Brain Trainer: About Elizabeth
Elizabeth Hickman, a lifelong resident of Elmhurst and owner of Thrive Therapy, believes deeply in the critical developmental period that takes place in life’s earliest moments. With a mindfulness rooted in her own journey, she’s delivering innovation to pediatric therapy, changing the course of behavior and treating her clients with compassion and connection.
Growing up, she struggled in an academic setting. Despite her high IQ, she often felt overwhelmed and recalled the pressure to complete course work standards in grade school. With determination and persistence, she attended Indiana University, majoring in kinesiology, minoring in nutrition and French followed by completion of a Master in Physical Therapy through a rigorous program at Northwestern University.
As a graduate, she started her career in outpatient orthopedics, returning to her hometown. She worked with clients whose rehabilitation journey was as much an emotional as a physical one. Ever mindful of fate, Elizabeth considered her next professional move when the local school system reached out with an opportunity she hadn’t considered.
By 2002, Elizabeth was working in the schools as a PT, to ensure children with physical limitations of all kinds received an appropriate education. She traveled between district schools throughout the week, supporting students confined to wheelchairs and diagnosed with diseases like cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy. Increasingly, she was called upon to assist students struggling with activities like sitting still, throwing balls and remaining attentive in the classroom.
“The kids that really pulled on my heart strings were the ones that were being misunderstood by the system,” she says. “They didn’t have a medical diagnosis at all, but they were having a hard time carrying out everyday functions within the school environment. They were deemed behavioral children.”
At the same time, Elizabeth became a new mom and brought her son home from the hospital after time in the NICU. Early on, he struggled to self-soothe and ultimately refused to sleep. As her son got older, lack of sleep turned into night terrors, and she began to recognize signs of an overactive sympathetic nervous system, which is triggered by the Moro (or startle) reflex early in development. The brain refuses to calm and remains in a state of ‘fight or flight,’ which can translate into more primitive outbursts and, in her son’s case, a lack of restful sleep.
Soon, as her personal and professional observations merged, Elizabeth started to identify patterns in the children she worked with in school. In 2008, her world changed with a single workshop by Australian therapist Moira Dempsey. The content addressed foundations for learning and development in the nervous system, through a practice called reflex integration.
“The more we do different movements and create a stimulus to the brain in certain directions, it’s going to strengthen that connection and build a stronger foundation,” she says, whose therapy work began to take on a new meaning. “Reflex integration is a rhythmic, movement-based practice that simulates what a baby does in the first year of their life and in-utero. You’re rewinding people back to stages that they either never went through or didn’t go through enough to help create connections to various parts of the brain.”
As she tested the practice first on her son then her students, Elizabeth struck a balance that yielded powerful results. Within the classroom, she found the children naturally gravitated to the movement exercises.
“They were asking for exactly what their body needed. Importantly, they were leading the charge,” she says, working within classroom spaces and ultimately with families in their homes as interest grew. “We innately know where we want or need to grow. Our nervous system wants that growth.”
In her practice, Elizabeth is ever mindful of the impact these exercises can have on the nervous system. She intuitively recognized signs of burnout and overstimulation, guiding the exercises while promoting the journey to self-awareness and ultimately self-regulation, no matter the age.
“Those physiological signs and symptoms don’t lie. We as people try to override these all the time as we try to please other people. We think, I’m not tired. I can do this,” she says. “As a therapist, I really have to read that in a person, and also help them to understand their own physiology and cue into that.”
By 2011, Elizabeth became a consultant on reflex integration and to this day, remains the only practitioner certified in reflex integration in the state. In 2015, she opened Thrive Therapy in Elmhurst as a safe space for her to meet with families and devoted her time fully to the practice.
A formal educator of the practice since 2016, she now hosts seven distinct workshops, guiding parents and professionals from speech pathologists and occupational therapists to dental hygienists and chiropractors in reflex integration. Elizabeth recognizes that she’s not providing a single solution, but rather unlocking an individualized path toward therapy-driven change, awareness and ultimately, empowerment.
“I really believe that every human being wants to do what’s right, but do they have the ability to do what’s right all the time?” she says. “Rather, do they have the support system, the neurological foundation, to do those things.”