For Keri Teague, an early career memory was working with Compass Community Services in downtown San Francisco. The center provided services to homeless and transitioning families, many of them immigrants and many with young children. Working within the center’s preschool, she employed her knowledge of sensory processing and the impact on children’s behavior. The center had just built a gym, filled with swings and crash pads, climbing walls and suspended equipment. 

“It was a place for kids to go and just move their bodies,” she recalls of the power of physical play and its impact on developmental milestones. “It was wonderful.”

Keri was born in California and studied psychology at Sonoma State University before moving to the UK for her Masters in childhood development with a focus on somatic complaints and emotional intelligence. She volunteered in special education classroom abroad, which prepared her for the return to the states and her work as a preschool teacher at that San Francisco-based center.  It was in the preschool setting that she started to partner with a mental health consultant on therapeutic work. 

“The kids who were really dysregulated, I found, had all these sensory issues too. We’d incorporate therapeutic movements while working with them,” says Keri, who eventually chose to attend USC for graduate school in OT, based on their emphasis on sensory integration. She wanted to continue her work in the schools. 

Throughout her grad school and early teaching years, Keri routinely visited medical clinics run by non-government organizations in Guatemala. She was inspired by and helped establish a field school focused on studying the intersection of anthropology, OT and the culture of disabilities. While there, she was invited to take part in their pediatric program. 

“As an OT, we look at those underlying issues that are impacting a child’s participation in daily life,” says Keri of the important role that therapists have in supporting developmental activities for children, both inside and out of the classroom. 

An OT now herself, Keri began her career at a sensory integration clinic in California that also contracted out to a local school district.  

“What was great was that I could see the kids in the school and I could see them in the clinic. I got to work with the parents and the teachers, the natural setting of the classroom and in a more specialized therapeutic setting. It was the best of both worlds,” she adds.

She continued working in the schools when she moved to North Carolina. Here, she joined the district’s preschool evaluation team. Her family’s travels took her to Texas briefly, where Keri worked in a pediatric rehabilitation hospital supporting traumatic injuries, pulmonary difficulties and feeding issues.

When Keri moved with her family to Western Springs, she found a home within the LaGrange Area Department of Special Education. A huge proponent of early intervention, she was able to work with several of the local school district’s youngest students. Keri excels at setting scalable goals to mark functional milestones, intended to propel a child while managing their limits and frustrations. 

Keri continued to lean into her sensory work and she came across a course on rhythmic movement therapy. The approach to working with primitive reflexes already felt familiar, having explored the crossover between that and sensory integration in her OT work. As luck would have it, Elizabeth Hickman is one of the only practitioners offering RMTi training in the United States and was right in Keri’s backyard. 

As the learning clicked, Keri also noticed applications for her own daughter, whose challenges with balance and coordination were greatly improved with therapy sessions at Thrive. Keri saw firsthand how the work brought new calm and self-regulation for her daughter.  As a teacher, a parent, and newly, as an added resource working with clients at Thrive, Keri has been able to help her clients unlock the tools to understand and manage behavioral outcomes proactively. 

“I think we all have these little tendencies or difficulties and that’s what makes us unique,” she says. “When it impacts our success in what we want to do or need to do in life to be happy, healthy human beings, that’s when I think therapy is necessary.”

Twelve-year-old Leo has been going to Thrive since June 2023, working with Elizabeth on a number of areas of development. As a child that used to refuse school and withdraw from activities, he’s shown tremendous progress while working on integrating his defensive reflexes. 

From an early age, Leo has also worn bifocals and was diagnosed with a form of convergent eye deviation called accommodative esotropia. The strong lenses were put in place to help his eye muscles better work in tandem, but the routine ophthalmologist visits had been bleak. Each time, they’d hear his eyes were the same, sometimes worse.

Elizabeth has been incorporating new exercises into Leo’s sessions, focused on cross-body midline movements that impact eye tracking and teaming. This work calls upon Leo’s vestibular system with head movements that support balance, coordination and his visual motor development. 

After a recent visit to the ophthalmologist, Leo’s mom reached out with good news:

“He was lit up. For the first time ever, his eyes weren’t the same or worse. The exercises were making his eyes stronger.”

For this first time since his diagnosis at age 5, his eyes are showing signs of improvement. In fact, this means Leo may now even be a candidate for contacts, a reality that’s very exciting for him!

The eyes, tongue, hands and feet are the last parts of our bodies to develop refined movements. Crossing movements and coordination exercises create the foundation for those fine motor movements. Simple yet powerful movements, like wiper blade motion, helps to rehearse and integrate these reflexes. 

Leo’s work at Thrive has unlocked his interest in golf and tennis for the first time, as he explores new ways to move his body with confidence. In fact, the work at Thrive Therapy has unlocked Leo’s ability to tie his own shoes for the first time in his life.  

The vestibular system helps with balance, coordination and spatial awareness. From daily tasks like tying a shoe and sitting upright to swinging a golf club, the reflexes that help us be successful in those activities may be underdeveloped and benefit from consistent cross midline exercises.

Elizabeth Hickman is traveling to Canada, taking the critical work of Thrive Therapy in Elmhurst to Montreal alongside somatic therapist Karen Hargot.

We’ll explore foundations for learning and development in the nervous system through a practice called reflex integration, taught for the first time locally in English. This course is open to those looking to know themselves more deeply, as well as those working with others in a therapeutic setting.

The RMTi workshop calls upon rhythmic movement to address unintegrated reflexes and has impactful results in strengthening those connections and building stronger neurological foundations. The practice simulates what a baby does in the first year of their life and in-utero, yet is impactful to clients of all ages. By rewinding back to early-stage movements, this therapy can more deeply address reflexes that were underdeveloped due to trauma or developmental detours.

Join Elizabeth as she explores the fundamentals of reflex and our body’s response system, and embark on an important step in a client’s overall therapeutic journey.

Being ready for reading, ready for writing and even ready for focusing on the day’s curriculum involves key brain connections established from an early age. A few weeks in, if you’ve noticed a child who struggles to sit at their desk or pay attention to their teacher, there may be primitive reflexes that require strengthening, or integration.

Thrive hosts a two-day School Readiness workshop that not only digs into the fundamentals of reflex integration, but also unpacks those brain connections critical to learning. Rhythmic movement training, which strengthens and supports those pathways in the body, can help improve stress release, empower speech and social-emotional skill building and address behavioral challenges. 

The course, open to therapists, teachers and caretakers alike, explores specific reflexes applied in a classroom setting. Connections that impact posture, positioning of hands and feet in gross and fine motor activities as well as reflexes for emotional stability will be explored in detail. Importantly, we will also explore why unintegrated reflexes are often a major factor in students experiencing emotional and behavioral difficulties, including sensory processing disorders, dyslexia, ADHD and autism.

The workshop will also focus on the role of rhythmic movement exercises on the senses and the importance of play in practicing reflex integration with young children. Throughout the session, participants will model therapeutic exercises and learn how to put key movement patterns into practice through classroom games and activities. Through an interactive, hands-on approach, the Thrive team will also share techniques for bringing movement-based therapy into a family’s daily routine for successful development, during the school year and beyond.

Participants will leave the workshop with a solid understanding of reflex integration, brain connections critical to classroom learning and core exercises to address physical and emotional behavioral challenges. They will learn how to implement therapeutic movement into a child’s routine and how to recognize the positive impact of the process.

From a clinical perspective, I often send a follow up text message to see how a client responds to our time together. Here is a message that I received from a mother of a client, with regards to her middle school-aged daughter’s response. 

Melissa was actually really good the rest of yesterday and this morning. She had some pretty involved homework to do and she just got it done. 

She had her first volleyball practice today. I am the coach of her team. I was shocked when she walked in and started overhand serving after never being able to get the hang of it last year. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the power, she just couldn’t make all of her body parts sync up to do it. I think she was shocked too! When she came home she was giving you all the credit.

You know I brought her to see you to address her challenges with school. So this is some “gravy” to the work she is putting in. She was super excited about it!

Melissa said on the way home from her session with you yesterday that she really loved trying the upside down exercise. Even though she was scared, her body wants to try it again.  She said it made her feel like she was just more even keel after doing it.  Thank you for checking in and for all the work you are doing with her.  We are definitely seeing progress.

Through the evaluation process, Melissa showed immaturities with reflexes that impact one’s ability to establish good connections between the vestibular and visual sensory systems. These immaturities have impacted her ability to track information across the page for reading, writing and math activities. Although she has a very strong IQ, prior to starting reflex integration work, she was having to compensate for her limited foundation.

These same reflexes underpin our ability to learn to coordinate our upper and lower body, front and backside of our body, and right and left sides of our body together. By offering integration activities and working on movement patterns, Melissa not only has seen a significant improvement in her reading, math and organization skills; yet she is seeing a change in the coordination of her body allowing for greater ease in executing a higher degree of difficulty in sports related skills.

One of the things that I love the most about reflex integration work, is that it impacts numerous developmental domains: safety and security, regulation and bonding, social and emotional regulation, speech and language skills, fine and gross motor skills, memory and learning abilities and higher executive functioning.