When Talk Therapy Isn’t Enough: One Trauma Therapist’s Path to Neurofeedback

For over twenty years, Erin Calhoun has worked with some of the hardest cases in trauma treatment. Early in her career, at a residential facility for teens in state custody, she ran groups twice a day, individual sessions twice a week, family sessions weekly offering every CBT- and DBT-based intervention she had. And the symptoms sometimes didn’t move.

“I didn’t actually help,” she says of that period. “The PTSD symptoms didn’t get better. The behavioral stuff didn’t get better.”

Over the following years, brain-based approaches – EMDR, then Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model – got her closer. She found EMDR to be remarkable for straightforward PTSD. But for clients carrying complex or developmental trauma, something was still missing. The insight would land, and the nervous system would still be, in her words, “revving.”

“The body keeps the score,” she says in a reference to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, “and I could just tell there was another layer of clinical intervention that was needed.”

That search led her to the Trauma Research Foundation’s Traumatic Stress Studies certification  and, inside it, a module on neurofeedback. “That’s it,” she remembers thinking. “That’s what can do it.”

A year and a half of asking questions

Knowing neurofeedback was the missing piece and actually enrolling turned out to be two different things. “It’s such a big commitment,” Erin says of the time –  by her own estimate, around a year and a half – between first hearing about Sadar’s training and actually joining a cohort. She had real questions about finances, logistics, and whether she genuinely had time to study alongside an already full practice.

That hesitation is worth naming plainly, because it’s familiar to a lot of clinicians reading this. Wanting to do something and being ready to commit to it aren’t the same, and there’s nothing wrong with taking the time to get ready.

What the cohort was actually like

Sadar’s team is upfront that the didactic work takes real weekly time. Erin had been warned. She still wasn’t fully prepared for how true that turned out to be.

“It’s almost like having children,” she says. “You can’t ever fully be prepared or ready for it, because it’s a lot.”

But the difficulty came with an unexpected upside: the deeper she got into the material, the bigger and more interesting it became. “There’s so much more that can be done with neurofeedback than I realized when I first joined.”

Building it into her practice

Erin didn’t wait for certification to take action.  She messaged her entire client base the same day she submitted her cohort application and converted an office into a dedicated neurofeedback room within weeks of completing her didactic course. The response is exciting: clients had watched the room take shape, asked questions, and were, in her words, “just as excited as I am.”

“It hasn’t been this big lift of marketing,” she says. “It’s just been this really natural, organic process.”

She’s planning to start with at least seven clients across two sessions a week each; that’s fourteen neurofeedback slots added to her schedule within weeks of finishing her didactic training.

Where she’s landed

Asked how she feels heading into this next stage, Erin doesn’t hesitate.

“The program has given me everything I need to know how to walk through these steps,” she says. “I feel like I’m on solid ground.“

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Erin Calhoun is a licensed trauma therapist and owner of Brainwork Healing Center. She completed Sadar Psychological’s BCIA-accredited didactic training in June and now serves on Sadar’s advisory board. If Erin’s path sounds like where you are, explore the Fall 2026 Extended Case Study Cohort or book a free 15-minute call to talk through your own timeline.