itself to be able to cope with intense or unbearable circumstances around us.

When the brain circuits that are designed to manage stress become disrupted, it inevitably leads to maladaptive behaviours. That’s where you start to see increasing anxiety-like behaviours even in the absence of something that could be anxiety-provoking.

What can we do when we still feel a pervasive need to remain on guard, even when the trauma or stress has passed? How can we tell our emotions, thoughts and physical body that everything is OK now? Sometimes we can’t do this consciously. The inability to switch off the hypervigilant protective part of your brain is called PTSD, or c-PTSD in complex cases involving prolonged repeated trauma. c-/PTSD occurs particularly when the traumatic events are considered to be outside the range of usual human experience. It can affect people of any age and demographic.

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Alhough the condition has devastating psychological effects, c-/PTSD is not solely a psychological disorder but also a significant physiological disorder.  Traditional talk therapies alone cannot resolve unprocessed trauma unless they integrate some form of physiological reprocessing/retraining. As Bessel Van Der Kolk says, "The Body Keeps the Score." And it is the body, specifically the brain, that neurofeedback targets by retraining those neural circuits involved in the stress response which have become dysregulated.