featured Archives - Page 2 of 17 - Move2Connect Primitive Reflex Integration

Sensory Processing Difficulties and Primitive Reflexes 101

Sensory processing difficulties.

For many parents of neurodivergent children, sensory processing difficulties might be the first thing that they noticed as “different” from peers.

I have used the term Sensory Processing Difficulties in this blog title as opposed to “disorder” because a disorder is a permanent condition – and a diagnosis that doesn’t exist universally. In my work, I look at the expression of the brain and nervous system – I do not diagnose because by working with neuriplasticity, a set of symptoms/presentations change.

This article explains how movement and the integration of primitive reflexes can really help reduce or even eliminate the sensory challenges of someone with SPD.

What causes sensory processing disorder (SPD)?

In brief, sensory processing disorder (SPD) or sensory processing challenges are down to a differently wired brain. The part of the brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) – within the brainstem – has not formed strong enough neural connections with the thalamus and higher sensory processing levels of the neocortex. This means that the brain cannot process sensory input efficiently, so we see sensory overwhelm, distractedness or even fear.

The involuntary movements we make as foetuses and newborns are doing a vital job: They are forming neural connections. These involuntary movements – reflexes – should disappear within the first year of life, giving way to adult postural reflexes and conscious movement, controlled by the cerebellum. However, if these primitive reflexes remain active in the system, it will mean that the brain has not formed the optimal neural connections from the brainstem, and consequently we may see sensory processing, motor coordination, emotional or behavioural challenges.

In my clinic, I assess for primitive reflexes and then work with the child and their parents to help integrate reflexes that might be causing challenges. This is done by repeating precisely the movement patterns that foetuses and newborns make, which helps the reflexes gradually integrate and helps the brain and central nervous system move to the next stage of development. It is important to remember that reflex integration is not a quick fix – in fact, it can take months for people to move on from their old patterns of posture and behaviour. However, you will see significant change.

What does Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) look like?

You might notice some of the following (not an exhaustive list):

Doesn’t respond to name
Zones out
Stims (hand flapping, making noises)
Difficulties with focus and concentration
Chews or spits on things
Restrictive food intake
Difficulties with motion / balance /coordination

Can a child overcome sensory processing disorder?

Using a bottom-up approach by addressing the nervous system, in a nutshell, yes. We can work to dramatically reduce these difficulties by calming the nervous system.

I had one little boy in clinic whose parents had marked around fifty of his frequent sensory behaviours in Angie Voss’s excellent book Understanding Your Child’s Sensory Signals. Following just three months of a reflex integration programme using RMTi (Rhythmic Movement Training International) methodology, this reduced to just fourteen sensory signals, and two years further on, just four. The sensory signals included behaviours such as flapping, spinning, humming, chewing, dribbling, making eye contact, etc. He is now a calmer, more present child, able to express his feelings verbally – as opposed to his nervous system being on constant alert.

You can also try to include various movements into your child’s day, every day, although when working with emotional or behavioural challenges, it is preferable to see a trained professional.

FPR Moro Reflex — A retained Moro Reflex is at the root of sensory processing difficulties

Try the following:

Cat arches, snow angels, star jumps, lying on back and pretending to be an anemone and slowly opening to become a starfish, and then back to anemone.

I hold a clinic in a home environment. in the Sussex countryside, and have after school and weekend appointments. Please contact me if you would like to discuss or find out more.

Book appointment

In brief, sensory processing disorder (SPD) is down to a differently wired brain. The part of the brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) – within the brainstem – has not formed strong enough neural connections with the thalamus and higher sensory processing levels of the neocortex. This means that the brain cannot process sensory input efficiently, so we see sensory overwhelm, distractedness or even fear.

This article explains how movement and the integration of primitive reflexes can really help reduce or even eliminate the sensory challenges of someone with SPD.

The Safe and Sound Protocol for neurodivergent families

Babkin reflex FPR: Fear Paralysis Reflex retained reflexes SSP: Safe and Sound Protocol Uncategorized

The Safe and Sound Protocol – SSP for neurodivergent families: Why Move2Connect offers a family package

The Safe and Sound Protocol for neurodivergent families

You have probably found this blog post because you’re researching the SSP (Safe and Sound Protocol) for your child.

The Safe and Sound Protocol (in its standard format) is a five-hour listening therapy, which works directly with the autonomic nervous system to make the a person feel safe in the world by tuning up their autonomic function, which in turn improves social engagement. It does this by passively stimulating the vagus nerve by means of specially filtered music. It is the only auditory programme to work directly with the autonomic nervous system, and is now used widely by all sorts of healthcare and mental health professionals with a variety of conditions caused by mis-firing autonomic nervous systems.

The Safe and Sound Protocol was first launched as a way to help autistic children improve social engagement. It has been acknowledged since that the reason this is so effective is because it’s working with the trauma inherent in autism – in other words, the stress caused by being forced to function in an environment that is not accepting of autism.

For context, I have been working with the SSP pretty much since it was first available in the UK, and have probably worked with more clients than anyone else here – with a myriad of presentations and a beautiful rainbow of different nervous systems.

The Safe and Sound Protocol for neurodivergent families

The Safe and Sound Protocol used to be provided by means of an MP3 player, which I would use in-clinic. I would also sometimes rent these MP3 players out to clients once they had been through a rigorous screening session in clinic. There were huge challenges in using physical equipment, in that either clients had to attend scheduled sessions, OR schedule a rental period. Most of the time, this worked well, but occasionally, more sensitive clients needed more time or needed to miss scheduled sessions. This made providing the SSP – and using the SSP as a client – costly and a logistical nightmare.

However, from March 2020, SSP providers had to adopt a different way of working due to lockdowns and our lack of understanding of COVID19 at the time.

The licensing organisation, Unyte, released a digital version of the SSP via an app. This enabled discussion on the safest way to work with clients remotely with the SSP.

It is important to recognise that the Safe and Sound Protocol in itself is not a therapy – it is a TOOL used by therapists, and we all do it slightly differently. Some hand-hold, some budget providers only give access to the tool and let their clients get on with it – not really advisable, but it happens – caveat emptor.

My opinion, having run a clinic for neurodivergent children and adults for the last 8 years, is that it is important to engage with the Safe and Sound Protocol (and my other work) in an environment that feels safe. For most people, home is a safe space – so this makes engaging with the SSP in the comfort of your own home appealing, convenient and most effective.

Even more effective is ensuring that a child’s needs during the SSP are fully met – and the best way to do this is for a parent to go through the process themselves first.

My approach is to train parents first. They then go through the Safe and Sound Protocol themselves, and learn to understand their bodies’ cues and their own nervous systems. After that, they take their own children through the SSP, as those who understand their children better than anyone else, as well as through the eyes of someone who has completed the Safe and Sound Protocol in their own way.

When I first started working with primitive reflexes with my own child, over a decade ago, I remember our therapist telling me that parents of children with retained reflexes always benefit from going through the process themselves too. At first, I thought this was a potential money-spinner and ignored the advice. However, the more I read about primitive reflexes and the more fascinated I became, the more I realised that it was something I needed to experience – if only to understand the changes we were seeing on a daily basis in my child.

I decided to take that time out for myself – I went along, was fully assessed and did exercises daily in order to experience what my child experienced. And I changed – enormously – for the better. The experience dramatically improved my social anxiety, as well as my ability to connect so much better with my child, which is completely key to seeing positive results. A prescriptive “working on” approach when working with neuroplasticity therapies is not as effective as a “working with” approach.

The same happened when I trained in the SSP. Of course, I used it on myself before using with my children. And of course, I had the same excitement and impatience as my clients often have when they first approach me! At first, all I noticed was calm and spontaneous joy – and later came the realisation that my connection with my children, patience and ability to co-regulate effectively had all improved so dramatically that my children had CHANGED – without my children even going through the SSP themselves.

By the time it was their turn, the outcome was so noticeable that I remember being stopped at school pick-up time by the teacher, who wanted to know what we had done as there was such a marked change in my child’s focus and attention.

For example, if a parent’s motive for using the SSP is to “fix” their child, it’s unlikely they’ll notice as much of a benefit as if they work with themselves first and then with their child. When children have undesirable “reactions” to the Safe and Sound Protocol, it is because a child’s primitive brain is feeling under attack – the SSP can make this more sensitive.

Working with the Safe and Sound Protocol is like buying a beautiful piece of well-loved antique furniture – a table, for example, complete with blobs of paint and scratches, applying paint stripper and giving it a good rub down:

If you then nurture and look after that piece of furniture, perhaps applying a coat of varnish or wax and protecting it with coasters when you put a mug of tea down on it, it will gleam in it’s new setting (equating to co-regulation and providing cues of safety). If you, however, don’t look after it and stick hot mugs of tea down, or allow the children to draw on it with sharp, scratchy pencils, it’s going to quickly return to the way it was before you did all that work.

I specialise in working with the Safe and Sound Protocol with neurodivergent families. For this reason, my pricing includes a parent and child and full coaching in polyvagal theory and how to use the Safe and Sound Protocol for YOUR FAMILY. This looks completely different for each family. For example, the SSP for PDA involves ensuring that a child understands that this is going to work for them on THEIR terms – not mine. Another good reason for parents to go first!

If you would like to understand how the SSP could work for your family, please book a discovery call.

Uncategorized

Post-natal PTSD and the Safe and Sound Protocol

I often tell my clients of how I feel my post-natal PTSD is healed, and yet I had an experience late in 2022 that made me realise that I’m not all the way there quite yet – but I DID feel empowered to explain this to medical professionals, who now listen to me as a result of my explanation of what’s going on in my physiology.

If you’d told me even five years ago that I was a trauma survivor, I would not have believed it.

Post-natal PTSD

However, I realised that I had trauma from the birth of both my children during somatic training a while back, in which that out-of-control situation and body position were re-enacted, and my reaction was identical to my reaction to the hideousness of my very medicalised birth, as a result of an induction that I wish I’d not consented to (I wish I’d insisted on a C-section, even though that’s not a politically correct thing to say – and even though our NCT facilitator made us feel that water births by candlelight were the only way to go).

I remember a health visitor coming to visit when we first moved to our current home. She decided that I must have post-natal depression because I wasn’t working and my child (aged 13 months) wasn’t going to nursery yet. I decided that health visitors were nosey parkers who could not distinguish between someone who wanted to spend time with their baby and their narrow-minded narrative of post-natal depression. After all, I didn’t WANT to work – I was happy just hanging out with other mums and babies at that stage. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether she was partially correct – except it was PTSD. But I kept rationalising and telling myself that I was “fine” – because that’s what a traumatised person does. After all, we’ve survived the experience and even “moved on”.

Through further work with Polyvagal Theory and story telling, I realised that my medical trauma goes back even further: back to a time that I was admitted to hospital with suspected appendicitis as a teen and was treated like a body rather than a person. However, this potential root cause is a relatively recent discovery.

As a result of my birth trauma and subsequent post-natal PTSD, which has included flashbacks and nightmares, whenever I drove past the Royal Surrey County Hospital, where I had my first child, I used to get a rising sick feeling and feel angry and upset. I couldn’t work out why. I used to take both children for various hospital appointments there, and from the moment an appointment letter arrived, I’d feel powerless and shouty. When I visited the hospital, I used to walk past the maternity department and would feel triggered. I would arrive around 3 hours early for appointments – using the terrible hospital parking situation as an excuse to be so early -and be spontaneously rude to people without realising why. I wondered at the time if there was something wrong with me, as I thought it was strange that I used to be suddenly so spiteful and unpleasant – that is not the usual me. My trauma was so obvious (and yet not obvious to me at the time).

Following my first ever round of SSP back in 2018, I remember taking my youngest child to a hospital appointment at that hospital, and not only did I arrive at an appropriate time – around 20 minutes early, which allowed for traffic and parking, but I was socially engaged for the appointment, wasn’t rude or defensive with anyone and then walked back past the maternity department and thought “oh yes, that happened…” but I didn’t feel triggered! I still felt angry about what happened, and the fact that things SHOULD have been different, but my body had not reacted in the same way – I hadn’t gone into fight or flight. I had acknowledged a time when I didn’t feel safe, but wasn’t dominated by it.

We are all offered talking therapies by the hospital we give birth in. We can even sit and go through birth notes (albeit selectively) with a midwife. However, this does not even touch trauma, because as I’m sure you know, trauma is non-verbal.

During a recent traumatising incident involving breast screening and negative framing of my very small chance of having a malignant growth, I pretty much lost my powers of speech.

This step towards healing my post-natal PTSD is just one of many wonderful effects that the Safe and Sound Protocol has had for me.

In the past year, I’ve had to take my child for two general anaesthetics, which is not an easy thing to do – remaining calm and cheerful when they’re artificially put to sleep and potentially wake up in pain. I have dealt with both incidents easily without being ragey from the point of receiving an appointment letter, or bursting into tears.

All of this was achievable without having to attend counselling (which wouldn’t have worked, as I would not have admitted to or even accessed the feelings associated with the event).

post-natal PTSD post-natal PTSD post-natal PTSD post-natal PTSD post-natal PTSD post-natal PTSD post-natal PTSD

Neuroplasticity retained reflexes retained reflexes Special Needs Education Uncategorized

DIY Primitive Reflex Exercises

I’ve always warned against DIY primitive reflex exercises without the careful guidance of a practitioner.

However, realistically speaking, not everyone has the budget to commit long-term to a programme with a practitioner, some people live a long way from a practitioner, and people will always look for ways to try to do this work for themselves – I know I would have been the same.

I am now happy to endorse an alternative that’s second-best to coming to see a therapist in person. I do stress that this is second best, as it’s a programme that will not address the earliest piece of the development puzzle in the same way that the Safe and Sound Protocol and RMTi do.

It’s a self-managed listening programme consisting of 20 hours of music coupled with a movement programme, devised by Tomatis, called Soundsory. Soundsory uses bone conduction headphones coupled with an ecclectic rhythmic collection of music and a movement programme, which is available via a login allocated when you sign up.

Soundsory

Soundsory can help with sensory, emotional, motor coordination and learning challenges by primarily targetting the vestibular system. However, if a person would be unable to copy or replicate the movements, it may be necessary to modify the programme to incorporate passive movements, with input by me.

I would still always recommend the Safe and Sound Protocol as a pre-cursor to Soundsory, but this is a great do-it-yourself, home-based programme for those who either do not have time to come into clinic or do not have the funds to complete a bespoke reflex integration programme.

What I like about this programme is that it’s yours to own for a one-off cost, and requires no practitioner input or monthly subscriptions. If you get on well with this, you could later consider signing up for one of the longer term programmes, but then again, you might want to repeat Soundsory.

Buy Soundsory

DIY Primitive Reflex Exercises It’s a self-managed listening programme consisting of 20 hours of music coupled with a movement programme, devised by Tomatis, called Soundsory. Soundsory uses bone conduction headphones coupled with an ecclectic rhythmic collection of music and a movement programme, which is available via a login allocated when you sign up.