Could Reflex Integration Change Your 2e Child's Life?
Twenty-five years ago, three of my four children were diagnosed as twice exceptional (2e) at Gifted Development Center. Their teachers, and my husband and I, spent lots of time trying to figure out how to help them gain the skills of “paying attention,” “perseverance” and “legible handwriting.” It was time that we felt would have been better spent encouraging the full expression of their giftedness. We questioned why we could not find a solution to the issues caused by our children’s atypical neurology that prevented the full expression of their talents and gifts. We wanted them to be all that they were meant to be.
We wanted to know how and why these exceptionalities happened, and a fundamental way of intervening. I hunted high and low, trying and discarding many options which might be helpful to others, but weren’t OUR kids’ answers. We looked at behavioral allergies, auditory integration training, sensory integration therapy, option process, and others. Oh, and yes, the eldest two sons tried medication. Many interventions helped to varying degrees, but we didn’t find our answer until I – in utter desperation – tried what seemed to be a pretty nonsensical approach.
It worked!
O my heavens, it worked WELL! All three boys got dramatic changes with Dennison and Dennison’s Brain Gym (www.braingym.org), whose exercises look silly and are scoffed at by many – but is one of the most subtly powerful life-changers for both our children and the vast majority of children (and adults) who come to me for therapy now. It was in a class for a related program, Rhythmic Movement Training, that I finally got a formal, complete explanation that made sense to my nurse-brain, with a physiological explanation for the cause, explanations for why exercise helps, and their relation to 2e symptoms. It was all about primitive reflexes and the earliest-developing parts of our nervous system.
If our baby teeth don’t fall out to make room for the new ones, things get complicated! So too, if reflexes that were helpful to embryos and infants don’t get submerged into our nervous system, life gets very complicated very quickly. The list of consequences when this happens is quite long; it includes all of the “twice exceptionality” symptom list. I was astonished to find biological explanations for why these occur, as well as exercises that can be done until these mature.
Reflexes exist as automatic ways of helping us survive and function effectively in an enormous variety of situations. Those expected situations are different for each stage of our lives. Our first reflexes (known as primitive, or baby, reflexes) are there to teach us that we have a body, and to differentiate between safety and danger. If those lessons aren’t learned, and learned quite well, our nervous system just goes on, and we must cope without that lack of automaticity in learning.
Which PART of these lessons aren’t thoroughly learned will dictate what behaviors and symptoms are present. Perhaps we don’t automatically process tactile or sound information, and we might hyper-react to that information. Tags in clothes, disliking having hair combed or cut, are examples of lesser difficulties. Reactions to these can also be that your body is in a state of perpetual alert, feeling as though it’s in danger, so emotional control, anxiety, combativeness result as the body tries to defend itself. Just as it starts to understand one situation, it might be time to go somewhere else. If our bodies are constantly alert, it can also lead to negativity, especially about oneself. That state of continual tension will also inhibit further maturation of the nervous system, like connections between the right and left side of the brain, how to be coordinated, social skills, and the like.
The more complex the skill, the more steps might need exercises to mature that area of the nervous system. There are lots of different steps to learn how to inhabit, understand, and use your body, other than these initial ones. A few:
• Learning when to relax our body’s muscles and when to stimulate them, and what the happy medium is.
• Learning to focus our gaze near, medium field, and far away.
• Coordinating both eyes for this, as well as for motion left and right, is another huge step.
• That rocking back and forth on hands and knees, just before a baby crawls, is crucial for later abilities to organize, memorize, handwrite legibly, pay attention. and so much more.
• Hand, facial and feet reflexes are also incredibly important.
Can you see how useful all of this would be when your mind works at a gifted level? These pull from optimum expression of whatever gifts – intellectual, artistic, social – that we’re trying to accomplish.
When I see parents asking for help online with everything from handwriting to emotions, behavior, or learning disabilities—essentially that second exceptionality—I sigh. Nearly 100% of the time, I can identify which reflex is likely to be the culprit. That reflex can be learned and strengthened using specialized movement.
My son is twice exceptional: exceptionally gifted, but with several issues including dysgraphia. An entire day was spent fruitlessly trying to write a single paragraph. When he was 8, I started doing Brain Gym with him. Twenty minutes worth of Brain Gym exercises later, he wrote two pages in an hour. A month’s worth of simple Brain Gym exercises produced dramatic improvements in his brothers’ posture, awareness, coordination, and other changes.
A nine-year-old girl, Jessie, was brought to me because of her refusal to do schoolwork, follow directions, and increasing reluctance to speak. In our second session, Jessie spontaneously smiled at me, and a deep gurgle of joy came from the depths of her very being. She laughed with relief, while her mom and I looked on in amazement. Today she’s thriving academically and working at the level of her abilities.
Twelve-year-old Brett had an explosive temper. He landed regularly in the principal’s office because of these outbursts. His grades did not reflect his true capabilities. Three weeks after his first appointment for Rhythmic Movement Training, Brett’s mother reported that he faithfully had done the exercises. Not only had his temperament greatly improved—he was much happier, his grades were up, and there were no explosions at school. Three months later, Brett was able to get off his ADHD medication and his antidepressant medication.
A 13-year-old boy, TJ, was in a gifted program. His performance anxiety with competitive baseball responded well to a few Brain Gym movements and Rhythmic Movement Training. In addition, his mother no longer had to pry information out of him; he opened up emotionally with her on meaningful issues.
A teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan, wrote that if she allowed 2 to 5 minutes every hour for Brain Gym, she got 50 minutes of work from her students. When she skipped Brain Gym, time on task noticeably disintegrated.
Much to my surprise and delight, on days when I did 20 minutes of simple Brain Gym movements, I gained 2 ½ hours of increased productivity! This personal experience gave me the mission of sharing what I had learned with my clients.
A great way to explain why we need the complexity of these neuronal networks in our earliest weeks is by comparing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the architecture of the brain, and the schedule by which we develop our primitive (at birth) and postural (lying, sitting, standing, moving) reflexes. (https://movementsolutions.us/pyramid/)
Reflex integration is just beginning to come into awareness, and it’s not everywhere yet. Much of the mainstream medical profession doesn’t know much about it, and so is quite suspicious of its non-pharmaceutical approach.
Searching for “retained reflexes,” “reflex maturation,” or “primitive reflexes,” will get you more information. Professionals who have taken my classes are special ed teachers, OTs, PTs, chiropractors, developmental vision optometrists, myofascial, mental health, but they’re still a small fraction of their professions.
Some things to know:
There are charts on reflexes and symptoms, but because human beings have such variable and complex nervous systems, they should be taken only as a very general guide. Most reflexes build on others, and any given symptom may be due to a number of different reflexes. Reflexes work in a network: trying to mature just one reflex won’t get you where you want to go; you’ll need to work on ancillary ones as well.
In selecting a professional, in general, the more experience with reflex integration a person has, both personally and length of experience, by far the better.
Learning these techniques online is roughly equivalent to learning to ride a bicycle online: it can be fraught with flawed results.
Exercises aren’t like wearing glasses: they are not forever, just until your system matures. The programs I’m familiar with take less than 30 minutes a day.
You might discover that you see yourself, your child, or someone you know, who might benefit from reflex integration. This work is for individuals of all ages.
Ruth Murray, BSN, is a nurse and mother of four gifted sons, three of them twice exceptional. Her long search for definitive answers to their second exceptionalities finally hit pay dirt in a class on reflex integration. The list of symptoms of un-matured reflexes from infancy included almost all of the twice-exceptional list! Ms. Murray instructed two programs, Brain Gym and Rhythmic Movement Training, for ten years, and now has a private practice in Papillion, Nebraska. She is also a public speaker on gifted homeschooling, the twice-exceptional learner, and paradigm-shifting ways to create better brain function throughout the lifespan.
