Another very difficult problem that Participatory Reflexology dares to work on is autism, in children, across the complete spectrum of the autism. In the environment in which I work I have rarely the opportunity to work with children. However, the experiences that I have working with autistic children are few but very hopeful. The main outcome is that in all children after the sessions, there are substantial changes.
I have to clarify that in children with these types of disturbances, there can not be the same standard approach as with disciplined adults.
The objective of Participatory Reflexology is to be to touch these children in specific parts of their body, in the presence of one or two parents, who always monitors the session. It is very difficult for a child in this condition to allow anybody to touch them, in particular the first times. It was also difficult for me to find the right way of approach, for each child separately for two main reasons. First during my approach, the child should not get disturbed and upset above a certain limit and second, the therapy should progress efficiently for physochological and also for financial reasons.
At this point I would like to refer to the issue of the physical approach, providing some specific examples of physical approach.
First, I would like to talk to you about G. (12 years old boy with heavy autism, schizophrenia, aggression, having hard time to shallow and continuous salivation.
In our first session, I started with the idea, that I place him in the therapy session bed, he would stay still and disciplined and everything would proceed normally. This plan failed miserably. Therefore the solution was only one. I put the therapy session bed in the corner, and I opened a large mattress, which I intended for therapies on the floor. I put the 12 year old boy on the mattress and I held him for about an hour very tightly, because this boy despite the fact that he was only 12 year, he had the same weight as me, he was very flexible and he had very fast and heavy hands. I held him tight for an hour in order to break the strength endurance that he had. Eventually after an hour his strength endurance was worn out.
In the photo below, you can see what happened, when one of his hands got free from my tight control.
So, after about an hour, the boy’s strength deflated. At that point, holding him on the mattress, I started touching his neck for a very long time. As a reference of this approach, I would like to cite the book of Earhart Tolle “The Power of Now”, page 62 which states: The feelings are generated in the places where the mind meets the body and these areas are the shoulders and the neck. This is the reaction of the body to the mind, or we could explain it as the refection of the brain to the mind. This approach gave the 12-year old body more reason to relax.
It was essentially the only to work on his neck area, where they are based one of the major blocking mechanisms in this boy, because my hands were busy to keep the boy immobile. The possibility of tying this boy on the first therapy session would be catastrophic and it would have shaken up the confidence of the boy and of the mother towards myself and towards my technique
If it was possible to continue the effort of confronting this boy’s problem in another way, I would have proposed it at a certain point in time, because at that time, there was trust established between myself and the boy.
The most important thing is that the boy would have accepted to participate in this approach, because the trust that he started having with me, had to be returned to me in the form of self-discipline. These two senses, trust and self-discipline, which started getting morphed inside the 12-year old boy, gave home for my objective, which was the awaking of his participation and his curiosity towards the outside world.
Taking advantage of this awaking and his curiosity, after a a few sessions he let me put a few auto-acupuncture needles on his ear to treat the subject of his aggression. The boy accepted the acupuncture needles and from what his mother and his speech therapist told me, he was careful as well, so that these needles do not leave his body.
The result was that starting with the next session, the boy was coming to the room, took his shoes off, opened on his own the mattress and jumped on the mattress on his own, waiting for me.
In all the therapy sessions with this 12-year old boy, I worked with him in the mattress and very carefully, because at any point in time, he could have hit me very hard.
We had 12 sessions in about four months.
The boy in the session before the last, was laying on the mattress and was looking at me in peace and I was simply touching him very softly at the base of his chin.
At that time, the difficult to shallow and the continuous salivation had almost stopped. The last time that I saw the boy, as I was talking to his grand mother, he came close to me, he hugged me and he kissed me on the cheek.
Another example, was that of the 4-year old boy A., who was already autistic. I was called, because the boy had a muscle problem in the pelvis, he could not walk and he spent the whole day in the baby stroller as the infants do. The parents were not accepting that the 4-year boy had autism, and they described his problem with other words, at the same time though they could not explain this boy’s behavior.
I tried to put this boy on the mattress on the floor, but this attempt did not succeed, as the boy was very difficult to keep tight control of. If I wanted to keep tight control of him, I would have to apply disproportionate force to his body, which would have been disastrous. In order to accomplish my objective, I followed a different path: I put him on my shoulders.
He liked it very much and he was insisting on touching my face with his small fingers. This allowed me to work with relative ease on the bottom of his feet exclusively in the first few sessions. Slowly the boy started getting more relaxed and he started letting me touch in other areas of his body. He also started trying to formulate words and speak in a coherent manner, because he was not talking until then, One day, at the end of the session, the family offered to me a desert and I sat down on the kitchen table to eat it. The boy came and sat next to me and on his own asked to eat something as well.
He started looking at my eyes, examining my face, and moving his head to the left, to the right, so that he can see my face from different angles. From what his mother told me that he was doing that with other people as well. Despite being very young, the boy A., was used to computers. Eventually his behavior changed and when he was seeing the home computer on, he would shut it down and he would go play outdoors.
In another circumstance, he saw me at the entrance of his house and when he saw me, he came close to me and offered me to drink water from his glass and in fact he insisted to hold the glass himself as I was drinking.
In order to show how important it is for a parent to be present and PARTICIPATE in the session through his/her interrupted attention towards his/her child, during the therapy session, I would like to refer to a third case. A boy, 15 years old, with ashberger syndrome and autism, asked by himself therapy sessions and laid down on his own on the bed where the therapy takes place. At a certain point in time, the boy managed through the help of Participatory Reflexology, to overcome a body block mechanism, which in turn reflected also in a emotional blocking mechanism. At the moment that the boy felt that he managed to overcome this problem, turned his head to look at his father, expecting to receive an approval sign from him, which in turn could change a lot in their relation. His father though, who was present-absent, was completely immersed in his tablet from the beginning of the session, till its end and thus he did not understand anything.
What I have understood form my experience so far, is that all the children with autism, want to communicate with us and Participatory Reflexology helps on this direction fast and efficiently, by giving the child, a sense of synchronization, discipline, stability, curiosity that they are lacking. At the same time, the child feels that another person focuses intensely on them.
To an extent, everyone of us lives on their own autistic spectrum. The spectrum for these children is more intense. The main components for all of us are the time, the synchronization and the handling at the present of these two components. These two components, for all the people and even more for the autistic children form the dream in which they live. I can agree with theories that autism can be created from several causes (vaccines, environment, etc). I have read a number of autism studies and its possible causes. The end result is the same, some joining functions get activated, which block everything. And the tendency is so strong, that it keeps tied to the future and at the same time it does pull them towards the past. They live a permanent and intense retrogression, which does not allow them to synchronize with the present now.
The r Participatory Reflexology leaves aside all the existing theories, focusing on the body malfunctions, which are created from the stereotypes in the children’s bodies and applying the practice of inverse mechanics (starting from the result, trying to find the cause), attempts to solve the problem fast and efficiently.
With the contribution of Participatory Reflexology, the child comes to the present, which creates the tomorrow and corrects the yesterday.
