Episode 180: What's Really Going On with ADHD with Dr. Connie McReynolds
/I am excited to share the latest episode of my podcast, where we will be delving into ways to determine how to support our children with ADHD and a new way of understanding what’s really going on with these kiddos.
In this episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Connie McReynolds. She is a Licensed Psychologist, a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor, and a Certified Vocational Evaluator with more than 30 years of experience in rehabilitation counseling and psychology. Dr. Connie is the founder of Neurofeedback clinics in Southern California specifically in Redlands and Rancho Cucamonga and the author of a beautiful book called “Solving The ADHD Riddle.”
Here are some of the takeaways:
How ADHD is diagnosed and develop a plan for support
Misconceptions and stereotypes of folks with ADHD
The role of auditory and visual processing in ADHD and effective interventions
Understanding how neurofeedback can support folks with ADHD
Ways for parents to support children with ADHD at home
Screen time impacts for ADHD kids and the difference between high-impact and low-impact video games
Understanding why busy environments or background noise enhance focus and concentration
If you enjoyed listening to Dr. Connie’s insights on ADHD in children, you can stay connected with her and learn more about her services. To connect with Dr. Connie, visit her website conniemcreynolds.com and connect with her on LinkedIn @conniemcreynolds, Instagram @drconniemcreynolds and Facebook @drconniemcreynolds.
Resources:
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello, everybody. This is Doctor Laura Froyen. And on this week's episode of the Balanced Parent Podcast, we are going to be diving into how to figure out how to support our kiddos with ADHD, particularly those kiddos for whom the traditional approaches and interventions like medication and behavioral approaches don't work. I'm bringing on a guest who I'm so excited to talk to. She's written a beautiful book called Solving The ADHD Riddle. Her name is Dr. Connie McReynolds. Dr. Connie, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.
Dr. Connie: Oh, thank you so much for being here. Love having me here. It's just great and I look forward to our conversation today.
Laura: Me, too. Why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Dr. Connie: Thank you. So I just want to say I used to live in Madison, Wisconsin. So that was a long time ago. It's where I actually did my doctorate work at UW Madison. So I lived in the same town that you live in. So it's kind of a kindred spirit feeling here. And so thank you so much for having me on.
Laura: Oh, I love that.
Dr. Connie: And really, so my career actually, I sometimes joke about it starting second grade a long time ago because my mother taught second grade for 32 years in the same classroom. And one of the things that as I was writing this book, a story came up that I had long ago forgotten about, but clearly had left an indelible mark on me, which was, she had a little boy one year who couldn't learn how to read and he was struggling and couldn't sit in his chair, there's all kinds of things going on. And so she over the summer took him to a teaching center at a university that was about 45 miles away each way. And they diagnosed him with something back in those days was not well heard of or learned about which was dyslexia. And so with that diagnosis and their health, they were able to figure out how to teach him how to read. And he went on and had a great life.
And then as my life unfolded in career, I became a rehab counselor. And the beauty of that profession is that while we may look at diagnostic information, we're always looking for the strengths, the abilities of the person. And we're looking for ways to mitigate problems. And so that was the foundation that I used when I went in to get my degree in Rehabilitation Psychology, which likewise was a similar approach, which you can have diagnostics, but you really need to have a plan to help someone because the label really doesn't do it. So I taught in academics for 25 years and that was really the philosophy that I brought to the classroom. When I taught psych rehab, I taught drug and alcohol rehab, I taught a host of counseling classes which is the diagnosis may get a person in the door, but it doesn't tell you anything about the person. So you need to figure out who the person is.
Laura: I really love that Connie. You know, a lot of the folks that I work with are either thinking about entering the diagnosis process or worried about entering it and getting their kid, you know, having a label. And I really love the framing of the diagnosis, getting you in the door, but then needing a plan. So for the families who are maybe kind of seeing some things coming some flags coming up for their kids, they're thinking about a diagnosis, what would you recommend they do so that they can not only maybe get the diagnosis that gets them access to services, but get it in a way that helps them have that plan?
Dr. Connie: Well, I think it is a little bit of a double edged sword for some families and parents because they struggle with this idea of a label because in some ways to access services at a school or even insurance, you may have to have a diagnosis for this. And yet they may think I don't want my child labeled with this. I don't want this label following my child through school. So I encounter a lot of parents who really are on the fence about all of this. And it's a case by case situation, you know, if they're needing some kind of insurance benefits that they can qualify for because they have the diagnostic criteria, then they may need to do that. If it's something else where they're not going down that road and they're looking for alternatives, then we have an answer for that one too, which is we have a different way of looking at this and I'm happy to talk with people about that and really explore. So the first part of it really is figuring out what is the need, what do the parents need, what's the family needing, what's the child needin. And then we kind of go into the next step of that, which is figuring out what is really going on with these children. And I'll say, and adults, because I work with as many adults who have this as I do children.
Laura: Okay. So let's hone in on this. So can you tell us a little bit about especially on ADHD specifically? Can you tell us a little bit about how kind of ADHD is perceived how it's sort of in kind of a mainstream way and how the reality of how ADHD can show up in certain populations with certain kiddos is very different because I, I think we all have in our minds that one kid when we were growing up, usually a boy couldn't sit, still, definitely had the H in the ADHD the hyperactivity part. But I was diagnosed with ADHD earlier this year. And I was never hyperactive. I had the inattentive type. So can we piece those apart kind of what our preconceived notions are, how we misunderstand it and kind of what's really going on when we talk about ADHD?
Dr. Connie: Great question because it's really the heart of everything. It's kind of the heart of the book that I wrote, which is when we think about ADHD typically, we think about the little boy typically who is like running with an uncontrolled motor and won't sit down and is kind of knocking stuff around and, you know, can't go to bed at night and parents are frazzled and everything's not working very well and teachers are worn out. So everyone's worn out around this little guy, because he's just 100% on all the time. Sometimes I ask parents about energy level on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being low, 10 being high and they'll say 15.
Laura: Yes.
Dr. Connie: So that's kind of the, I think the general population understanding that is one tiny segment of what ADHD can represent across our population. So part of what I discovered 15 years ago when we started using this particular assessment is I look at 37 ways the brain is processing auditory and visual information. So if you think about that, that's completely different than saying, oh, this kid's hyperactive. So what we're looking at is a host of information across auditory and visual processing as well as fine motor hyperactivity. Some comprehension, we look at processing speed and stamina and you can have, it's almost, I've come to think of it as these assessments of the graph that comes from that as an individual fingerprint of ADHD, because it can be inattentive, it can be combined, it can be hyperactive, it can be, well, they've got a whole bunch of auditory and visual processing, but they don't have enough to even qualify on this assessment for ADHD. But they have all the same behaviors that a child who maybe does qualify for a diagnosis of ADHD. So really.
Laura: Wait a second there because this is, that's, I feel like that's the part that when I was reading your book, I just jumped out at me and blew my mind because I, I work with so many of these kids who they even go through the diagnosis process and the parents think it's ADHD but they get in there and they you know, the diagnostician says, nope, it's not ADHD but they're having all of these behaviors that, that look like it. So tell us a little bit more about the auditory and visual processing aspect of this and how like why we get confused, why that misunderstanding is there?
Dr. Connie: Because we don't know what we're looking at. Bottom line, we don't know what the behaviors mean. So the traditional approach to ADHD in any child who's struggling, the, these are the ones who have come to the surface popped up to the surface typically because of behaviors or grades or something. So these are the children that look like something is going on perhaps. But, but what about these children who, as you were describing, they have all this going on, but someone says, no, they don't qualify for ADHD. Well, perhaps they do from a different standpoint because if we get rid, let's just get rid of the ADHD diagnostic label for a moment. And let's just look at the underlying causal factors of what's going on. Typically, there are behaviors that people are trying to get rid of bottom line. So either we're trying to get someone to pay attention or we're trying to get someone to sit down and it falls on a broad spectrum of those. And so the challenge is that if we have these behaviors and our sole purpose is to get rid of these behaviors without understanding what the behaviors are actually telling us. Then we've lost the language that's being communicated from the child to the adults.
Laura: I love those so much. Yeah, go ahead. Keep going.
Dr. Connie: Yeah, it's a language that the children are using because they just have behaviors, they can't walk in and say mom, my auditory vigilance is off today. I'm really going to need you to repeat this two or three times in order for me to hang on to it so I can do what you're asking me to do today. It's not that I don't want to. It's that I can't remember. You're not gonna get that from a child, but you're gonna get behaviors from a child.
Laura: What will that look like behavior? How will a child say that with the behavior?
Dr. Connie: So the behaviors for auditory processing, if it's a vigilance problem, which is they can't sustain their attention, they could drift off, they could be inattention, they could be wandering around in their mind and it's like they can't follow instructions, they can't remember what was said. It just got the list goes on and in the book and it look like.
Laura: Can it look like purposeful defiance and not paying attention?
Dr. Connie: Absolutely.
Laura: Okay.
Dr. Connie: It absolutely can look that way because the child doesn't know how to tell you that they can't figure out what you're asking them to do. So they're going to drift, they're going to be disengaged sometimes they're going to be obstinate looking, sometimes they're gonna look like they have willful, bad behavior because, and some of that will develop as a result of this because it's a defense mechanism for this child to protect themselves against punishment, against harsh words, against criticism, against all of these things that are coming at them that they can't understand because they don't know why they are getting in trouble because it isn't anything that they are willfully doing. It's simply the brain cannot keep up with what's coming at them and it has nothing to do with intelligence. So I've worked with geniuses who are in special education their entire academic career. It K12 until this one young man hacked the school's computer system because he was in the library one day and bored out of his skull. And that was the first inclination that this kiddo was brilliant. So we miss it completely with these children because we're looking at all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. We can't get the right intervention until we figure out what's really going on. And if we're treating an attentiveness and we think it's willful bad behavior, we're going to use punishment or withdrawal or something to try and improve the behaviors and when it doesn't work and it doesn't work and it doesn't work, there's something off.
Laura: And it may even make things worse, right?
Dr. Connie: It does.
Laura: So I just wanna hold to light something that you're saying that I think the, the folks in my community have heard from me a lot that the, you know, so much of this is not necessarily within the child's control. And then when we layer on punishment, shame and blame, we heighten their, you know, their safety systems and their bodies and they make more mistakes and they have more behaviors that are challenging. And I just really, you said earlier that, you know, our go to is to start if to either get more of one behavior or less of the other. And I just wanna say you're speaking right now to a community who is really moving to, to set aside behaviorist approaches. We are hungry for understanding, not just what's going on under the surface for our kids, but how to actually support them. And so I'm, I'm, you couldn't be speaking to a set of parents that's more primed to be hearing what you're saying.
Dr. Connie: Well, as I said, I'm thrilled to be here because this book is really for the ears who are ready to hear.
Laura: Yeah.
Dr. Connie: What this is and I think there are a lot of ears out there that are really ready to hear an eyes that are ready to see things quite differently than where we've been. What we've been doing isn't working. And I learned that 15 years ago when parents were coming in, they'd have their children on all types of medications, multiple medications, side effects. Children wouldn't take the meds, behavioral inventions didn't work. And the question became, why is this not working? What is going on here that all of these traditional things aren't working? And me being kind of a out of the box thinker to start with because I didn't like labels too much anyway, you know, I, I didn't buy into the labels that these children were walking in with, which was oppositional defiant disorder, intermittent explosive disorder. You know, just go to anger management problems, willful, bad behavior, Tourette's syndrome.
The list went on and on and on with these diagnostic conditions. And I'm interviewing this little guy in the room or the little girl and I'm looking at them and they're conversing with me or you know, I have had children spin all the chairs in the room that has happened. I did have one little guy that pulled all the plugs out from underneath the chairs one time and brought them into the conference room and it's like, well, okay, this is unique. So again, this is really about understanding the behaviors and looking at this from a completely different frame of reference, a different lens of perception where we can better understand that if we get to the root cause of this, there's something we can do about this. And that's the beauty of what I've discovered over the last 15 years is that when we can find these auditory and visual processing problems, we do this with a 20 minute assessment that's computer based.
Laura: 20 minutes?
Dr. Connie: 20 minutes.
Laura: I mean, wow, my kids just went through the diagnosis process and it was a two day full on.
Dr. Connie: It is. And as much as I come from teaching myself, I understand psychology. I get all of that. It takes days and days for that material to come to the surface. And they still miss this because they're not doing this assessment.
Laura: Yeah.
Dr. Connie: And so they still miss this information, which in 20 minutes tells teachers what they need to know more than anything else will. And when I ran the pilot project in a school, the changes that I saw, not only with parents, obviously, that always happened, but the changes with the teachers and the administrators was full on mind blowing. When they actually looked at this assessment, I held up the graph and they've got the little girl melting down in the classroom every single day, crying and having a horrible day. And I ran this assessment. She didn't have any visual processing, which means she couldn't understand what the teacher was putting on the board or how to get it to her piece of paper. She couldn't figure it out and she was so embarrassed and mortified that her only response was just to break down every single day and just having and just in tears in a puddle all the time.
Laura: Doesn't your heart ache for these children?
Dr. Connie: Yes. Every single day. I hear these stories every single day, every day for 15 years. I've heard these stories, which was the reason the book came about once I figured out how to deliver these services beyond the 20 or 30 mile radius of my clinics. Once I figured out how I can deliver this to anyone in this country, then I was ready to write the book and I've actually worked with people in Switzerland as well. So.
Laura: That’s awesome. Okay.
Dr. Connie: It is. So we can, we can solve it is the bottom line here, we can solve this.
Laura: Okay. So I feel like you gave us a good description of kind of what audit like auditory, visual like sorry, auditory processing problems can look like. What about the visual stuff? How does that work in the brain? What's going on for kids who are having that, that type of processing problem?
Dr. Connie: Well, this is the child who can't remember where he or she left his shoes, the backpack, the homework, the toys are scattered all about runs into things, bumps into things disorganized, messy. Can't write very well, so messy handwriting or eye hand coordination, missing letters when they're copying words. A whole host of behaviors come with visual processing and they can just not be able to track on things going on. So like the little girl who was crying every day, so the teacher is diligently writing on the board thinking she's doing exactly what she needs to do for her students. The little girl sitting in a puddle in the room because she can't figure out what anything means because she can't translate what's happening on the board to get it on a piece of paper. She looks around, she sees her peers doing something. She has no idea why she can't do it. The only conclusion she comes to is that she isn't very smart and they use terrible words for themselves.
They start telling themselves that they're stupid and we hear it and it's just like we have to stop this, we absolutely have to stop this. So and we can't. So these visual processing and I have a checklist at the end of the auditory chapter and the the visual processing chapter where parents can kind of go through there and see, you know, are there, you know, characteristics here that they're noticing in their children and some children will have both, will have combinations of auditory and visual. And sometimes the auditorium in one area is working in the visual is that sometimes it isn't working across both of these sections. And these are children that really struggle. And then I have children that don't have the ability to score anything on either auditory or visual processing. And these are the children who are most likely to end up channeled into support services and end up over there and never get out. Because if you can't process information, you look like you have other kinds of disabling characteristics that may or may not be the case.
Laura: Okay. So I, I feel like you're, you're giving me a lot of really interesting information. I'm processing it. So I, I'm thinking about the listeners listening to this right now and as you're talking and describing these things, they're thinking about a kid in their lives. I'm actually thinking about one of my kids. I, lots of things are kind of dinging a bell for me there. So for those of us, you know, we may go through your book, go through the checklists or we have the ability to take your assessment. What do we do then with that information, when we find out specifically where some, maybe some auditory or visual processing is going awry for our kids? What are some interventions of things that we can start doing or places to go immediately?
Dr. Connie: Yes, immediately what I tell parents once we know what's happening, so we get the assessment, we know which areas are working great and then we know where the pitfalls are for this particular child. Then I can tailor the intervention specific to the parents at home and they can share that with the teachers. And sometimes I write a combination letters if they're having a particularly difficult time with the school district, you know, we're gonna punch it up a little bit and see if we can get some help coming in for a child. But for auditory processing, you need a visual backup if they have the visual processing capability. So whenever you're saying anything visually small chunks, one thing at a time don't be doing multilevel instructions or multi step expectations for a child with auditory processing gets going in and you may hear that oh, when in one ear and out the other. Well, that's exactly what happens because it's not sticking on the way through because they don't have that neuronal processing capability to retain information has nothing to do with intelligence.
But if my brain has a Teflon spot on it where it's supposed to be hanging on to auditory information, it's gonna slide right out and I'm gonna go. What, what do you say if I have the awareness that you even said something to me that may not even be on the menu today, it could be something totally, you know, distracting for this child. If there are auditory processing problems that interfere in noisy environments, think about a typical classroom, think about a typical home and homeworks going on. Could be the TV, going on at school. There's probably 20 or 30 kids in the classroom. All of them are making some kind of little noises here and there can have an air conditioning unit, can have a lawn mower outside, you can have a dozen other things going on while a child with auditory processing difficulties. All of that comes in at the same level, there isn't the ability to discern to shut out the unwanted information to get to the wanted information. I once had a little girl come in and tell me she was after she did neurofeedback, she was a teenager. She was now not taking her medications anymore because her brain was working better and she came in and she said, you know, now when I'm in the classroom, she said I can choose who to pay attention to. I can pay attention to my friends who are chatting around me or I can choose to pay attention to the teacher.
Laura: Okay, so.
Dr. Connie: We asked the breakthrough.
Laura: Are you saying that, that these aren't things that are set in stone? They, that with practice, they can get better for some folks.
Dr. Connie: Absolutely. It's what I do all day long. That's what we do with the neural feedback. So the neurofeedback is.
Laura: Yeah, tell me about that. But how is the, what's the mechanism like? I mean, I know our brains are amazing and plastic and they grow a new neural connections forms. I'm fascinated.
Dr. Connie: So this is the beauty. It's called neuroplasticity. And neuroplasticity was actually get, this was introduced in 1949 by Dr. Donald Hebb out of Canada. It's taken us a while to figure out what he knew way back when. But this neuroplasticity means the brain's ability to change. We change our brain every single day. The only way we've ever learned how to do anything is through repetition from picking up a pen to riding a bike to being an astronaut, it doesn't matter what it is, it's repetition. So neurofeedback, EEG Biofeedback capitalizes on that which is called operant conditioning or operant learning, which through reward and repetition, the brain learns to hang on to things. So any of these areas of weakness, we literally target them with a training plan that are low impact video games that have been scientifically designed to tackle the auditory, the visual processing problems and through the repetition, typically 30 minute sessions, two or three times a week for every 10 hours of training, we come back and rerun these assessments to measure overall global progress toward the goals. And then if we haven't hit everything on the 1st 10, which most of the time we don't, then we do another 10 hours, which is equivalent to 20 hours of brain training, which is pretty much industry standard. So kind of the average, if you think bell curve kids in the middle there, you can usually get most of it.
There are some that get done sooner, some that take longer depending on how far we have to go. So we're strengthening. Yeah, if we're strengthening existing neural pathways, that's one thing. If we're building it, it's gonna take a minute because we literally are building these pathways in the brain so that this child's brain will retain this and go on. And once we get this all strengthened and channeled in and wired in, people don't need to come back to see me. That's the beauty of this. You get done with this. The brain's working and because repetition works and reinforces everything, the more you use it, the stronger it gets and the better you just continue to get. I've had adults come back five years, eight years later and say I just wanna let you know, my brain continues to get better and better and better.
Laura: Oh, that's really beautiful. And I don't know, gives a lot of hope. Okay. So what are some of the, like it, it sounds like that's a computer game like that people can play. What are, you know?
Dr. Connie: Specialized computer.
Laura: Of course. No, of course. But like what are some of the things that, you know, I'm, I'm just thinking about my, my one daughter who dings some ADHD bells for me. But perhaps it's perhaps it's just some processing stuff going on for her. The other day I was asking her to do something and I said it, you know, super respectfully, calmly, connectedly three times and after the third one, she goes mom. So she's, she's eight. She goes, mom, I heard you, I just needed a moment to process. And I mean, I was like, oh, thanks for that feedback, but she's also like a highly verbal kid who can really tell me what's going on for her. I'm not all kids can do that. This is also my child who, when I say like, oh, we need to clean up the playroom, it can throw her into a meltdown. But I, I say, okay, take this bin and go pick up all of the toy cats. She goes and takes them and it's not a problem, you know, it like she gets thrown by those kind of big multi step things. But if I or if I make a visual list for her and say, just do this one first, she's able to go, you know. So I mean, those are dinging some bells for me. What are some things that parents can be doing if this is also dinging some bells? But we're not at the place where we need to go and have like maybe have some big time interventions. But what are some things that parents can do to support these kiddos at home and not just, you know, perhaps building some new neural pathways but just even making life easier so that we don't get that meltdown when we say it's time to pick up the playroom.
Dr. Connie: Well, meltdowns are indicative of overwhelming. Yeah, being overwhelmed. So the brain's overwhelmed when you're getting meltdowns and that means whatever was just presented to this child was too much, too much, too much, too much, too much.
Laura: Yes.
Dr. Connie: So it's just smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller increments to figure out. Okay, where's the threshold for this? So what does this child, what's the threshold by say go get your toothbrush, brush your teeth, pick up your pants on the way, feed the dog, take out the trash and then you've got, nothing happening.
Laura: Yes.
Dr. Connie: Might remember something about playing with the dog.
Laura: Yeah, right.
Dr. Connie: Okay. Oh yeah, the dog, I mean play with the dog. Yeah, that's all they got through. So again, segments, small increments, big projects for children who are overwhelmed will melt cause meltdowns. It's just thinking about what type of segment does this child particularly need. And and parents often know parents kind of know and many times are implementing some of these. Now some parents don't, but some parents have kind of figured out. Okay, if I say five things, nothing's gonna happen here. If I do one, we might get it done. And so it's like do one thing, check for comprehension, check for completion, then the next thing. And so if you've noticed that your words fall on deaf ears, so to speak, then switch to list, switch to chore list, switch to some kind of visual. If you realize that your child doesn't even notice, you know what color the shirt is that they're putting on and things just aren't operating that way. But if you tell them to do something, then go that it's literally figuring out the strengths.
Now, I will say whatever any of those weaknesses are, we've tackled a lot of it. And so the beauty is that yes, a lot of these children can learn these, you know, these techniques, parents can learn that too when it gets to the point where they're struggling in school and it's just a lot, then it may be time to kind of look at. Okay, you know, is there something we can figure out here? Is there a little bit bigger piece of the puzzle? Now, the checklist in the book will give you that. And then there are chapters in the book for teachers and for parents for what do you do when you have these kinds of situations that you've identified in your child. So here's this approach, here's this approach, try this and try that and then kind of see how it's going. And so, yeah, you're right. Not every child needs, you know, interventions, but honestly, a lot of them do and can benefit. So it's figuring out where you are with all of that.
Laura: Okay. And so, you know, for, you know, I'm, I'm looking at your book right now, which was one of the funnest books I've read in a long time. It's funnest a word. I don't know if it's a word. But it was lovely. It hit all of my like delight, you know, in child development and, you know, it's, I, I've always heard that ADHD brains are interest based nervous systems, you know, that we have an interest based nervous system and it definitely pinged my pinged my brain. But I'm, I'm just thinking about the parents who are wanting support with this. You know, the book is so good for, you know, folks who are in a kind of do it yourself place. But what about folks who want to have someone walking alongside them? Want some, you know, help or for, you know, I have one kid for example, who only wants me to be their mom. She does not want me to be their therapist. She does not want me to be their teacher. She wants me just in one lane in her life. You know, which I love, I love that. She can tell me that, you know, and I, so I just stay in my lane.
Dr. Connie: Which is great, which is great. So what I was able to do a couple of years ago with the software company where, you know, we've been working with them for 15 years now is to be able to do what I call remote neuro feedback. So literally everything we do in my clinics, we can do with people sitting in their homes and we can do it, because the the gaming industry, although I'm not a big fan of the gaming industry per say, they did create very powerful laptops. So these new computers that we now have can handle all of this where 1520 years ago when we started this laptops were not that powerful. So you kind of had to go to university or some big place to get this. You can do this in your home now and we have people all over California that are doing this and I have people in different states that are doing this. And so we start with the assessment. Yeah, I send the tech sheets. It's like, okay, we're gonna do a tech check to make sure we've got all the tech right to be able to handle this.
And then literally through zoom, we do the assessments and within an hour and a half, we can have all the information that we would have if you're sitting in my clinics, I go over that with the parents. We email those assessment reports out and I can do consultations then with schools if they need it. So that gets you in the door and then the neuro feedback, we can deliver that the same way. You do have to lease the equipment. So we have some licensing and some leasing things that have to happen on the front end that don't happen for the people, you know, that come into the clinics, but we can make this completely doable. And that was really the lynchpin or the keystone here before I wrote the book because I, I knew all this material for years and I just had decided, I'm not writing this book if I can't answer and provide help to people who need it and want it. And then I thought, well, not every, like you said, not everybody needs that, but people just need tips and techniques to handle, you know, some of this for the schools and for home. So it's, it's avail all of it's available. And yeah.
Laura: Okay. So I have a, so I have two questions and they're totally different. So I'm trying to figure out which one to ask you first. So one is, so there's quite a few people in my community who have experienced harm from behaviorist invention interventions in the past. ABA ones that are coercive and punitive. Can you tell us a little bit about how your approach to behaviorism within this training is different?
Dr. Connie: That is so important because I see it all the time and I see it in the classrooms. And I think it's indelibly stuck in my mind when a mo mother came in one time and told me that the teacher of her young son had decided that she could improve her son's attention by having him sit on a one legged stool throughout the school day. And it just sends chills around me when I hear these stories and the beauty of neurofeedback is or neurofeedback just so people understand most people have heard of biofeedback. So biofeedback was where you put a little sensor maybe on your finger and it measured your pulse and you had measurement of your respiration and that's the biological feedback. And so that was fed into some equipment and it may be beeped or there is something on the screen and you could see that by practicing breathing exercises and relaxation, you could lower your heart rate and you could improve your breath. And so you could get the biological feedback which is hence biofeedback. So, neurofeedback is EEG biofeedback where we're doing the same kind of thing only we're just reading brain waves.
Laura: Fascinating.
Dr. Connie: So with a little, yeah, with a little sensor on the brain, on the scalp, it doesn't go in the brain, nothing goes into the child. It's the same kind of feedback loop. So by being able to read the brain waves, we can tell how the brain is working with attention and concentration and focus. And then there's these low impact video games that as your brain is creating the desired outcome, you win your video games. And so.
Laura: Okay.
Dr. Connie: There's no behavioral intervention involved here. This is your child or you as an adult, allowing your brain to get trained. So I call it kind of a brain boost, so to speak, we just kind of boost the functioning of the brain. Reinforce that. And literally children become self empowered because instead of constantly being in trouble for their quote, bad behaviors that they can't control. They start learning, they can run a computer with their brain, they're not using a mouse, they're using their brain to run the computer and they get pretty excited about this when they get to see they have that kind of control in their life, in areas that they didn't think they had control at all.
Laura: Yeah.
Dr. Connie: And so literally, this is such a kind of low impact intervention that kids generally, even children with mild to moderate autism. We work with these children who come in and it just helps them develop a greater sense of self. And I will say for adults, too. So I talk a lot about children in this book because I really want to help people understand that this is completely workable here. We can do something about this. But there are many, many adults who have similar challenges, maybe they've lost a lot of jobs or relationships or things just haven't gone well, anxiety and depression may have set in and even some trauma. So the trauma, which is a little bit what you were hinting out there with some of those behavioral interventions, we tackle trauma too. And so that's the other side of this is that I worked with a lot of veterans, I've worked with children who come through foster care. I've worked with people who've had all kinds of traumatic experiences that when the brain gets kind of locked into that, there are response patterns.
And so that is literally the brain learning how to relax again. And so we teach the brain how to do that as well. So yeah, the beauty of this, particularly for military folks is that research now clearly shows talk therapy for a lot of people who have trauma does not work. It is not the thing to be doing. And there are a lot of organizations that still haven't quite learned that research yet and they're still going down that pathway. But I've worked with veterans when I lived in Wisconsin. So I was at the VA center there for a year or two doing my doc work and, you know, talk therapy has its place. But I, I would think of so many of those veterans and then the last 15 years, the veterans I've worked with here and what I wish I could have done for the, at that time there were Vietnam veterans that were getting served there at, Middleton VA Hospital. So there's a lot that can be done and this is really a workaround for any of that traumatization that's happened, where talk therapy hasn't worked for behavioral and punishment and all of that hasn't worked. If those things aren't working, it's time to change the game, is what I'm saying. If it isn't working, stop.
Laura: I mean, I think like the punishments and those types of things work in a way that like the mechanism by which they work isn't necessarily one that most parents really want to be leaning into anyway. You know, they just do it because they feel like it's their last hope, you know, their last thing that they can do. Okay, so I have, now I have a couple other questions, sorry, I warned you that this is probably gonna happen. Okay, so one is I've noticed that, you know, in my own life and in lots of the people that I work with that kids with ADHD tend to gravitate more towards gaming and screens. And I'm kind of, do you have thoughts on that around like why it can be harder for them to, to self manage, you know, and and remove themselves from those things. Some of the families I work with even say that feels like their kids are self medicating with them. I I I'm kind of curious. I've always wanted to ask an expert about that.
Dr. Connie: Oh yeah, straight on the answer is yes, it has an impact and yes, it can be addictive and I've actually treated children who have video game addiction to the point that they, once the parents tried to withdraw that from the child, there was destruction, there was violence, there was all kinds of bad negative behavior, you know, because this child's brain was literally addicted to the dopamine rush that gets dumped in with these games that are specifically and I'm going to be very careful here, but I'm gonna be very specific about it. Some of these games are specifically designed to keep children playing those games.
Laura: Of course.
Dr. Connie: The high impact that cause a lot of the anticipation and the reward system for children who have ADHD they're short on dopamine, which is our feel good neurotransmitter. These games, guess what they dump into the brain?
Laura: Dopamine, right?
Dr. Connie: Dopamine to the point. And this research and it's cited in the book when I talked about it, the references in the back and you can go find it. So there was research that was done back in the late 1990s by scientists who were looking at these violent video games and these high reward, high impact video games and they were able to measure the amount of dopamine that was getting dumped into these children's brains. And it was the same as an injection of methamphetamine.
Laura: Wow.
Dr. Connie: that's been out since the late 1990s. People know this.
Laura: Yeah.
Dr. Connie: This is not a secret that this is what's going on.
Laura: And so of course, we're not attempting to vilify games but understanding what's happening in your kid's brain while that's going on. And so is there are there things that we can do to help our kids heal from that if, if we're seeing that?
Dr. Connie: Well, it is. So obviously, I'm using video games, we use video games in our training. So again, is it low impact or is it high impact? So what is, what's actually happening with that game? What is that game designed to do? So if you're looking at your child and you're saying, okay, it's time to come get dinner, your child can't get out of the game, can't walk away and it's just a constant battle and constant struggle you may have to start looking at. Okay, do we have a situation going on here where this child's brain is just being so overly stimulated that to walk away from that then causes the dip in the dopamine. So here's what's so important for parents to know, if this child has been using these games and a lot and you can define however you wish to for a lot that it's the behaviors again you have to look at. So we have the behaviors and you start to put an intervention in and you start getting a lot of pushback.
You have to start digging a little bit deeper in here because this could be a situation where this brain has become dependent upon the video game to manufacture the dopamine. Because what happens as in any type of addiction, I'm using the term a little bit loosely, but there's been good research out there that actually speaks to video game addiction. It's out there, it's in the book too. So what happens is when the brain starts becoming dependent on these video games and it gets these big dumps of dopamine, then when you don't have the video game, the brain is dependent upon the external source to create the dopamine rush. And its own manufacturing unit starts to slow down because it's measured that it has enough dopamine in there. And so then if you pull away the game, then the brain is going through withdrawals. And so now you are dealing with an addictive brain.
Laura: Okay, and so then do you need to find other ways that increase dopamine levels for these kids as they come off of games?
Dr. Connie: Well, certainly math doesn't do it. So, so if you're thinking homework and thinking.
Laura: For a second, I thought for a second, I thought you said meth, not math.
Dr. Connie: Math, meth doesn't do it typically for these children, okay. So what I have recommended is kind of those old traditional things. Get outside, get outside, get outside when you can. Now, when you live in the north, I know what it's like.
Laura: Oh man, you know.
Dr. Connie: That's quite hard. But the gym, something where you're getting physical activity because you're gonna have to find other ways for this child to get reward systems and it's gonna, it's not gonna measure up, you know, once the brain kind of gets tied into that video game business, it's hard to find something that's gonna give that kind of a dump because it probably won't. We don't really want it to, we just want the child to develop better habits, other interest, find things that are joyful. If sports, you know, used to be something, let's figure out what that is. It's creativity, you know, what else is interesting and it may be difficult for that child to identify once the brain has kind of gone down this pathway, so it might take some investigation, it's gonna take some patience, it's gonna take some creativity to be able to get this going. And really a hands on approach with parents is, is necessary. It's like, well, let's figure out, you know, can we in the summer go for a bike ride, can we go, do you play sports? Can we get outside? Yeah, whatever it is, get outside because we know that physical activity increases the feel good, you know, neurotransmitters in our brain. So, you know, is there are other kinds of puzzles and games and other kinds of things that we can do that aren't driven by a particular type of video game. There are a lot of video games out there but these are the ones that are designed that cause the trouble are the ones that are designed to really keep kids hooked to playing them.
Laura: Okay.
Dr. Connie: If you've got a kid who can't walk away, then you might have a kid with a problem.
Laura: Okay. You, you used to a term earlier that I wasn't quite, quite clear on. I think it was high-impact and low-impact video games.
Dr. Connie: That's what I've called. I've started calling them that because I have to make a distinction because video, not all video games are created.
Laura: Yeah. Can you tell me what some of the, you know, my, we basically do know video games at our house. And so I, I don't even know. I know Roblox is a thing. I know that like is Call of Duty still a thing, you know, like I, I mean, I know Minecraft is a thing. So what are some of the high, high and the low is that?
Dr. Connie: Well, the ones that you were just mentioning, if it's designed to keep a child playing, and keep them engaged a lot, then I call that more of a high impact because there's something about it that keeps drawing that child in that they can't kind of let go of it to go do other things. They have trouble kind of putting it down. It's like if you really love chocolate chip cookies and someone just pulled a dozen of them out of the oven and you're sitting there, how many of them can you walk away from?
Laura: Right.
Dr. Connie: You know, kind of the same thing. But you know that maybe that salad is a little bit better for you, but it doesn't quite taste as great as that hot chocolate chip cookie taste. But it's somewhere, you know, that maybe if you go the salad route, you're gonna be better off. So part of it is really teaching and crafting and molding children's response patterns to their environment. It's like, what can we do that really is going to enhance this. So low impact is what I talked about, which is just kind of innocuous programs, things that don't necessarily drive a lot of this desire to continue to do it. So, in our, clinics, our training programs are usually about 25 minutes long and they'll have like three or four or five or six different little video games in there where they're only playing it for two or three minutes. But it's designed to do something really specific for those two or three minutes and through the repetition of that. So they're not going to get addicted to coming in and doing these progress because we're mixing it up and it's low impact. We don't have a lot of super high impact visual reward systems in there. It's much lower impact on that. And that's for a good reason because we don't want that kind of thing going on. So high impact is a lot coming at you, a lot of auditory stuff. There's a lot of visual stimulation, there's a lot of reward coming at it.
And so you just want to keep winning as it feels great or you're beating all your friends or, you know, they have ways that these kids can actually have a bunch of kids playing all at the same time. It's all sitting in their room by themselves and they think they're connected with all these kids all over the planet, which to some degree they are. But let's get them out and get them actually socializing because that is not socialization. Playing a video game is not socialization, they need to be able to be with people. And that's part of what we've learned with some of these video games is that it does strengthen certain aspects of the brain. So you might get some multi multiprocessing aspects, you might get some good visual, but there are parts of the brain that are underdeveloped when they do too many of these video games. And part of that is executive functioning, decision making, being able to even tell when you need to go to the bathroom. So that part of the brain just gets diminished, it doesn't grow and you have to have all of that in order to be successful in the world.
Laura: Okay, so without talking about what games to avoid, are there any like, you know, just like standard available video games that you actually like that are like that you would, that you would say like this one is, you know, not one that's gonna be a problem?
Dr. Connie: You know, I kind of stay away from that conversation.
Laura: I understand why you might.
Dr. Connie: Yeah, because anything can be misused.
Laura: Yeah.
Dr. Connie: And so, you know, if I say, oh this one's okay and everyone runs out and then I get a call and my kid's addicted to this one. So I.
Laura: I totally understand. Okay, so I have one more question.
Dr. Connie: Sure.
Laura: And then a general question. So one more this one is just, this is just for me, a total like, this is one of the benefits of this job. I get to ask experts personal questions. So I found out in college that in order to really focus on studying, I either needed to be in a really busy environment with lots of like external noise or I needed to be listening either to music or honestly audio books. Like I some, I needed to be filtering something out and I've never really understood the mechanism for like, why that worked well for me. And I'm just kind of curious why that.
Dr. Connie: Well, and again, I haven't met you and.
Laura: Of course, yeah I know.
Dr. Connie: And assessments or anything. So, just kind of broadly speaking, there are a lot of people that have that and part of it is because everything can kind of come in at the same level for some folks. So all the noises that are around. So it's trying to control the auditory levels of noise that's coming in. And if you have a song, you have something, your brain can lock onto that and then you're able to then focus in on other things. Whereas if those off, you're catching everything, the car that's driving by outside. Yeah, the air conditioning that's clicking on it. You know, the dog barking down the street. And so what you're doing is trying to focus the brain in to enhance the attention, the ability to put inputs.
Laura: Fascinating.
Dr. Connie: Yeah. And that's part of what we tackle is that very thing.
Laura: Okay, thank you, Dr. Connie. You know, I spent my whole life feeling like I was bad at things, you know, obviously I ended up being, you know, academically successful, you know, I have a PHD in all of those things. I learned lots of hacks to get myself through those things. Getting my diagnosis over this past year has been a really lovely experience for me just because it has helped me understand myself better and be more forgiving with myself. You know, just it kind of changed the way I viewed certain childhood memories and certain ideas I had about myself as a kind of a, a careless clumsy person. So I that's felt really good for me. I have, I, I feel like as I have been talking with more parents who are noticing some neuro divergence on themselves, the, the conversation in neurodivergence that's happening kind of more, you know, in a more mainstream way right now, I just feel kind of curious how you think the field is gonna be moving when we you know, it just so this is totally like not on your topic necessarily, but this is more just a kind of a colleague to colleague question. I, I feel like I'm getting a, a vibe from the community that are our understandings of autism, ADHD, sensory processing disorders that all of this is gonna be changing. So that we, they no longer fit into these discrete, you know, binary categories. And I, I just feel kind of curious what your take is on that?
Dr. Connie: Well, my take has always been about dealing with stigma and that's really what all of these labels have created for decades is the stigmatization of people. If you've got a label, you're stigmatized, you fit in a cubby hole. This is a little box of a little corner that you get stuck into and this is what it means to have that and it couldn't be further from the truth, because I, I can, you know, and hence, whenever a person does a presentation to a room full of people, whatever words go out, each person sitting in the audience is gonna hear something a little bit different. It's all the same message as being the words are the same that have been delivered from the one mouth, but you can have 1000 people with 1000 different interpretations of what that is. And that's how I view diagnostic labels. There are 1000 interpretations of what ADHD can mean. I can have 10 kids walk in in a day and have ADHD, they're all 10 going to present a completely unique manner. Autism, the same thing might have a few traits here and there. And the DSM-5 which you know, some people are familiar with. The whole purpose of that you know, when that was created a gazillion years ago, wasn't to give labels. It was merely as a method to communicate from professional to professional, what a grouping of symptoms might be. It wasn't to say you have ADHD.
Laura: Yeah.
Dr. Connie: It was for me to say to you, okay, we've got a cluster A here. So this is what I've seen is cluster A, now I'm handing this person over to you a cluster A. And that was all it was intended to do. And now we have, you know, books that are hundreds of pages and link with hundreds of diagnostic criteria in there. And I'm not sure who wins with that. I'm ready to walk away from that a lot and I've spent, I've spent the better part of my career walking away from it because as I said, in the beginning, it may help you get in the door. It's not going to help me know anything about you per say. It's just a shorthand mechanism that someone created that. By the way, the ADHD diagnosis now almost anyone can qualify for ADHD when the DSM-5 came out. There were a lot of influences that are well known now about how that came about. And you always have to look at, you know, where the money is on some of these things. So, you know, my goal is let's educate people, let's let people know that there's a different way of looking at this, that there's hope out there, you're not abandoned, you're not walking alone. We have lots of resources that we can help with and I can help if you wanna pursue this, there's a lot of different neurofeedback systems out there. Not all of them are the same. Many of them are quite good again, check things out. And I'll just say briefly that if it's something that administers something to the brain, the industry standard has been, that's not neurofeedback, that's, that may be something that can help the brain. But if they're calling it neurofeedback, the tried and true professionals within the field will say that's not truly neurofeedback because neurofeedback is simply the biofeedback, which is giving feedback about how your brain is working. It's not administering something to the brain.
Laura: Got it, like as in like a shock or magnets or something.
Dr. Connie: Yeah. Anything that's administering something to the brain doesn't mean they don't work. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that's not neurofeedback in the traditional sense of what neurofeedback was designed to be.
Laura: Okay Dr. Connie McReynolds, thank you so much for this conversation today. I just, you know, so I really would love to make sure that everybody knows where they can go to find you as we wrap up. I'll make sure everything is in the show notes, but you know, some people like to hear it out loud. So your book is called Solving the ADHD Riddle. But where can they go to get the book and learn more about how they could potentially, work with you?
Dr. Connie: Straight to my website, which is just my name it's www Connie McReynolds. So that's conniemcreynolds.com. There's a link right on the front page to the book which takes you right to Amazon. It's available as audio book and I did the audiobook myself.
Laura: Oh, fun.
Dr. Connie: Ebook and, paperback. And then there's also a contact form on the website. So you can fill that out. It comes straight into my email. Just give me a way to contact you if you have questions, phone number or times to give you a call, then kinda cuts down on the back and forth. And so people, you know, we put that in your email message when a good time is and a number to call you. It's, there's too many questions and too many variations for me to answer questions through email. I'd much rather have a five or 10 minute conversation with people to really get to the heart of the problem.
Laura: I love that. And, you know, of course, this is a global podcast. But for those of the listeners who are in California, where are you practicing? Can I ask that question? Is that okay?
Dr. Connie: Absolutely. I'm in Southern California. So I actually have two clinics. One in Redlands, California, which is halfway between LA and Palm Desert and one in Rancho Cucamonga, which is a little closer to LA than Palm Desert. But you can driving up and down the 10, you, you're probably gonna bump into me.
Laura: Nice. I love that. Okay, thank you so much, Dr. Connie. I really appreciated our conversation.
Dr. Connie: This was beautiful. Thank you so much and stay warm in Wisconsin.
Laura: You enjoy the nice Southern California temperature.
Dr. Connie: All right. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to be here today.
Laura: Same.
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All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this!