Tara’s experience with the power of MNRI®

Tara enjoyed working with non-speaking or minimally-verbal children who had daily challenges impacting their ability to mimic or stay in attention long enough to receive information. For about a year, Tara worked implementing research-based techniques that she learned in graduate school with little progress in her client’s overall wellbeing. While they were able to verbalize more, it came at the cost of high structure activities & clearly uncomfortable nervous systems (i.e. wiggly bodies & frequent outbursts or aggressive behaviors). Tara soon realized that while compensations, tools & behavioral modifications were a necessary part of behavior-shaping & achieving goals, there had to be an easier way to assist her clients without the sensory overload that they were so clearly experiencing daily.

After meeting an occupational therapist who was learning about a technique that took behavior out of the equation & focused on the body’s protective function for that behavior, Tara was inspired. She learned that children were hitting as a way of reflexively setting boundaries & these regulatory behaviors started to make sense… ‘If these children are relying on reflexive patterns to compensate for their body’s deficits, then of course they are going to have a difficult time learning new information.’ 

This led Tara to enroll in six Reflex Integration courses (totaling over 75 hours) & then work in a clinic full time utilizing these techniques for almost 2 years. Working closely with occupational & physical therapists on a daily basis, she began to understand the body & all the parts that go unmentioned in graduate school for Speech-Language Pathology. She saw children & young adults of all ages- 6 months through 21 years of age, working at the level of the nervous system to help regulate & allow their natural functions to become reflexive (as they are supposed to be) so that they could learn.

One of her most memorable cases included helping a two year old who had a minimal diet (goldfish, strawberries & bread) be able to eat all types of proteins & vegetables within a few months. She also helped calm an autistic 16 year old’s nervous system enough to significantly decrease his head-butting behaviors, high-pitched verbal stim & toe-walking behaviors by more than half. She also (often involuntarily) taught multiple children easy, calming techniques & rhythms that are much more functional & communicative than said biting or hitting.