The Importance of Therapy and Treatment for Teenage Boys with ASD
Are you a parent of a teenage boy with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) seeking additional support? This episode delves into the complexities of providing therapeutic care during adolescence. We'll explore various therapeutic approaches, discuss when to consider residential treatment, and offer insights into the challenges and rewards of supporting your son. Join us as we navigate the complexities of autism in the teenage years.
If you’re a parent grappling with how to support your highly sensitive child, we can help. Discovery Ranch provides personalized mental health treatment aimed at empowering teenagers to lead meaningful, independent lives. Our therapeutic program helps in creating life-changing experiences and building strong relationships. Start healing today. To learn more about our services, call us at 855-662-9318.
Introduction
Tiffany: Welcome back to our final and fourth episode. If you've been with us through this journey, you probably are at a point where you are looking for extra support for your son who has autism spectrum disorder. So in this episode, we will discuss exploring therapeutic support options and when to consider residential treatment.
We're going to dive into various therapeutic approaches for teenage boys with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), including when and how to consider residential treatment, which is a big step for parents. If you're at that point in listening, my name is Tiffany Herlin and I'm a licensed clinical social worker. I'm excited again to be talking with Chris Brown, who's a licensed marriage family therapist from a residential treatment program for teenage boys called Discovery Ranch.
Please remember that this podcast is not a replacement for therapy. Please always seek a mental health professional for your situation.
So, Chris, I was asking you before we started if there is a specific type of training that a therapist should be receiving or that parents should be looking for when they're interviewing a therapist for their son and needing that extra support.
Is there a type of credential or certification?
Chris: Well for me, I spent about five years working at a program that was specifically designed for ASD boys and they were very heavy into neurology and understanding the brain chemistry. Understanding these kids in a very molecular way, but also in a humanistic way. Understanding what makes them them. We did a lot of training and research in those areas. So I got a lot of my training with my feet on the ground kind of mentality.
Tiffany: Experience-wise, you had to dive into that.
Chris: Yeah. There is something called ABA training, which is applied behavior analysis.
You can take those classes and become an expert in working with them as well. So there are two ways to get into those fields. For me, it's more of the boots on the ground and just being able to delve into the research and understand the kids and then, through that trial and error being able to work with other clinicians that are specialized in neurodiversity and autism.
Tiffany: I think it's helpful for our listeners to also be aware that there’s not necessarily a certification that you're going to be wanting to ask the therapist about. If they don’t have a certification, ask about their experience, and if they have delved into the research, and spent time studying this specific topic. If you're talking to a therapist and they say, "Oh yeah, I've met with a few kids with autism," know that they may just not have the breadth of knowledge that they need to address your son or daughter's needs.
So you want to look for that experience in a therapist and someone passionate about this because not every therapist is.
Chris: I'm a marriage and family therapist and you're a licensed clinical social worker. We all have this degree, but then we also specialize in certain areas. Some therapists specialize in substance abuse or addiction or adoption or couples. My specialty and passion is with ASD boys, and teenage boys in a residential setting.
Recognizing the Need for Residential Treatment
Tiffany: I think that's good for parents to know. What are some warning signs or red flags that parents should look for in their son that indicate the need for additional mental health support?
Chris: This is a good one because I have had hundreds of kids that come through my doors who have come through different facilities that I've worked at and it's usually for violence.
So if the student has reached that point where they're bigger and they're more violent and aggressive and they're pushing their mom, dad, or siblings and using knives, that's probably a sign that you need to start looking at out-of-home placement.
If they're threatening their own lives or if they're constantly calling the police and saying, "Hey, my son or daughter is struggling. They're threatening their own lives or threatening me. I can't sleep at night. I'm locking the door every single night. I'm trying to protect my valuables. I'm trying to protect me," that is another time that parents should seek residential treatment for their teen.
When I worked at a different facility, I had one boy who came in and went after one of his younger siblings and the mom had to barricade herself in the room and hold the door while he was trying to get after his little sibling. She was very young, probably three or four years old, and he was trying to hurt her. At that point, the mom knew "I've got to work with the school district. I've got to get my son out of my home and into a safe environment where they can work with him." Violence is huge. The suicidality, the self-harming, running away, or getting into drugs and alcohol as well. Getting into things that he shouldn't be getting into.
Tiffany: We had one boy steal a car and drive one and he was underage by quite a bit.
Chris: They start to become ungovernable meaning that they're loose and the police are being called and they've been referred to juvenile justice or DCFS a lot. Anything like that indicates that it's time to start looking at out-of-home placement.
Tiffany: At one program that I worked at, parents would have to step in and intervene before the law did, because the law doesn't understand. I think they're getting better. I shouldn't speak for every place and state, but a lot of places don't understand kids on the spectrum. The law is the law and there's not a lot of wiggle room around it. If you've broken the law, it doesn't matter if you're on the spectrum or not so parents stepping in front and getting ahead of that is going to be huge because you don't want your kid in the legal system who's on the spectrum. It's not going to help them.
Chris: No. If you have a judge who is looking at a 17 or 16-year-old young man who's on the spectrum, but mentally he's 6, 7, or 8 years old, the judge is going to look at him as a 16 or 17-year-old that is breaking the law as opposed to a 6, 7, or 8-year-old young man, even though that is his age mentally.
Tiffany: Unfortunately they don't look at him as anything other than neurotypical, even though they're not. I think other things to point out too is that you've exhausted your options. You've done outpatient therapy, you've involved a support network in the school and special education and your child isn't getting better. They're digressing and you're just in constant crisis and exhausted and burnt out and it's above your ability.
Chris: You're scared for your own family. You're scared for your own life. You're scared for the people around you. It's just exhausting and it's time to take the next step.
Tiffany: So parents, if you're listening and you're at that place, then this is the episode for you. If you're not, thank goodness. We don't want our parents to get to this point. I've worked in residential for years and I wish it wasn't needed, but it is, and thank goodness it is for families who do need it.
Exploring Medication as a Treatment Option
Tiffany: So there are options, and there is hope if you're at that point. Can medication be an effective treatment option for teenage boys with ASD? If so, what are the benefits and risks?
Chris: So, for me, medication is paramount. It is one of the four legs of the table that I use to help an ASD student succeed.
So, the first of the four legs is clinical, and that is my job. As the clinician, I am in charge of making sure that everyone's on the same page. So, academic, residential, and the doctor or the medical side. The next one is academics. Making sure that the academic team knows how to work with this young man, and how to support him in his struggles or his success at school is important. The residential team is next and they work to understand how to help him through a flood or help him through any type of struggle or success.
Tiffany: Struggles or successes with their day-to-day behaviors.
Chris: Exactly. The very last one is that medical piece. That medical piece is so paramount in helping because I've talked a little bit about that bandwidth of functionality where they're cognitive and doing what they're supposed to be doing. Medication can increase that bandwidth where they're much more relaxed and capable of staying cognitive. I've had kids where we've got him on a certain medication and it's night and day. All of a sudden he is calm and relaxed and he is now listening to me. He's able to process the information I'm giving them. He's able to use those skills and go to school.
He's able to function just from a medical standpoint. We've had kids that do a Neuropsych test after, and the neuropsych psychologist says "He needs to stay on these meds because they are the ones that are helping him stay in that functional atmosphere or that functional environment where he can be productive. Possibly when he becomes 18, 19, or 20 when his brain starts to settle down, you can probably start to wean him off of it. Right now in his teenage years, he needs those medications to be able to access those skills and to be able to understand the processes.” Without those medications, he would struggle and fall back into some old patterns of behavior and then lose it, which is scary.
Tiffany: That makes a lot of sense to look at them as a whole and the whole environment that's affecting them and not only just their mental and academic, but also their physical well-being as well and how the medications affect that.
I think it's important to note too that sometimes they can be on the wrong meds and overmedicated when they come in. The goal is not just getting them on meds, but getting them on the right dosage of the right medication. We don't want them to be overmedicated.
We want them to be able to function and I've seen kids come in completely overmedicated.
Chris: I tell the doctor that I can work with a calm kid. I don't want them overmedicated as well, but I can work with a kid who's a little bit calmer. We can move the medication to a point where he is out of a very normal mentality.
I can't work with, as I call it, a “Tasmanian devil," which is someone so energetic, spinning, so reactive, struggling with transitions or anything of that nature. The reason why I struggle to work with that is because it's just now it's reactionary.
We're just reacting to the kid and we're just trying to keep him safe as he's bouncing.
Tiffany: It's all behavioral at that point, and you're not getting to the solution and the real root of the problem.
Chris: So I can work with a very calm kid as we're trying to move him into a successful medicated spot as opposed to a reactionary kid that is not medicated or not successful.
When they're not medicated and they're struggling, they have failure after failure after failure. I'm trying to teach them all these skills and it's not clicking because they're like, "Chris, I'm doing everything that you're asking me. I'm doing everything in academics and residential, but I'm still failing at everything."
So we need to get that doctor, the psychiatrist, and the medical side on board so that they can be supportive of that.
Tiffany: Is it fair to say that we want to get them out of chemical imbalance? We want to get their brain firing correctly because their brain is wired differently.
We want them to be releasing the correct hormones and neurotransmitters so that their executive functioning skills can thrive. They can learn those skills. They can develop their brain and create new neural pathways.
Chris: It's very interesting because I went to The Autism Symposium in New Hampshire just recently, and I loved it. We had a doctor come in and do the keynote speech for us. She's from Dartmouth and her name is Dr. Davison and she had done brand new research on the autistic mind. She found that there's a neurotransmitter in our brain called glutamate.
Glutamate is the excitatory transmitter that creates excitement in us.
It creates this elation in us, it creates excitement in all human beings. What she found was that in ASD students, that is the same. It's very normal doses as opposed to neurotypicals but it’s the same neurotransmitter. There's also this neurotransmitter called GABA, and it's the one that calms those neurotransmitters down.
What she found was that 35 percent less GABA was found within those neurotransmitters in ASD students, as opposed to neurotypical students. So when ASD students start to ramp up, they can't ramp down. That's why we see these kids-
Tiffany: Their brain's not firing correctly to get them to calm down.
Chris: Exactly.
Tiffany: Makes sense.
Chris: Our nurse and our doctor say, "Yeah if the parents want to buy those over-the-counter GABA supplements from Amazon or wherever, let's give them to them and see if that will help them out." So I've encouraged the parents of the boys I work with to get them that supplement and see if it works well for their son. That's another piece that we're looking at, but also that medication piece of helping with those antipsychotics or those other types of medications to help calm them down when they get excited. When they get excited, they will start to ramp up and they need help coming back down.
Tiffany: That's good to know. Let's take a step back. So if you're a parent, and you've tried everything, you’ve exhausted your resources, maybe even medication at that point, you need to find a residential treatment center. Let's talk about it.
Role of Educational Consultants
Tiffany: I think a lot of our parents may not be aware, but there are people called educational consultants. What are they and how can they help?
Chris: So usually they'll provide some options for you to help your struggling child. Maybe it's three different placement options that would likely accept your son or daughter. They will help you get in contact with the admissions team and will help contact the therapist. They would get everything set up so that they are part of the journey to be able to help support. They would also stay with you if you want them to stay with you during the time that your son or daughter is in a residential treatment center or in a therapeutic boarding school to be able to be a support to you.
Tiffany: And advocate for you.
Chris: Exactly. Advocate to be able to say, "Hey, are you having a hard time with this or is there anything that I can help you with?” They’ll reach out and start that process of getting a dietary plan or getting something in the academics or whatever it is. They're very supportive and very helpful to the whole process of getting your son or daughter help.
Tiffany: They're great at helping when you're ready for the next step or the coming home and the transition process. They're a valuable resource and are worth your time to use because usually, for you parents who are at the point of looking at residential, you're exhausted. You're burnt out, you're in crisis, you're in a fight, flight, or freeze mode all the time.
You're probably not thinking very clearly and to have to go on and just Google a placement for your son or daughter is very difficult. You're going to find hundreds of places and who knows if they're good or not. What they look like on the website may not be what they look like in person and then you got to go tour them.
The ed consultant helps you take out all that stress and they're that support team to help walk you through it while you're feeling overwhelmed and you need that extra support.
Chris: Yeah. I just got a text from our admissions team over at Discovery Ranch saying, "Hey, a new boy is coming in. Here's the education consultant, and here is the family. They're coming in on this day, at this time. So it's great to have that because I know that the parents have been prepped. A lot of times parents will reach out to us without an education consultant, and that's okay, but then we might go down this path of maybe a few weeks, trying to figure out if this boy is the right fit for us and vice versa, and we might find out at the very end of this journey that they are not.
If this happens, then the parent has to start over with an education consultant. They would have a list of a bunch of different places and then they would send emails out and then we'd all collaborate.
Tiffany: They do a lot of the hard work for the parents, so if you're worried about your child and stressed out, they are worth looking into and considering if you have the resources and the availability for that. We want our parents and listeners to know that that's an option.
Chris: Definitely.
Benefits of Residential Treatment Programs
Tiffany: What are the benefits of residential treatment programs?
Chris: So there are plentiful benefits of coming to a residential treatment center. First of all, you get the expertise. There's a lot of expertise.
There are a lot of professionals that are working together. So it's 24 hours, seven days a week, eyes on your boy.
Tiffany: It's a whole team. It's not just two parents trying to manage it alone. You get a whole team.
Chris: It's hundreds of people.
Tiffany: There's less burnout and less exhaustion.
Chris: Exactly. So at the bunkhouse, we have four residential staff per shift and we have four shifts. So there is a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday shift, and then a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and then some Sunday shifts. We have about 60 staff that are working with your son every week.
We've got a whole clinical team that is working with your son. So me and a bunch of other therapists and a clinical director. We've got a medical team that is working with your son. We've got the academic team that's working with your son. We have the equine therapist, we've got the recreation therapist, and we have a lot of different people who are all interacting with your son and being supportive of him. They’re able to go home at the end of the day, regroup, decompress, and then come back and work with your son again and go through all the struggles with him while you are working on yourself.
Tiffany: It gives you a break. It puts your son in a safe environment so you no longer have to manage and worry about their safety and your safety. You've got a whole treatment team support and more than one person trying to figure this out and looking at those four legs of the table like you were talking about.
If you're at the point where you need this, you've got this wonderful supportive team to carry some of the burdens that you've been dealing with alone. Their goal is to help find solutions and healing for your son's mental health journey and your own.
Chris: Everything that we do over at Discovery Ranch is programmatic and therapeutic.
Even though we try to couch it at times, as you're going to ride a horse, there is a programmatic and an experiential activity associated with that. If we're going to go rock climbing or do ground tasks at rec therapy, they will be learning from every one of these activities. Even the hike, while it's fun, it's programmatic. It's experiential. One thing that we know, especially with ASD boys and girls, is that talk therapy is not that productive with them. I've had so many students come through my door and talk to me and I think I've just changed the world. I think I've made it.
Tiffany: I've had those moments where I'm like, “I'm amazing, I've changed this kid.”
Chris: You think you’ve gone there and changed the world. Then he'll go out and all of a sudden I hear screaming and yelling.
Tiffany: He didn't process what you said.
Chris: He did not. I'm like, "I thought we just talked about this." He's like, "I forgot what you said." So talk therapy at times doesn't work that well with ASD students and so my job is to do the talk therapy, do the family therapy, but then also do a lot of experiential groups. I'm also talking to all of the people working for you. So the residential staff, I'm teaching them how to work with you. I'm talking to the academic team about how to work with each student.
I'm talking to the doctor and the nurse about how to work with the students. So my job is really important in that I am the person who is just making sure that everyone's on the same page with the student. So, talk therapy is important but it's not as important as it is for neurotypical students because it's not as effective. It's important, but the work that I do around him and the scaffolding I do around him is going to be paramount with him.
Tiffany: Well, for a neurodiverse student, they need more concrete, hands-on experiences.
Chris: They need the five senses being activated and sitting there and just doing talk therapy is not going to be as helpful.
Tiffany: Engaging the five senses is going to allow them to dive deeper and gain more insight and to make those connections in their brain and create new neural pathways that they wouldn't get just through talking. A neurotypical student only has to touch the stove once or twice to realize they're going to get burned. A neurodiverse student may have to do it 50 times before it registers and they realize, "Oh, when I do this, this happens." So therapy takes a little bit longer and you'd need more than talking. You can't just talk them through, you need those experiences.
Expertise and Specialization at Discovery Ranch
Tiffany: I feel like you already answered this but why should a parent choose Discovery Ranch over another program for their son who struggles with ASD?
Chris: So we have that expertise. The staff are all trained in it. The academic team is all trained in it. The doctor does everything for the whole ranch, but he has a specialty in working with ASD students as well. He knows the medications that work well with them. We also have that experiential stuff. We have the equine, we have the hikes, we have the outdoor activities, we have the rec program, and the calf program, which is huge.
Tiffany: For parents who are listening, if you're interested in hearing more about that, we have a previous season where you can find out more about the calf program and other things that are offered at Discovery Ranch.
Chris: We do a lot of different experiential stuff and it's great because Discovery Ranch is good at saying, "Chris, we understand that your boys are going to be a little bit different than the neurotypical boys and the neurotypical houses."
The way that you process, the way that you interact with the students, and the way that you help them learn from their mistakes are going to be different. We have a whole different program built into the bunkhouse at Discovery Ranch for ASD students that is specifically designed to support their neurology. These boys have some very deep grooves in their neurology and how they behave. We have to go against the grain. It takes time actually, because they've come to us after 14, 15, or 16 years of doing it their way and having these very deep grooves in their brain, and we are fighting against it.
Tiffany: It's not going to happen in a month to rewrite that.
Chris: Another thing that I like about Discovery Ranch that I haven't seen at other programs is that we are designed and built to handle tough kids. Sometimes these kids come in pretty set in their ways. They don't like transitions. They don't like stress.
Tiffany: I call that rock brain.
Chris: Oh yeah, they don't want to move. They don't want to do things. Our staff are trained to be supportive of them. If there is a safety issue, our staff are trained to help with that safety. So if a student is unsafe, if a student is trying to hurt another student or themselves or staff, our staff are trained to be supportive of that student and to help them in a way that allows them to get back into a cognitive state.
A lot of programs out there, if a student gets violent or aggressive or suicidal, they're like, "We can't support this kid. He needs to go somewhere else." Eventually, they will probably end up with us. I've got a student that has been in 11 different
programs.
Tiffany: Wow.
Chris: He has blown out of 11 different programs and finally has come to us and he's been with us for six months. His poor mother is like, "Chris, are you going to kick him out?" I'm like, "No, this is what we do every single day."
Tiffany: She probably has so much PTSD from that.
Chris: Yes, and I told her, "No, this is normal. This is what we deal with. He's getting better. He's starting to trust more. He's starting to be more open to suggestions and to be influenced better."
Our whole program is focused on the fact that we can't control. If you're out of control, then we have to help you. If you're running, if you're violent, if you're aggressive, we have to be able to support you and keep you safe.
But if you are doing what you need to do, we're going to influence you, hopefully for the best. That student is going to make a choice. They will recognize that they are going down a certain path. We'll see where it goes from there, but it's all about helping that student grow.
Expectations and Treatment at Discovery Ranch
Tiffany: So what can a parent expect treatment to look like for their son with ASD if their son is placed at Discovery Ranch?
Chris: So usually for them, I say "Let's work on you guys get some help on your side. Go get your own therapy, get the help that you need." For the first maybe six months, we have to get that limbic system under control. He's got to learn those skills to become cognitive.
Tiffany: Regulate the nervous system.
Chris: Yeah, so if he can eventually get to the point where if he is frustrated or stressed, he goes cognitive instead of limbic 80 percent of the time. So if he's having a stressful moment at equine therapy, instead of getting off the horse and throwing a fit and screaming and yelling and going limbic, he goes cognitive and says, "Okay, well I just need to take a break. I need to relax and get through it.” If he can do that 80 percent of the time, that means he is at a point where we can start that insight work.
That's my gauge right there of knowing when we can start maybe talking more about the trauma.
A lot of the very first three to six months is mostly based on skill development and being able to stay in a place where they are cognitive instead of limbic, and that's huge. Once we go there, a lot of the work starts, a lot of them being able to apologize, being able to talk to their parents, being able to open up, and being much more cognizant of what they’re doing.
Tiffany: Maybe even more empathetic to how their behaviors have affected their parents and siblings.
Having a two-year-old throwing a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store. If they want a sucker and you're like, "No, we're going to have dinner."
When they're throwing a tantrum on the floor and screaming, you're not going to be able to talk them through that because they're in their limbic system, and there's no point. The goal as a parent is to not try to have this adult conversation with them at that moment. They don't care. They want the sucker, and they're raging.
It's getting them grounded, helping them calm down, doing the breathing and holding them, getting them through whatever “Hulk" moment they're in. Then, once they get grounded and regulated, you can have a better conversation with them of "Here's why, and here's how you can get it." Most kids are like that and especially kids who are on the spectrum are going to be more like that and even into their teenage years.
Chris: Especially the ones that come through our doors that are already limbic dominant, meaning that they live in their limbic system all the time and that they're struggling and we just need to get them cognitive.
Tiffany: That makes tons of sense. How do staff work with the students residentially who are on the spectrum?
Chris: So I have a two-month program where I work with the staff and so every week on Wednesday I have a half an hour meeting with all the staff that want to come in.
It's usually a required course and it goes over understanding the limbic system, understanding the cognitive system, and understanding how to be supportive of these students. It has do's and don'ts with these students. It has a skills module training on how to support their neurology.
The main thing that I am trying to emphasize with the staff is that they have to be a trusting partner with them. That is huge because when a student is limbic and sees you as an enemy, it's going to create a much more limbic dominant mindset as opposed to someone else. If I walk in and they trust me, and they're limbic, they're going to see me as a trusted person who can help them come out of that limbic dominant mind. I can sit there and be supportive and helpful and they're going to feel safe with me as opposed to unsafe.
Staff can do that by getting to know them, understanding them, getting to know their strengths and their weaknesses, getting to know what works for them and what doesn't work for them, getting to know what skills they're working on, and what they're not working on, and getting to know their flood plan.
Getting to know what is helpful and that all are designed to develop trust. Trust is huge with the staff because there are times when a student is out of control and they're struggling so badly. Then that favorite staff walks in and then they just like, "Oh, I'm glad you're here because I trust you. Help me, help me."
When they're limbic, it's more of a cry for help and just saying, "Hey, I don't feel safe. I'm so out of control that I need you to help, put me back into safety. So please help me. Maybe your presence can help. Maybe some of the things that you know about me can help me."
So trust is huge, but then also all the skills and the do's and don'ts, the skills module, the understanding of the neurology is going to be very important for these staff.
Tiffany: Having worked at a residential treatment program, especially with kids who are on the spectrum, this is huge. The work that you're doing with the staff, because as a therapist, you can have all the training and skills and knowledge, but you're not with the kid 24/7.
You're with them a couple of times a week in therapy and groups and things like that. To translate those skills down to the staff who are with them on the floor in the trenches, that's going to be the most powerful change you're gonna see. When they're in their day-to-day living and practicing what you're teaching in therapy and then having the support network that they need through the staff to help coach them through that. That's just incredible work, honestly. From my perspective, getting the staff on board and understanding how to help a student in the crisis and get them regulated again, is one of the hardest parts.
Chris: Yeah, because I want to go to work and enjoy my time. I want to go to work and feel like we're a team. So I do a lot of work behind the scenes to get everyone on the same page.
Once we're all on the same page, my job is a little bit better. The staff's job is a little bit better. The academic team is a little bit better; the residential team as well. We're humming along and it's just better. I can go home and enjoy the time that I'm home instead of worrying that things are going to go crazy while I am not there.
Tiffany: That's amazing.
Chris: They're all on the same page and they're all humming along perfectly.
Tiffany: You're probably getting fewer crisis calls and text messages, right?
Chris: Yes
Tiffany: I think this answer is a question alone of what makes you guys unique in helping kids on the spectrum. The fact that you're doing that with the staff is just, I don't know if revolutionary's the right word, because everyone should be doing it.
Every program that takes ASD kids should be doing that but you're just a step ahead in doing that. That's incredible.
Chris: I like it.
Tiffany: So helping the staff, empowering them, giving them the skills that help the kids with their day-to-day living is going to be huge.
Understanding Neurofeedback
Tiffany: You also do neurofeedback.
Chris: Yes.
Tiffany: Talk to us a little bit about that.
Chris: So neurofeedback is along the same lines as biofeedback. So what happens is the brain’s frequency is 12 to 15 Hertz, that's the magic zone. It's the sweet spot of frequency during the daytime.
So when we're focused, when we're patient, when we are at our peak performance, we're at 12 to 15 Hertz. So if we're too high in our frequency, that means we're in crisis mode. We're in this more Tasmanian devil mode, we're spinning and just struggling. If we're too low in our frequency and the frequencies go from zero to a hundred for too low, then that's sedation.
That's where we should be when we're trying to sleep or anything like that. So neurofeedback pushes against the brain and helps the brain regulate at 12 to 15 Hertz. A lot of our students are either too high or too low when they first come in. We have about 20 kids doing neurofeedback right now and we have a technician that we've hired. She comes in every single day and hooks the kids up to the neurofeedback machine.
Tiffany: It’s like a heart monitor, right?
Chris: It's much more intense than that. It's much more intense.
Some companies that do neurofeedback do auditory, and others do the finger and the heart rate. This one is very visual, so we want to encourage the brain to hit those frequencies. The way that we do it is through the visual media. What happens is the student will come in, sit down in front of a television set, and there's a computer that runs the neurofeedback software.
What the technician will do is hook up some electrodes to the brain. Certain electrodes are hooked to the brain to just read the information from the brain. So it's reading the frequencies of the brain.
Tiffany: I've done a different one personally when I went to a conference, so that sounds a lot more high-tech. That's awesome, keep going, I'm excited.
Chris: So what happens is, the technician will say, "Okay, computer, I want to encourage the brain to be at 12 Hertz.” What happens is the student will sit down there, and the computer is reading the frequency of the brain. Let's say the brain is saying eight Hertz. It's too low right now so they're watched and they can watch a Netflix movie. They can watch anything on YouTube. They can watch a DVD. Those are the subscriptions that we have currently right now.
What happens is they're watching it and they're at the low frequency or the high frequency or not hitting that 12 Hertz, the screen will get very small. So it'll be very grainy at times. It might have holes in it. So like this big TV right here that we have, everything is very small and the sound might be off.
So the student is sitting there like, "This is dumb. I don't want to watch this, I hate this." But one thing that we know about the brain is that the brain is good at talking about itself.
Behind the scenes, not in this conscious area, but behind the scenes, the brain is talking about itself, trying to figure out what's going on. The brain is good at monitoring our heart rate. It's monitoring our digestion. It monitors the circulatory system. It's doing everything behind the scenes. Subconsciously or unconsciously, the brain is trying to say, "Okay, what's going on here?"
And the student can't do anything about it. So sometimes they'll squint or they'll just look at it funny and try and force the screen to get big. As the brain starts to cycle and tries to figure out what's going on, it'll hit that 12 Hertz and all of a sudden the screen will get very big.
It'll get very bright. They'll be able to watch it. The student is like, "Oh my gosh" and then all of a sudden they'll hit another frequency and it gets very small. There's this back-and-forth going on as the brain tries to figure out what is going on. Then all of a sudden the brain will figure it out. It takes maybe a good half an hour for these students... Young people can figure it out a lot faster than I can. It might take me two sessions, maybe two, or three hours to figure it out, but they can figure it out within half an hour. All of a sudden the brain figures out 12 Hertz is the magic number, and if I hit that thing, the screen gets big and all of a sudden it figures it out. So all of a sudden the screen will get big and then they'll be able to watch it for the rest of the 45 minutes or 30 minutes.
So, after that session, the technician will say, "Hey, how do you feel after this?" Usually, the student will say, "I feel good. I feel relaxed. I feel focused." A lot of the students will say Zen-like, "I feel very Zen" and then they'll leave and it might last maybe an hour or two after, and then they go back to their thing.
Every single time that they come in, it lasts longer and longer and longer.
Tiffany: So every time you're- rewiring the brain, right?
Chris: You're a force. Yeah. You're pushing back against the brain and saying, "Hey, if you want to enjoy this TV show that you like because it's rewarding, you have to hit that frequency." So the brain figures out very quickly, "If I want to enjoy the show, I have to hit that frequency every single time." It's like riding a bike or exercising, you just get better and better every single time. After the 20 sessions, you can keep that going for a long time. Our students might need 40 sessions. They might need 60 sessions because they are struggling. But for most people, for most people out in the community, it's 20 sessions. For our boys, it might be 40 sessions or 60 sessions, but they're able to maintain that without side effects, and it's long-lasting too.
It lasts for a very long time because the brain likes it. It uses fewer resources and we know that the brain is so hungry for resources. If you're too high or too low, you're using too many resources. If you're right at that sweet spot, you're using just the right amount of resources to function, and it’s great.
Tiffany: I've heard a lot of great things about neurofeedback. I haven't personally as a therapist been trained in it, but there's research out there on it and it's just really powerful and proven to help people.
Chris: I've been trained in this for the last 10 years and so I've had hundreds of people come through. I've done a lot of it with students. We started at maybe every single facility I've gone to and we've kept it going. I've encouraged it and stuff like that.
Tiffany: It's hard to get going in a program and then to have someone keep it up because there's a lot of equipment, it is time intensive, and there's a lot behind it.
A lot of programs don't do neurofeedback because of that when in reality, every program should be doing it.
Chris: Yeah, and we go through the Othmers, which are in Woodland Hills, California. So it's eeginfo.com and that's their website where, if you want to learn anything about neurofeedback, you want to see the research on neurofeedback, how they work, and stuff like that.
So we go and get trained there and we get our certification there. We get all of our equipment from them and then we do that at Discovery Ranch. So a lot of parents when they first come in, they'll say, "Hey, I want to start up on neurofeedback." We have found that parents who start doing neurofeedback at the very start tend to have better results.
Tiffany: That's awesome. I think it's important to know, as you said, these kids may need 40 sessions versus 20. I think parents need to have some front-loading of therapy because it does take a bit longer for kids on the spectrum, especially residential because they've had years and years and years of their brain being wired a certain way.
It's not just going to be fixed in a couple of months and their brain fights you a little more than a typical brain. So where some kids may only need eight to 10 months of treatment, some ASD kids may need it, what would you say?
Chris: 18 months to 2 years.
Tiffany: 18 months to two years, which is what I've seen as well.
So parents coming in, if you're at this point where you're like, “I need residential treatment” know that it can take up to two years of residential treatment to help.
Success Stories of Transformation
Tiffany: But that being said, let's help us end on a success story.
What experience have you had to show parents that there's light at the end of those 18 months to 2 years?
Chris: So when we were coming over from Discovery Academy to Discovery Ranch, I brought four of my ASD boys over to the ranch. On the same day, they admitted a new ASD student and he was fantastic.
I love this kid, but he came in very dysregulated. He came in blowing out of school after school, after school, and he came in with an aggressive attitude. He was struggling with his anxiety and struggling with a lot of things.
We worked so hard with this kid because he was so wonderful. I mean, great personality, but when he went limbic, he went limbic. Through our trust, through our working with him, through not giving up on him, through getting him the correct medication, through working with the parents, through all the hardness, after six months, it just started clicking for this kid. That's what I usually see is six to nine months of really just being in the trenches, working with these kids, it happens all of a sudden, they just start to like, go, "Okay, I'm going to trust you guys and I'm going to work with you guys."
The medication is starting to click, the residential is starting to click, and everyone's starting to click. It just flipped on this kid and he has become an amazing young man. I mean, he is pleasant, he is a fun kid, talkative and enjoyable.
Another student came in, probably a few months after him, and he was the same, struggling. At the start, these two boys hated each other, but they became close friends.
I remember the day when we were trying to get medication for the second student and my clinical director sent me a text saying, "Hey, we're ready to pull the plug on this. We're ready to send this kid off."
I said, "Just give it a little bit more time. Medication's going to hit pretty soon." Within a week after that, the medication finally hit and it clicked. This kid made a complete 180. He was a kid from out of the country, his parents also struggled because he had blown out of program after program after program. They said, "This is the last thing we can do for this kid." We just worked with him even though everyone else around him wanted to give up. They were saying, "Hey, it's tiring on the staff, it's hard work." And I was like, "I'm not done. I can still do it."
It worked out. It worked out well. It was just great. It was just powerful. But there's success story after success story after success story that we've had over at the ranch because we've had kids come in and they're violent and aggressive and my staff are good at taking the punches and taking the falls and stuff like that.
Then all of a sudden, we see this powerful shift. All of a sudden they're productive and they're ready to move on and they're going into different places, and, but it's amazing how you just have to hold on and just go with it because it's going to be hard at the start, but it's worth it.
Tiffany: Thank you so much for sharing those vulnerable and powerful stories. I often tell parents, "Initially things get harder before they get easier and you have to buckle up."
As a therapist, we know that you have to do the hard work first and kids are going to fight you and you'll get a lot of resistance and pushback, but eventually, you get that burst and the cool thing about kids on the spectrum is once they get it and once it clicks, they are like ingrained in it. Once they get the rules and they know what they need to do, they hold their parents accountable. They're like, "No, no, no. That's not how we do this" and it's like a light switch flips on.
Chris: It's amazing.
Tiffany: They're ingrained in it and once they grasp it they run with it.
They have this superpower that is so not recognized and I wish more people could see it and that they could see in themselves. I think at the ranch, you guys do an amazing job at helping these kids and these parents see that superpower and see their strengths and help them not give up because they've had years and years of people giving up and saying,
"No, we can't do this."
Chris: I hate that. I hate when people say, "Oh, you just need to give up. We just need to move them on." I'm like, "No, I don't see that. We just need more time. We just need a little bit more patience and we can do this. There's no other place that's going to take him." The sad part is that usually Discovery Ranch and the things that we're doing there, that's the last place that they can send them. I mean, unless it's some type of really locked-down facility. I worked at those places. I worked at these lockdown facilities. They are facilities that are needed but the boys that come to Discovery Ranch don’t need that. If they're a good fit and we just need to give it more time, then I will push back on management or administration and stuff like that and say, "Hey, just give me one more time."
Conclusion
Tiffany: Chris, it has been a delight talking with you about this topic that's dear to my own heart. I just love your experience and expertise. I hope our listeners have found value, hope and healing in what you've shared.
Chris: Thank you.
Tiffany: You have been a beacon of light and hope for me listening to these stories because these are hard kids to work with.
Chris: They are. They're tough and they're worth it.
Tiffany: They are worth it. Great talking to you.
Chris: I appreciate it.