Primitive Reflex Integration Case Studies

Headaches vanish, range of motion increases

This woman with chronic muscle tension frequently experienced severe headaches. She had a limited range of motion in her neck and shoulder, as well as weak muscles. Regular engagement in physical therapy had not made a difference, and she found attempting those exercises “defeating." Within a few weeks of starting rhythmic movements from the Brain and Sensory Foundations course, her headaches disappeared and her neck became more flexible. As she added in reflex integration, her general strength and mobility continued to improve.

Submitted by C.D., Caregiver

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Joanna is a 40-year-old female presented with ongoing lower back and neck tension that is often so severe that it causes her to develop debilitating headaches. As a teenager, she experienced severe trauma to her left arm and shoulder after being thrown from a car in a collision and has a lot of scar tissue around the break site on her forearm. She also mentioned in our brief verbal assessment that she never really crawled as a child but was pulling up on furniture from 6 months of age and walked very early on.

Postural assessment revealed general muscular tightness across the cervical and lumbar regions, along with compensatory movement patterns during head rotation.

I decided to investigate reflexes relating to the feet, hands (particularly as she reported frequent numbness in her left hand, below the break site) as well as Asymmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex (ATNR) and Symmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex (STNR) considering her comment about her early development. Both feet and hand reflexes demonstrated no response to stimuli, however, ATNR and STNR were clearly active. After talking her through my findings, we worked together to develop a little "movement diet" for her which she could do at home every day as well as working on the movements with me in our sessions (30 mins bi-weekly).

To begin with, we worked on passive rhythmic movements [from the Brain and Sensory Foundations course] together and once I was confident that she could do the movements actively herself, we agreed that she would start and end her day with a cycle of these movements (movement 1 caused some initial anxiety as her range of motion in the neck is quite limited) and also include them before she did any of the stretching and mobility work provided to her by a physical therapist, which in her own words she found "painful and defeating" because she wasn’t seeing and feeling results. I also talked her through the 5-Step-Balance process [from the Brain and Sensory Foundations course], which she agreed to use before her physical therapy exercises to help her get over her reticence. She did only this for the first 2 weeks, both in session with me and at home, at the end of which she reported (and I noted with great joy) a notable change in the flexibility of her neck at the base of her skull. Meaning that she was able to turn her head, nod her head, and complete the rhythmic movements with ease. She also reported that she had not had a headache for the 5 days previous to our 4th session together! She went on to continue with this "movement diet" at home as we added in a few isometric activities specific to her retained reflexes.

I decided to backtrack a little to include the movement pattern for Tonic Labyrinthine Reflex [from the Brain and Sensory Foundations course] at first considering that this is something she could do in supine position (having achieved some change through the rhythmic movements in that position and feeling confident there). She could do one of the positions without pain, but with the other she struggled and engaged secondary muscles, compensating by also lifting her feet or becoming quite distressed. We worked on this together for an additional 2 weeks, as well as adding in the Core Activation activity [from the Brain and Sensory Foundations course] which we did whilst she was sitting down (and unable to compensate by using her legs). After a further 2 weeks, she was able to hold her head up in the TLR supine isometric activity for the full 7 seconds, without holding her breath or tensing other body parts, and most importantly, without pain. She was also finding her PT exercises and stretches easier and reported that she was gaining mobility in her left shoulder.

We are currently on week 5 of her movement work with me and she has been headache-free for 3 of those weeks and is still committed to bi-weekly sessions as well as practicing her ‘movement diet’ at home. In our most recent session, she was able to engage in a floor game with me without subsequent pain and without undue effort, and I felt confident to introduce her to the ATNR isometric activities in the supine position. Her progress is ongoing, but it is exciting to witness the relief even this initial phase of movement based therapy has provided her, both physically in the relief of headaches and recent gain in flexibility and strength/control in her neck and core but also emotionally and psychologically. Understanding that her tension and pain may have resulted from her early childhood reflexes remaining active has given her a means to view her injury and the trauma to her body in a different light, and has allowed her the permission to move parts of her body which she would have guarded or considered broken or chronically dysfunctional. I have seen her relax deeply for the first time this week, and also note that her choice of language around how she feels in her body is becoming more positive and solution focused.

I am genuinely excited to continue working with her and have every hope that her progress will continue and that the ATNR and STNR movements will help her to regain a better quality of life. I have also learned that in my practice with adults, building positive physical signals around the movement is critical, especially if they are already discouraged by a lack of progress through other therapeutics and that offering movements in positions they are already confident in (even if they may belong to reflexes that do not initially appear to be active—though in Joanna’s case, the movement pattern for TLR revealed an active reflex where she didn’t respond to the initial stimulus) can make a very big difference pretty quickly.

(Edited, emphasis added)