PTSD Professional Perspective: Open Focus Attention

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I am so very excited for our guest post author today. Pioneer in biofeedback, Les Fehmi, PhD., has developed a terrific overview of how to utilize your ability to focus attention. Being able to concentrate is a challenge when we’re dealing with PTSD symptoms. Dr. Fehmi provides a way to conceptualize and implement a solution.

Treating PTSD with Open Focus Attention Training

The Open Focus Brain* is a book about attention, and specifically about the power of attention to heal mind and body.  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a diagnosis given when extreme stress, anxiety or hypervigilant reactions (often in ways that resemble the original ordeal) persist and recur.  The dissolution of anxiety and other stress related symptoms reduce the duration and frequency of recurrence of PTSD. 

It would seem that anxiety is caused by a “traumatic event”, especially extreme in the case of PTSD.  However, it is our observation that attending to the same event in different ways produces different results.  When attending in certain ways, anxiety can be diminished, reduced to lower intensities and ultimately allowed to completely release.  Trauma can be created or aggravated by overuse of certain kinds of attention and underuse of other types of attention.  This applies to many types of symptoms.  It is the way that a person attends to or processes events that maintains or changes symptom intensity.   Some ways of paying attention to an event actually allows intensity to be reduced and dissolved.  Other ways of paying attention lead to the accumulation of anxiety and blocks them from diffusing.  Similar observations can be made regarding many other symptoms and the way attention impacts experience.

Open Focus practice arises from the observation that one can personally identify at least four fundamental dimensions of attention:

• A. Narrow Attention is the type most easy to identify. Narrow attention excludes peripheral attention.
• B. Diffuse attention includes peripheral attention.
• C. Objective attention highlights separateness between the perceiver and the perceived.
• D. Absorbed attention is the occasion when the perceiver or the self merges with the perceived. In the extreme the perceiver or the self disappears into the perceived.

These can be experienced individually, in pairs, triplets and all at once.  When they appear more or less equally and simultaneously, we term it Open Focus attention.  In Open Focus attention, stress arises and dissolves almost simultaneously.  In narrow-objective attention, stress and tension accumulates.  Attentional flexibility is the goal of Open Focus exercises.

It was also observed that when students (at the State University of New York) were asked to imagine feeling the space between their fingers, or the feeling of space around their body, or in the room they are in, or feeling the space their body occupies, this usually produced an obvious increase in synchronous alpha brain waves distributed over the cortex.  Associated release experiences included movement toward a relaxed but interested attention and a general reduction in anxiety, tension and other stress related symptoms.

The Open Focus exercises are designed to reduce the common rigid attachment to narrow-objective attention.  There are 18 exercises which are intended to impact attention.  Some broaden the scope of attention and some enhance the ability to merge with experience.  Other exercises incorporate the existence of both broad and immersed attention which has the ability to dissolve physical and emotional pain, as a means to manage general experience. The individual types of attention and their combinations are powerful tools for managing our mind and our lives.

An example of an attentional deployment that impacts the perceived intensity of anxiety readily involves the alternate use of narrow focused attention and the use of diffuse widespread attention.  When narrowly attending to anxiety alone, anxiety is the only experience in awareness and thus is perceived as potentially powerful and overwhelming.  In diffuse awareness, when attention is a small part of the totality of experience then anxiety is more manageable and in fact, easier to dissolve.  See Figure 1.

Les Fehmi, Ph.D., Director Princeton Biofeedback Centre, LLC, is the founding member of The Biofeedback Society of America (now AAPB) and First President of the Biofeedback Society of New Jersey. For over forty years he has conducted research and practiced clinically in the area of attention and EEG biofeedback (Neurofeedback). He developed OPEN FOCUS^TM Training and specializes in multi-channel, phase synchrony neurofeedback. He is considered one of the pioneers in the field.

*The Open Focus Brain “The Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body” by Les Fehmi, PhD and Jim Robbins.

The opinions in this post are solely those of the author. To contribute to “Professional Perspective” contact Michele.

Tags: Dr. Les Fehmi, Focus Attention Training, Open Focus Brain, ptsd, symptoms