Shooting victim finds peace from neurofeedback

Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Apr 26, 2004 by BILL RADFORD THE GAZETTE

It was a gray, cool afternoon. Julie Beasley, working on a college research project in a Kerr County, Texas, pasture, remembers a flock of birds bursting from the brush, a feeling that something was wrong.

The next moment she was fighting for her life, gunned down by a fugitive with a high-powered rifle. The bullets shattered her left hip and right elbow.

The gunman raced off in her car, leaving her to die.

Bleeding profusely, she crawled across the rough terrain and through barbed wire to a road, where she was found and airlifted to a hospital.

Through more than 30 surgeries, doctors repaired her body.

Her mind was another thing. Beasley was suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder, haunted by memories of the attack.

"My brain was hard-wired to pick up on every sound, every movement," she recalls. She dreamed of crawling through that field.

Her parents would wake her up, tell her she was safe. But she wasn't, she says. In her mind, she was being shot again and again.

Beasley recounted her ordeal as part of a presentation at the recent conference of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology & Biofeedback in Colorado Springs. She told how her fight to regain a sense of normalcy led her to Lynda Kirk of the Austin Biofeedback Center.

Beasley, Kirk found, was in a constant state of "hypervigilance," the muscles in her shoulders and elsewhere always tight.

Biofeedback taught her to recognize that tightness and relax those bunched muscles.

"She learned very quickly in a confident way that she had control over her muscles," Kirk says.

Kirk also employed another form of biofeedback, neurofeedback, which involves brainwave activity, to enhance Beasley's inner focus and control. Those methods, along with desensitization techniques, allowed Beasley to shed the nightmare that had haunted her since the attack on March 13, 2001.

"I owe it all," she says, "to biofeedback and Lynda Kirk."