Dana Hargus: Restore: biofeedback breakthroughs

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world one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Mantur.
Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide.
Joining us today is Dana Hargus, LPC. She's the founder
of Restore of Aida, a biofeedback therapy center in Ada, Oklahoma.
With a background in education and special education along with
a master's degree in school counseling, Dana transitioned from a
public school teacher to a dedicated practitioner of biofeedback therapy.
Her journey began with a passion for helping children with
emotional and learning challenges, leading her to establish Restore of Aida,
where she focuses on calming the nervous system to address
issues like add anxiety, depression, and addiction. She empowers clients
to achieve lasting mental and emotional well being. It's there
pleasure to have her join us today, so before we
dive into our episode, we'll be back with an uninterrupted
show right after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for
coming on. Yeah, I'm glad to So tell me a
little bit about yourself and how you got started.
Okay, I was an educator a very long time ago.
I think I started teaching school in like ninety one,
and I taught school for about nine years, mostly special education.
And during that period of time, I was a foster
and then an adoptive mom, so I was very interested
in how to help disregulated people because I had them
living in my house and I spent my day with
them in the classroom.
Okay, that makes sense.
During that period of time, I got interested in biofeedback
as an intervention for my own son, one of my
adopted kids. And as I worked through that and began
to try to figure out how I could do it myself,
I figured out first of all that there were only
two people.
In Oklahoma doing it.
They were both private pay and I didn't have the
money to get him what he needed. But it really
intrigued me all the things I found out when I
was researching and visiting with people and calling places, and
at the time, I was working on a master's and
I just kind of sped things up and got my
master's in counseling and went under supervision and became a
licensed counselor here in Oklahoma with the thought, as soon
as I have this license in hand, I'm going to
go and do this bio feedback training see if I
can help my own son. And at that point I
stopped being a teacher and I was going to just
become a counselor. So I did that and was able
to do a lot of cool stuff with him, and
for the first time in his life, he was able
to go to school without them calling me and without medication.
So it was really great, and that was kind of
the start of a new journey, and I entered into
this career that I've had now for the last twenty
five years.
So that led you to opening a company now, correct.
Yes, I have two companies.
The first company is my counseling agency and it's just
a private practice here in Ada, and we have like
a little substation and more which is close to Norman, Oklahoma.
We have thirteen counselors and we schedule over one thousand
appointments a month and we do bio feedback.
Okay, so you have all these counselors, Let's focus on
that part of it first, right with all the counselors
that work with you. In your bio it says you
cover autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar, a lot of different things
that fall under the mental health umbrella. So what is
it that you cover or is there anything that you
don't cover?
Well, if you think about it, I think, first of all,
if you live in a town, our town is probably
thirty five thousand people in the town proper, and then
there's lots of little towns around us that we pull from.
What we focus on is what walks through the door.
You know. It's like, if you go to Dallas, you.
Can probably make a career of seeing women between the
ages of thirty and fifty with anxiety and blah blah blah.
But when you're been Ada, that isn't really the way
it works. So we've had an opportunity for a long
time to get to figure out how do you deal
with all these different demographics and where that has led me.
For probably twenty years, I've known I want to move
out of where I'm at someday, and I want to
move into intensive treatment that is more whole body. In counseling,
you tend to see people once a week, maybe twice
a week, and we make great progress.
I'm not unhappy with where I'm at or what I'm doing.
I just know that in terms of mental health, especially
mental health for people that are really struggling, I feel
like our current systems are a fail.
I'm curious where do you think it's failing.
Impatient care is not appropriate. It will keep you alive
if somebody is going to die, it's very good too,
Like if somebody's drinking themselves to death, they can sober up,
they can get some help, they can be protected. But
I feel like impatient care for children is unbelievably inadequate,
and for most adults as well. They come out over
medicated and struggling, often more than when they went in.
And then we look at all the medications and all
the things that we're doing to try to help people,
and what I see is that they don't work.
I feel like you've got to address the whole body.
At some point in my past, I thought, Okay, I
am going to open a mental hospital. That was my plan,
and I started checking into that looking and then in
the end, I thought, do I really want to spend
a million dollars?
Yeah, that makes total sense. That's a lot of money.
I've worked all my life to get out of debt,
to get where I am in this nice stable position,
and I have a lot of grandkids, and I have
a good life, and I don't want to tie myself
so hard to something that I lose what I have.
So kind of went by the wayside.
And then I thought, I'm going to open a boy's home,
and I begin to try to navigate that.
With our states.
What did you find there? Anything better?
They won't even pay me enough to do it right.
I knew what I needed to do. I couldn't even
find a way to make it break even, so then
to let that go.
So I've been letting things go a long time.
So finally I arrived at my current model that I
knew would work. Then I just had to figure out
how to make a go of it, and I feel
like I have. Okay, what did you come up with?
It's a whole bodied approach that centers around bio feedback.
But people start about six weeks before they come to
Ada in their home, and I have a lady that
works with me. She begins to work with them to
get them to begin to make lifestyle changes depending on
where they are, depends on where you start.
Can you give an example of what you're talking about there?
Things as simple as a shift in the diet and
what are we going to do to improve gut hell?
Also the impact of attachment on her whole life. I
feel like that is so often ignored. Look at what
supplements might be helpful. So they get things from us
in the mail. For six weeks, we work with them
online to prepare them to be as ready as they
can when they get to Ada.
Okay, that sounds good, So what's next? After that?
They run to Ada?
They're here for two weeks and they receive five months
of bive feedback in two weeks. So you're getting a
AM and a PM session every day. And also during
that time, we have all these other interventions that begin
to work on resetting your nervous system.
What type of results are you seeing from this?
The outcome is astounding because if you think, how would
you like to learn something?
If you were going to learn to play the piano
and you.
Were going to do it an hour a week every week,
or in this case, it would even be just thirty
minutes because we do counseling and conjunction with BIW feedback,
so it's not like they get a whole hour of it.
You're going to do thirty minutes a week, and I'm
gonna do forty five minutes twice a day. In the end,
it's going to take you five months to catch up
with the number of treatments I get in ten days.
But what that really does is it trains the brain
in such a rapid way.
The brain is eager to learn, it's eager to check.
So you begin to address things like insomnia and anxiety
and anger and overthinking and attentional problems.
Yeah, that sounds like a very good plan.
You just meet the brain where it is, and most
of the time the goal is to really calm things
down and then when people are not with me, they're
with my colleague, and we have some other employees that we.
Work on other aspects of this.
How do we take these changes and go back home
with them?
Now, when you say biofeedback, there's going to be a
lot of listeners to say, what, right, can you explain
in layman's terms what that actually is?
Yes, the simplest way I know to explain it is
just like you do exercise for your body, you can
do exercise for your brain. So there are electrodes on
the head, but they have no output, no current goes
through your head. They're just there to pick up the
brain waves and then that takes the brain waves to
my screen.
You're watching a screen.
It can be as simple as there's games and different
things that really what you're doing doesn't matter much like
all of the things have the same outcome. But I
think a simple way to visualize it is you're looking at.
A YouTube video.
The biofeedback equipment puts a filter on the YouTube video.
When your brain is doing what we want it to do,
the screen is wide and clear and the volume is strong,
and that's like telling the brain yes, yes, yes, good job.
And then when the.
Brain diverts, does something that's like out of the realm
of what we desire. The screen closes in, it gets
a little foggy.
And the volume diminishes it. So that's like saying no, no, no.
So all the time you're on there, you're getting a
series of yeses and nos showing the brain we want
more of this and less of that.
How many different types of people do you work with?
When I say types, I mean autistic, bipolar, ADHD, getsophrenic,
anything that falls under that mental health umbrella. How many
of those different types do you actually work with?
I would say all of them, Like there are things
that are more or less prevalent in our practice. We
do see some people with schizophrenia. We do see lots
of people with anxiety depression, We see a lot of
people that have autism. We never limit anything. If somebody calls,
we try to make sure that we put them with
the best possible person for them.
So we have them tell us, do you want a man?
Do you want a woman? What do you want this
person to be like?
And some people want somebody older and some people want
I want someone closer to my age and I'm thirty,
you know, So we have such a nice variety of counselors.
We're usually able to really accommodate what people want, and
sometimes when they tell us, like what their issues are,
then our staff will say, you know, the best person
for you is this person? You know, like, I have
a lot of history with people who have disabilities.
That's been my life, my whole adult life.
I've worked with people who are struggling in some way,
and so if somebody has that issue, oftentimes, I've also
spent a lot of time with delinquents.
I enjoy that.
I feel like somebody needs to love them, somebody needs
to care about them, but someone also has to stand
up to them.
I like doing that.
Okay, hypothetical, how would you approach someone that is schizophrenic.
Their brain is telling them something. They may be going
through antisygnosia. They really don't know that they're doing wrong.
They think they're doing right, so they're having a plethora
of issues. How would you handle something like that?
The first thing I think is you just have to
build rapport. It's just doing good therapy to begin with.
If you can get to the person, if you can
get to the point that the person trusts you and
is willing to participate, in say bio feedback. Then it
gets simpler from the standpoint of there's a very thorough
intake process that helps you narrow down based upon the
symptoms this person has, and it's really not about a
diagnosis as much as it is about the groups of
symptoms together. Can they sleep? Are they stable? Are they
able to focus?
Are they able?
There's like lots and lots of questions, and then those
questions build a real picture of this is where the
electrodes should go when you start, and this is what
we're thinking of in terms of what frequency will start at.
And then it just becomes a collecting of information from
them and hopefully a caregiver week by week in our
case now, but in a case like in restore, it's
much more fast paced.
Okay, so what are the opinions of the medical doctors
in your area regarding your therapy? Are they supportive?
Well, it's interesting when we started here, like about twenty
five years ago, I would say that people would tell
us very negative things their doctor said, because they would
be excited and go to their and say, guess what
my son sleeps now And he's like, well, it wasn't
that biofeedback? He just grew out of his insomnia. We
had things like that, but at this point, locally we've
felt such a nice reputation that we actually have a
lot of doctors that come here, we see doctors' kids.
I feel like it was hard fought that locally we're
very well thought of and people recognize that we're able
to help lots of different people with different problems.
Now you mentioned another business, is that right along with
this one as well?
That's the thing I have, this long term bio feedback
and counseling, and then where I've been at the last
year is called restore of ADA, and that is the
fast pace that nine week program tensive in making all
those shifts, and then the last portion of that is
called restore Plus. And restore plus is an online forum
that provides lots of practical information because not everybody can
come to data and do biofeedback and have this intensive experience.
But restore plus looks at all the components like diet
and exercise and how do you spend your time and
how do you build dopamine, what's the impact of the
choices that you're making, and how do you reset the
brain if you're not going to be able to leave
your home and come to ATA, but you're there at home.
What kind of practical things can be done to get
you where you want to go. That's like the final
component that's open to others as well.
That wouldn't just be open to people who come here.
So basically, you have the online, then you have the
people that come to see you weekly or bi weekly.
Then you have the intense training.
Correct correct?
Okay, you mentioned nutrition, So do you have a dietitian
or a nutritionless on board and how do you use
that to help these people get back on track to
where they need to be.
The lady that's kind of my right hand that does
everything with me for me. She started her life as
a home economics teacher, but then she did advanced studies
in attachment and resiliency, and then she also has done
just extensive programs, not university programs, but just online programs
and sales study programs and nutrition.
How to get the gut, Like you make.
More of your hormones and your serotonin and all the
things you need in your gut than you do your brain.
Yet we ignore the gut, your brain will be no
better than your gut. And then when we add the
factor that we tend to medicate people with medication that
causes weight gain, chronic constipation, significant gut issues, and then
we're like surprised they're not better. I have yet to
find a program that deals with the whole body.
Feel like that's what we're doing.
When you say a whole body, you've mentioned the gut,
the brain. Can you give me a picture of what
this whole body explanidsperiences that you're talking about.
Just as a for instance of some of the things
we're talking about when people come to us here in Ata,
we do exercise that relates to releasing trauma that's stored
in fascia. We also look at different types of exercise
that you can do, for instance, being on a rebounder
or a trampoline to get your limp system moving. Your
limp doesn't have a pump, and if you've done a
lot of different things, even like just eating food that's
not clean, you are likely to have poor limp flow
and that's a huge deal. And then we have PEMF technology,
which is again about frequencies. I believe that frequency is king.
We need the input.
Of better frequencies, especially when we're talking about cell phones
and towers and all the things that are giving input
to us. We need to look at all of those things.
And we also deal with heart rate variability. That's another
very science driven process that begins to change your nervous system.
So our goal is, with many different interventions, to create this.
Reset in the body that allows.
You, I mean this sounds grandiose, but allows you to
become what you were created to be.
So by touching on all these things you just spoke about,
this goes way beyond what people would consider normal therapy.
As a therapist, obviously, I think talking works. I talk
to people all day long for the last twenty five years.
I believe in therapy. There are a lot of things
therapy cannot touch, like you will not talk them better.
You have to give the body something that it needs.
And oftentimes within our intake process we'll kind of figure
out like, Okay, this person we're really going to focus
on that. You know, we'll be looking at what things
we think are the primary stressors based upon what they
tell us about their history.
But we spend that.
Six weeks and then again that full two weeks just
with lots of instruction and then restore plus has a
lot of practical things. We have a section on there
called do something, and that is just filled with things
that you could try today, because I think people are
overwhelmed with what do I do? So we explore what's
something you can do, what would it look like if
you did it today? And then we encourage you to
only do that one thing until you get good at it,
and then we move to the next thing, and the
next thing and the next thing.
People are going to come in at different places.
I mean I have people show up at my office
hysterical because they're having panic attacks and they don't know
why it's happening. Some point I figure out they're drinking
three monster drinks a day and they.
Don't drink water.
It's not rocket science, but in order for me to
help them, I really need to discontinue the monster drinks
and add some water.
You know. And that sounds so simplistic.
But there are a lot and lots of very simplistic
things that we need to consider and then begin to
do something.
So this nine week process that you do, is this
a nine week college type situation where they have to
be there for nine straight weeks?
No, no, No.
The first six weeks are at home, and then they
have two weeks in person. The third week is back
to your home.
Now we're going to work with you.
And talk about how we're integrating this at home, and
then you have a year follow up with restore plus.
Once they go through your nine week process. What's that
for that you say, follow up? If they've learned everything
in that whole process, what can they expect for any
future follow ups?
That's where remember that third component of restore plus. Okay,
So they have access to all of that information, which
includes live question and answers frequently during the month with
my partner and I, which includes workshops additional information that
is added every week. So there's a good amount of
base information there right now, but we continue to add
information about new ways to perceive your health, like what
else can you do and what's the impact on your
body if you don't have enough magnesium, what does that
look like? And what are the foods that have magnesium
in it that you could add Now, so we are
constantly going and here's the next thing you.
Can look at.
Okay, so you just brought up magnesium. Do you do
blood tests to check on different levels of different things?
So that you can always be tweaking things they need
to do to stay healthy.
Well, I feel like that is out of our scope
because we are not medical doctors. Our focus is on
things that we can do. Like we do have a
section on restore plus call shorts with doctor Shelley, and
it's a position friend of mine, talking about things from
a doctor's perspective, talking about gut hell, talking about different
chemicals in your body and what you can do. We
try to flut as much information as we can, but
we're not going to step out of our lane because
we are not medical doctors.
That makes perfect sense. Now, how do you make sure
you get the right balance? You just brought up supplements.
When you get supplements, some can interact with different supplements,
some can interact with different medicines. How do you get
that balance so that there's no issues there?
We are not really making suggestions. The initial suggestion we
make is we have a really good line of products
called Standard Process.
They grow all their food.
It's organic and it's like minerals and vitamins and things
that are just basic things that.
We need for life.
Okay, then after that point we're not making suggestions so
much as providing information. We want you to know this
is what you need to do, this is what you
need to know about magnesium, and here are the signs
in the sinems that you might be deficient. My preference
would be that you start choosing some foods from this
list that we're providing and eating them every day, and
if somebody would like to take a supplement, that will
be their decision based on what they learn. So it's
more about us providing information and looking at natural ways
to do things. I think that our toksin load is
a big deal. Like people have substances in the air,
in the food, on their body. So it's like something
as simple as getting away from a bug spray that
has ded in it and looking at a product that
you could make yourself at home with essential oils. You're
not going to harm yourself, but you're going to potentially
reduce that toxin load that can be huge for people
who can't manage toxicity.
Sure, that makes perfect sense. So basically, you're just feeding
information let them make the decisions. Than if they need
supplements or medications, they just call the doctor and then
they go from there and move forward.
Correct, we are not physicians.
People often are getting off of their medications when they
do about feedback. That is all we are doing is
encouraging them to go back to their doctor. You know,
we just help them consider where where are you? Where
are you? You know? I will talk to people about
so if you're going to go to your doctor, what
do you plan to say? I encourage them tell your
doctor you're doing bio feedback.
Tell them.
Often when people do biu feedback, they don't need as
much medication, or they don't need any medication. They're going
to have to advocate for themselves. But we do not
make medical suggestions ever.
That makes perfect sense. This way, they can go through
your program, they can figure things out, decide what they need,
talk with their doctors. Then because of what they're doing
with you, they can discuss everything with their doctors and
if they don't need any more, then it's a win
for everyone.
Right. We really work at what can you do yourself?
I mean they're obviously welcome and courage to go see
a doctor. Bit it's like I think that changes that
you could make on your own and they become a
part of your last style are the most powerful things
you can do.
Sure, just like a plant based diet can help you,
It can change everything right. The next question is how
do people contact you and how do they find you.
My website is Restore of Aida dot com. Phone number
is five ah oh four five three one oh seven six.
Our email is contact at Restore of Ada.
Okay, good, Well, this has been great information, great conversation.
I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today.
Well thanks for having me.
Oh it's my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking time
out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today.
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