Week 5: Treatment Session 9 & 10 Copy

This week, you will make coaching/treatment visits 9 & 10. Post your case notes in the Discussion Forum immediately following your treatment visit. Your supervisor will read your weekly case notes on the forum and provide feedback and answer any questions you may have. In your case notes, use ONLY the INITIALS of the child with whom you are working! This will protect the privacy of the child.

Now let’s review what we have learned about the skin-brain connection, and how we use QST to normalize the skin and stimulate the brain to learn. What it comes down to, is that touch, like hearing and vision, is immediately perceived by the brain. Thus, touch gives us access to the brain. And this organized and healing form of touch, QST, both heals the organ of touch – the skin – and sends a balanced input from the skin to the brain, so that the brain can orient and connect to the whole body.

Once the child is comfortable in his skin and the brain and body are oriented, the child becomes aware of himself and other people. This is a whole-body awareness. So, for example, if you have the child on your lap and are reading him a story, the child’s brain is now accurately informed that he is sitting on your lap, that he is facing outwards from you, that he is hearing your voice, and that he is looking at a book that you are holding and reading. This allows for normal multi-sensory processing of what the two of you are doing together. For parents who have learned that autism entails difficulties of multi-sensory processing, this will be good news. After touch normalizes, it takes about another 6 months for multi-sensory processing to normalize.

The body language and eye contact you see during QST is proof that the touch is reaching the child’s brain and stimulating her to learn and communicate in new ways. One of the amazing things about QST is that this new learning automatically fills in the gaps in the child’s earliest missing developmental milestones. This finally creates a solid foundation upon which to build social and language skills.

Chapter 6, “Troubleshooting the Massage,” of Qigong Massage for Your Child with Autism is an excellent resource when you encounter body language that you don’t understand, and don’t know how to attune.