Antonieta Contreras
Psychotherapist, supervisor, consultant, coach
CONDITIONS
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Emotional disturbances
• Obsessive thinking
• Confidence
• Negligence
• Personality issues
• Grief
• Dependence
• Mood issues
• PTSD
• Trauma
• Infidelity
• Abortion trauma
• Relationship issues
• Spirituality issues
• Shame
• Self esteem
• Parenting
• Social anxiety
• Attachment
• Accidents
• Losses
• Infidelity
• Divorce
• Family conflicts
• Impulsivity
• Dissociation
• Career dilemma
• Procrastination
• Sexual dysfunction
• Sexual trauma
• Sexual orientation
• Sexual pleasure
• Neglect
• Abuse
• Violence
• Domestic abuse
• Behavioral issues
• Dissociation
MENTAL HEALTH
Your brain is involved in everything you do, including how you think, how you feel, how you act and how you get along with other people. Your brain determines your personality, character, intelligence and every single decision that you make. Training your brain helps regulating and improving a myriad of problems and conditions.
"You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. “ Francis Crick
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PTSD, TRAUMA SPECTRUM & STRESS
Excessive stress, shock, or living under chronic stressful situations have a big impact on the normal functioning of the body and brain. The brain and nervous system alter the regular functions into dysregulated and complex series of adaptive measures for survival.
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Besides being a complex cognitive processing apparatus, the brain is also the seat of our conscience and regulates emotions, moral thoughts, and abstractions. The social self, thoughts, impulses, and imagination are all intertwined and involving frontal lobe brain activities and other deeper brain structures. The frontal cortex is responsible for the brain's most complex processing and when correctly activated, has the power to calm to the amygdala, controlling some of the reactions that are more related to surviving than with enjoying life.
From the beginning of our lives or at any unpredictable moment, failure or shock or disarray in any of these processes, disorganize the brain and develop habits that manifest as emotional problems and mental disorders like depression or anxiety.
Combining psychotherapy with neuroscience and technology, the problematic habits dissolve and are replaced by healthy functional ones that return the individual to control and power.
PERSONALITY DISORDERS
Clients with excessive fear as a result of trauma, anxiety, neglect or a chronic stressful environment may have an overactive amygdala and consequently an under-active prefrontal cortex.
These creates a dysfunction in the way the nervous system process information that shows as in ordinary life as irresponsible behavior, lack of appropriate affect, euphoria in some, and incorrect expectation in others, as well as many other socially disapproved actions that become shame, and further dysfunction, evolving into what usually is called a personality disorder.
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Training the amygdala to calm-down and improving the activity of the prefrontal cortex is something that most therapies have not access to. Neurotherapy is offering real and more effective solutions to solve a distressful life that was considered irreparable for decades.
BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER
The term “Borderline Personality Disorder” is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It has changed with the different versions of the DSM, which implies that it’s not yet well defined. The name has also been used in the psychoanalytical world as an umbrella or a spectrum where all the personality disorders move under.
The most common understanding and popular believe is used to describe individuals who are overreactive, unpredictable, unreliable, and unstable; individuals with a black or white mentality that have serious problems maintaining relationships but that crave relationships more than anything else. In general, many clinicians and the general public use the term to describe persons with anger issues, manipulative tendencies and/or suicidal threads. The term is overly used and most of the time, incorrectly assigned. BPD together with most personality disorders has been diagnosed under the belief that is a lifelong disorder, unable to respond or be stably controlled with medications, and that is untreatable in term of psychotherapy.
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Fortunately, with the progress of neuroscience and the understanding of the relationship between mind and brain functioning, we are now removing the labels and the effect of untreatable. We have diagnoses instead the lens of trauma and traumatic stress as the origin of developing some of those personality traits, and by regulating the nervous system, giving hope to individuals of a better and more functional life.
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It's now believed that many people that suffer from this type of symptoms have had attachment difficulties which result in complex psychological trauma. This trauma manifests as instability of mood (issues with regulating thoughts and emotions), behavior (recklessness and impulsivity), and relationships (intense relationships that cycle between idealization and devaluation). Under this paradigm, we help clients improve psychologically by treating the dysregulation since complex personality traits and issues are mostly an effect of dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system. Neurotherapy is the approach that by using different modalities including neurofeedback, most efficiently and rapidly help the deficient ANS to go back to a more regulated state, which then allows navigating the attachment issues that cause such difficulties.