Episode 4: Sheila Frick
Check out all of Sheila’s course offerings at Vital Links
Transcript:
Amy:
Hi, and welcome to OT Mentor Moments Podcast, where we explore advanced occupational therapy practice, mentorship, and the work that we can all do to become the best version of ourselves. I'm Amy Lewis, and I love the profession of occupational therapy, particularly pediatric practice. Over my career, I have had the great fortune to have some amazing mentors who have helped me to grow both as a clinician and as a person. Mentor Moments is my way of paying it forward by sharing their wisdom with all of you.
Sheila Frick is yet another esteemed mentor of mine. Sheila practiced occupational therapy in the specialty areas of psychiatry, rehabilitation, and home health before specializing in pediatrics. Sheila's expertise includes sensory integration and processing and auditory interventions. She is the creator of therapeutic listening and quick shifts, and she's the co-author of Astronaut Training. She comes from a perspective that sees how the body and motor systems are connected to the underlying processing of vestibular, auditory, and visual information and teaches about those connections in all of her classes. Sheila has a gift for writing courses in the way that she shares her treatment strategies, along with a deep understanding of how those strategies work. Let's dive in and hear more from Sheila. Welcome, Sheila. It's so great to have you here today.
Sheila: Thanks, Amy. Great to always great to be with you.
Amy: Thank you so much. We are here on OT Mentor Moments Podcast, and I have told you a little bit about what we want to talk about on this podcast. I'd like to start today by asking you to tell us a little bit about some of your mentors in the past and how your journey of mentorship has gone, because I think that it's important for people to hear that all of us have had mentors and how important that's been for our growth along the way.
Sheila: Yeah, well, I actually, just in preparation for this podcast, just have given it quite a bit of thought. I think that I will unintentionally possibly leave people out, not on purpose, but I think of the... When I started to think about it, I thought about one thing in particular, a particular incident. It started with a relationship with Pat Wilbarger, who was an amazing, is an amazing, therapist and really has changed the face of thinking about sensory processing from this perspective of defensiveness. But we were having, actually, she came to teach a workshop for me in Michigan long ago, and we were having dinner and we were just talking about OT and I think she was asking me how I evaluated kids and how I knew stuff and whatever. And there was something that transpired in that conversation where she really made me feel like I could do amazing things. I mean, she really empowered me and we were really just talking back and forth about how I evaluated kids. However, that wasn't like “you're there now”, do you know what I mean? It was like she saw something in me and I think that's one of the key things that mentors do. They teach you something, they open your mind. I remember in that workshop in particular, sitting in the front row, because I'm a front row sitter, nodding my head crazily, but the whole workshop on sensory defensiveness really shifted a perspective that I had had and that was really eye-opening and that led me down a path of following a lot of individuals that were involved in the Avanti camp. So Patricia Wilbarger obviously kicked that off and talked to me about Avanti, but it was really then where I met Patti Otter, who I just felt like you'd watch Patti work with a child and it looked like magic, like there'd be a change. And I wanted to do that magic and it's like it's a funny thing because, and then trying to imitate Patti, it didn't work. I couldn't imitate Patti, it could only be me, but I could be in conversation with her and go back and forth and again, it's that when somebody sees something in you and keeps investing energy in the conversation in you, that it allows you to come to your own way of doing something. And I think that from my mentor perspective, another mentor of mine was Reggie Boehme and from Reggie, I really learned the power of presence and really the power of reflecting upon yourself and bringing that into the treatment perspective. When I'm treating, I have to be really tuned into myself and tuned into my client. And I think Reggie really brought that forward. That was her secret sauce, her magic, and Reggie was another person who really was very powerful and very magical when she was treating. And then another sort of maybe lesser known in the OT world mentor of mine who taught me about, again, just diving deeper into yourself and learning everything about the human body and the human brain in great detail, and then sensing into yourself to see if you can perceive that, which was a woman named Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen, who's still teaching body mind centering and somatics and really that bridge between the physical body, the emotional body, the thinking body and how all of those systems integrate together. Bonnie's another person who just could do magic. I still couldn't even come close to doing what she's possible of, and she's so, again, she had that same magic as Reggie is that power of presence and really being with herself and with another at the same time. And it's sort of that with yourself, with another and merging, but not merging. It's like the joining together so that you can support that person. And I think it's not just the presence, but it's also having each one of these individuals just really reinforced what I think I naturally came with as a child was curiosity and just a zest for learning. And that really, that learning was about people and what makes them tick, and then how they learn. It's not just Dr. Ayers' work, who I've never met in person, but just really diving deeper into how the nervous system works and how that affects everyday function. So I feel like I've had a lot of amazing OT mentors. And then in the world of sound, I think my biggest mentor would be Paul Maudale, who wrote a book called When Listening Comes Alive, for his beautiful work in taking something so complex and explaining it with such simplicity and elegance. And he also was a friend who liked the same thing, even though we were doing different listening technologies, and he could have seen me as in the world as a competitor, in a way. He didn't. He created... Well, Paul Maudale was actually a protégé of Tomatis and worked with him for 20 years. And Paul Maudale created another listening therapy that didn't stick in the world, I think. So it was a takeoff on Tomatis called The Lift. I don't think it's as well known these days in the world, and I'm not sure how much of that is still being produced. But he was really one of the forerunners in doing an at-home tomatoes kind of program. And I mean, we had a lot of... I spent some time with him in Canada, and he spent some time here in Wisconsin. We had a lot of really great conversations, each taking each other's courses. And it's like that collegial, yet he is a little senior of my age and had this vast experience with Dr. Tomatis. He had a very long-standing personal relationship with him. He actually, I think... I believe that as he was treated by him in his early, maybe teens, 20s, and he actually, I think, believe he lived with Dr. Tomatis. So, he really had that personal journey himself with the treatment technique and the passion for it. And I think that's where we kind of met our spirit, our energies kind of met together on that, from that perspective. So anyway, so that would be a lesser known, but just a really incredible human being.
Amy: Amazing. Yes. Thank you so much for letting us get to know about your mentors a little bit. It will be interesting for our listeners to listen to your list, because some of the other guests that I've had have had similar lists. And it makes me think about how influential people like Pat Wilbarger and Reggie Boehme have been, and how far-reaching their ability to see the strengths of others and to really help people see the things in themselves that they can hone and bring to the treatment world. I think that that's an amazing testament to them.
Sheila: Awesome. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think it is that seeing in another, but it's also seeing where somebody is at and kind of seeing their next steps and where they can reach to. I think as having the privilege of being a mentor to others, it's like such a joy. Like I feel like as a mentor, when I am doing individual mentor sessions, that I gain so much more in it than the people that come to me often, just to watch them unfold and see how they take information I might give them that would be about how I might think about something or how I might approach it, and then take it into themselves and then do it in their own way, and add some of the other pieces. And I think that for people, I think it's important to know it's not about one mentor, it's about having many and it's about finding the people that really resonate with you.
Amy: Right. Yeah. Awesome. So you mentioned listening, which I think is how a lot of people know you is from Therapeutic Listening and all of the myriad of different interventions that fall under that, that Therapeutic Listening heading. But I have to say that I came to your course for listening, that was the first course I came to, but quickly was blown away by the big picture perspective that you give, and how you really do a nice job of talking about how everything is connected and integrated and what you teach is not all about listening. It feels like listening is an important way in for you, but I would just like to hear you speak to that a little bit about who you are as a clinician and the bigger perspective that you have.
Sheila: Thanks, Amy, because I don't see myself as only listening. I really started with a passion to really understand what Dr. Ayers, understand sensory integration in a big way, not in a way of, you know, in terms of many people talk about sensory processing and basically the aspect that's been really brought forth. And I think the Wilbargers really were instrumental in that was bringing forth the sensory modulation piece and talking about when people are defensive or are not, are under responding to sensation and looking at sort of that whole paradigm and sensation and arousal and affect and from the perspective of defensiveness. And so I think they really brought that forward and, you know, many others have done lots of work. That's a piece of sensory integration, but my really first 10 years was about trying to understand what Dr. Ayers was saying. And it is so in-depth, I mean, and it's so in-depth and the problem for young therapists these days is that we know so much more, but she created a map and she created a beautiful map that still really holds true about how neurological processes really influence behavior. And along with that is, you know, emotion and behavior as well as learning. She was very interested in learning. And so that was where I started and was just fascinated by the body senses. And that's really where Dr. Ayers spent a lot of her energy was in the vestibular and somatosensory systems and really trying to learn that foundation. Now, interestingly enough, back in 1980, some of you weren't born, but anyway, I was really wanted to be a sensory integrative therapist. However, to be one, you had to be certified in SI, it's like kind of a conundrum. You had to treat kids and you had to have a population that was very strict, a certain population to be able to be certified. So I could only go so far and take the theory course and it was challenging. Peds jobs weren't like they were now. They were like very vetted, your experience in working with peds, you needed to have experience to get in. And not only to work in peds right off the bat, you had to do a third field work in it or have landed in a pediatric field work. So I was just always wanting to work with kids, but I worked in neuro rehab. And so then I just continued to study the brain and perception and be interested in the vestibular system. I worked in psych and I actually, my first presentation that was quasi professional was at AOTA. I had nine months under my belt and I had been working as first as, interestingly enough, it's like a little bit like, why did I ever think I could do this? But I had been working in a day treatment program for individuals and it was a time in Michigan when we had deinstitutionalized people. So we had some pretty serious people out in the, people with serious medical issues, mental health issues in the community, and they were coming in for day treatment. So I created a sensory integrative program, made a trampoline and we had a ramp and I was actually riding adults down a ramp on a scooter board. And I was indeed using an office chair for rotation. And I could say that I could do a lot of things differently now, but I had collected their human figure drawings and they changed. And I did a presentation, my first presentation at AOTA on that. And it was supposed to be a small paper, which I had seen in the past, because I'd been to AOTA as a student, as being a room with, you know, 15, 20 people. Well, I get there and I end up looking at what room am I going to be in? It's the ballroom. I had like 300 people, I was so flipped out and I have a whole presentation written word for word on like notebook paper. I mean, it was the day of overheads, you know.
Amy: Right. Oh my gosh.
Sheila: I remember in my audience was Ginny Scardina and Karen Pettit and Elaine Utley. Well, Karen Pettit and Elaine Utley, I had known because as part of my, you and I are a lot alike, because as part of my setting up that program, I had driven to Pennsylvania to see them doing a science and sensory integration in an adult psychiatric facility that was in an institution. So they came to support me and it was crazy. So I got a little taste for public speaking, although scared to death. Sharing what I was doing and getting the feedback. And actually, truth be known, Ginny Scardina came up to me and she corrected me on something, but in a loving way. You know, like I didn't know, but I had the passion for it and I kept trying. And I think you have to not be afraid to be corrected. You're not going to be right. I think she corrected me on something I said about neurology or something. But anyway, it's OK, you know, to do that. So anyway, that's kind of a long story.
Amy: Yeah, that's wonderful. I love that.
Sheila: So that was kind of the beginning, but that big picture of where I started. And so truth be on much time past, I ended up doing school contracts and being interested in sensory integration, finishing my training, then moved here to Wisconsin. And after another round of school contracts here, I really wanted a private SI clinic. It was like my dream. And I did open that here in Madison. And it, of course, was the very first private practice clinic. And I do have to say another mentor, Nancy Lawton Shirley, actually really supported me in that. And I learned a lot from her as well and supported me in opening my own clinic. And, you know, I think you can have mentors on many, many, many levels. And in that process, I was treating it was the boom of like now it's the boom of trauma and attachment. It was the boom of autism. Like it was the numbers and then that range of spectrum. Like at first, 1980, when I was seeing autism, it would be individuals that were severely impacted by their autism. But the boom of it was really coming in. The diagnoses were becoming clear and treatment was really growing. And I was treating from a sensory integrative perspective. And a lot of my clients were flying to clinics to do this thing called Auditory Integration Training. And to tell you the truth, I thought it was really weird. And, you know, parents were going and they were so hoping. And some of the kids with very severe autism were really hoping that they would talk. And I have to say, kids came back, some of them. And in 10 days, I didn't notice any difference. Now, that doesn't mean there wasn't a difference. It just meant that my eye wasn't refined and I was looking for them to talk to. You know, right. And then I had a child, a speech and language pathologist who was attached to my clinic, trained in the Barard A.I.T. And I had a child go to her and he changed dramatically. And she said to me, hey, you can come over and try it yourself. And I did it and I changed. And so that's where I feel like my parallel with Paul Maudale. Like I was very gravitationally insecure. I understood the vestibular system and how the vestibular system was maybe the problem for gravitational insecurity. But my gravitational insecurity went away and it was dramatic in 10 days. I was I was like a kid, you know, look at me, look what I can do. You know, when kids like really find their power and their agency. And I was like, I would go to a big pile of pillows and I'd say, somebody look at me. And I throw myself backwards into it and jump off stuff. And it was just like, what happened? And then I then my husband said to me, “well, now you have to go get trained. We we have to do this. You have to do this in the clinic because this is sensory integration.” And that sort of set me on the long quest. I can't just do something. I have to… always I'm curious. I want to know why. And there's always another why I feel like a three year old. Why? Why? Why? My granddaughter is getting into that now. Why? Why? Why? But that's on the same way. Once I find out the answer to one, why I want to know what what's underneath that, what's underneath that, and I did that with sound and really just to see literally what we know now is that the auditory system is an extension of the vestibular system. We know that part of the vestibular system processes sound and it is embedded in some of those gravity receptors. So you are here in the space can't be you are here. Different box. Here's the space that surrounds you, that that's the connection and that really low level perception of what is called environmental scheme. We're really perceiving or even sensing. I think it's below perception. The space around you is often individuals start teaching. But that's I think that's that really changes the whole game, just like when you work with vestibular work and you really get someone anchored and organized in their body. And so that that sort of, you know, you are here. And then that extension into space that the auditory system gives you. And again, for me, I learned it as a sense like I sensed it in my body. I sense my body change. And people say to me, you know, we don't have research. Well, we're not there yet. I mean, we didn't you know, things happen. And then the research builds slowly after we see that with Dr. Ayres work. But I I knew it worked because I knew it in myself. And then I was just striving and then continuing to observe. But then the next piece is I was I was teaching at this time. I was teaching first with Patti Otter and Eileen Richter in the MORE course. I'm very interested in all things body. And I was fascinated by the breath. And I still am. And, you know, the body senses and the vestibular piece and how that all ties and where does it come together neurologically. And then I started to talk about sound, because how could I not? Because I saw it as just as important. There's a part of sound that really is joining in the body senses. And it does influence all the things that OTs classically trained in Ayres sensory integration think are vestibular. Not all of them, but it has a big influence on changing them. And so I started to talk about that even in these other courses and then I got very fascinated in the neurology of the connection between the vestibular and the auditory and the visual systems. And so the very first course I taught the triad course with Steve Kool, who I'd say was another mentor of mine. And we were teaching that for probably about a year. And then I met Mary Kawar, who was super interested in vestibular visual. And we were teaching about visual connections. But Mary had taken that deep dive into visual, like I'd taken the deep dive into auditory. And then we just exploded in our conversation. And it's fun. Our passion and our friendship. I would say she's another mentor. Mary, you know, is 23 years my senior. And, you know, I think she could be 88 next week. And she's still teaching with me. So I see her as a colleague and a mentor, a mentor in life, really, as well as another OT mentor. And so that's really my passion. The course is called Listening with the Whole Body. It is not about apply a sound technology. And here is the technology. And you do it for five days, two weeks or whatever. And you do this track or this, you know, particular I know in other technologies. And it's fine. It works for people. It's not to, you know, like this is the sensory integrative one or this is the language one that sort of have some of the Tomatis, which I'm trained in is just don't see it that way. I see it highly individualized. And that's how we teach it in all of our courses. It's a part of the picture.
So I was treating yesterday and we saw a young man where I would definitely say the triad was off hit a huge vestibular piece to it, as well as his eyes, the postural ocular piece. His eyes were not working well together at all. So that component was off. And we did some auditory processing testing, which, you know, he couldn't. He had a lot of trouble with auditory processing from a sensory perspective in that more than hypo hyper. But he really couldn't hear sounds in a noisy environment. You know, he got them, you know, mixed up. And so, you know, there's a whole treatment program for him. And but where we started, his family came for listening because speech and language is a little bit delayed. And dad was telling a little bit of a story about when the young man was on the bus and he thought he met a friend and he thought his name was I can't remember exactly, but he had twisted it to something funny. And it wasn't his name. It was the way that he heard it. So we knew that piece was in there. And then when we sent them home with listening, it's very different. It wasn't, you know, that we were going to start with the same thing. We start with everyone. And we did you know, so it's like highly individualized. I think that's the way I see using all sound. And even though we created the therapeutic listening, which has multiple libraries in it with different technologies that are designed for like modulated music is really designed to teach you to zoom in and zoom out. What we really need when kids like the young man I saw yesterday couldn't hear in a noisy environment where they can hear. He just is zooming in. Right. And that inability to really use language in a crowded environment or spacing out in a crowded, noisy environment. Also, you know, we need that same zooming and zooming in out function when you're sound sensitive. Interestingly enough, that same zooming and zooming out in the modulated music triggers what we call an orienting response, which was really early on. What I learned from Dr. Porges and his work is very a seminal article orienting in which is in a million something like that. Now I'm going to lose it. Sorry. I'll get you that. If people want to go back and look it up and put it in the show notes. Yeah. Put it in your show notes. Yeah. So I'm not you know, I'm always telling you where I'm at in the moment. I can't quite pull out the exact article, but how he really talked about, you know, when you're orienting, you're in that ventral vagal system. And so, you know, we were going for that because ventral vagal is when you feel safe. It's when you're in you're regulated in your physiology. It's in your arousal. And we could see we were turning that on. And so that was the modulated music. And we taught that first. Many people think that is therapeutic listening. But then we went on to do binaural beat technology, which early on was longer tools called gear shifters, which we still use wonderful for regulating, particularly kids who flip really quickly from, you know, high to low or hypo to hyper. And then quick shifts were something where therapists really. Again, I'm always trying to give therapists what they want from a practical perspective was we just need something we can't do it every day. I'm in this environment or that environment. That's where kind of quick shifts came in. And from my work with Ingo Steinbach we created a tool that used a narrow band sort of filter or to be able to refine zooming the area and called, you know, are more fine tuning music. So we created different libraries. Again, they're just tools to be able to access and support individuals at, you know, where they're at. And I think that one of the biggest pieces that all of my mentoring taught me was that clinical reasoning piece. And that's really where therapists, my mentors were seeing me where I was at and then walking me through the clinical reasoning process and doing that through their lens that they understood the most about. Yeah, I think that's really when we come back full circle. That's really in nurturing my curiosity, my wonder, my I think the kiss of death for any therapist is to think they know.
Amy: Right.
Sheila: You know, it's like I think I know, but it's not. I'm curious. Would this be it? I go through a lot of information and synthesis and then I get to this. Would this be it? And then I put it on and I'm going to watch. I'm curious what's going to happen. And I think the other thing mentors taught me is really learning to read, not read a book, but read the room, read the body, read the physiology, read the you know, when it moves into I feel like Reggie Boehme and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen are doing something like reading energy, reading at another level, which I think we all can do. And you have to find your own way to be able to do that.
Amy: Right. And I think of that also as staying curious.
Sheila: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that staying curious in the moment allows you to read the room, to read the, you know, because I know that when you're doing listening with a child, you are watching that orienting response. You are watching the way that the child moves and how that changes.
Amy: You know, I tell people I didn't know I was going to tell this story, but I tell people that when I first came to your class, I was only a couple of years out of school. And I think, you know, at that time, we heard about classes through mailers and stuff like that. And I had gotten a mailer. And my gut said that this one kid that I was treating really needed to do a listening program. I had never heard of listening before I got that mailer. And so I came to the class and, you know, I thought I was just learning about putting headphones on a child. And I believe you and Colleen Hacker were teaching.
Sheila: Ah, early on. Yes.
Amy: Yeah. And you had some videos and one was of a child jumping on a trampoline and he was jumping before he did listening. And then he did the listening and then he was jumping afterwards. And about half of the room, when you showed the after video, went “Ah!”and gasped. And I didn't see anything different. And in that moment, I was like, hmm, either all of these people are really trying to impress her by acting like they saw something, or I don't have the ability to see that yet. And obviously, the latter ended up being true. You know, I just didn't have the ability to watch movement and see movement patterns and how they shift at that point in my career.
Sheila: You know, I think that's actually the thing that's driving me now. I think that, you know, I I'm glad you brought that up. It's funny because I was the same way. I didn't know what are people looking at? And that's sort of driven me. And I actually did NDT training, but it just my I don't have the mind for that. My mind doesn't work that way. I think in feels, I think in wholese. I see things as a whole. And I had to really start to develop my own way of understanding it. And I feel like it's simpler. It breaks things down into patterns. And to me that I could that's something I could follow. And then once I could follow the patterns and I could see more detail within it. But I needed the whole before I could get the parts. And that's really I think that's. Why some people are attracted to my teaching is because I need to learn the whole, but I need to also go through all the parts to get to the whole. And then I get to the whole. It's like I I learn these scattered pieces of information and all of a sudden I see how they're all connected. And that's what happened with movement. I was very confused in NDT. And I know that's funny. Many of my friends are brilliant NDT therapists. I know. Of course, I'm sure you've talked with Kim Barthel, and I have many other friends, the whole group that was here in Milwaukee with Reggie Boehme, and Gail Ritchie, and Linda Kleibhan, and also, I would say these are also friends and mentors in that I strove to learn from them, but it just wasn't my thing. And I think you have to let some things go, and I kind of beat myself up over that for a while. Right. It's not how I learn, it's not how I process information. And I think the world of neurodiversity has really helped us. We're all neurodiverse, right? We have to, you have to get your own thing and celebrate it, but you do have to stay curious, stay learning. It was something that my father always said about me. He said, you know, I think you'll just go to school forever. You know, and it's funny, I don't have a PhD. I didn't find school didn't, in OT, it wasn't where my interests were in, you know, and I know that that's a necessity now, and I think I'll be ready when I'm 80 to go back and get my doctorate, but I just needed to learn it my own way. And what I'm really interested in is clinical art. And what we always say is like when I see a child and then we start to treat, it's like opening a present. Like you kind of are going after something, but what you sometimes get is, I think when you get the whole and you get a child or an adult to have an experience where they feel different about themselves and they find a piece of themselves that they were potentially insecure with. And the most basic level, you know, the young man I saw yesterday came in and he looked at the lycra and he's like, I said, do you want to climb that? I can't climb. And it's like, you don't know. Well, let's go. It's a different thing. Let's see what we can do. And at the end he was climbing it like crazy. And I'm like, wow, you can climb. Wow, look at you climb that. You know, that's a present.
Amy: Agency.
Sheila: Yes, exactly. I can do it. I mean, that kid power, like look at me, look what I can do. And that's exactly where he left. And to me, that's a part of the present. And I'm hoping when he comes back, because we sent him home with a lovely home program and we're going to hear some things from parents about how things change. But the most important is that the, I can do it. That I know I can do this. Right. And when things get tough, you stay at it because you feel like, oh, I've had that experience where things were a challenge and I kept at it. And, you know, I got there. So super fun.
Amy: Yeah, that's awesome. So what's your favorite thing that you're teaching these days? Cause I know you and you go in a lot of different directions and then bring it back to OT. And so I'm super curious about what you're excited about right now.
Sheila: Well, we're trying, I'm actually have a course that we're working on, which is done, but things are never done in my mind, but it's called Ready, Steady, Go, but it's really a template. And for me, it's the whole template of this exactly what we're talking with, being with, and what are we looking at and how do you practice that and how do you find that within yourself? So sort of the ready part is really all of that early physiology pro-social, but what does it look like? You know, and I think like I, the truth of it is, is that I think my Myers-Briggs or one of them is like concrete random. Like I want to give you concrete things. This is what we know. How can you take this into all of these other places? So the ready part of it is in a part, what are all the things that go into regulation and how do you know that you got there? How do you feel it and practicing that? And you know, part of that is breath is a big part of that and learning about breath and not just how to change it, but what does it mean? How do you look at it and how do you see it? And what does that mean? And then looking at posture, but not from the, how do you, from more of its impact on affect and arousal and looking at the fine tuning parts of that. So that's sort of, and then how does that tie into the next kind of level, which is steady, which is really a lot of that triad, vestibular, auditory, visual, but, and the movement patterns. And how do you look at movement? And how do you know when there's more integrity in it that's gonna net you better perception, that's gonna net you better function, that's gonna net you better I can do it and agency. So all of that component and then go being more about taking that into the 3D movement world, as well as some of the more top-down strategies. And just like sort of like, it's almost like a clinical reasoning model that's very simplified and yet more in depth. And then some, I don't know, maps. It's a map you can use in a treatment session. And along with it, I love to, my friend, I say my friend and then I, as soon as I say that I lose someone's name. I had the same issue with word finding as soon as I'm ready to say someone's name. Kris Worrell said, when she liked my workshops, cause I had a lot of to-go's, and there's a lot of to-go's in it. Little fun things we do as power-ups that we have found helpful and powerful that can be added in to a classroom program, could be put into a home program. We add them into treatment programs. And so it's like a template for wherever you work, these things are gonna be helpful. And you can take it to a highly individualized level and you can take pieces of it to design other programs. So it doesn't, it's not the end all be all, but again, it's a clinical reasoning model to keep you curious, to keep you wondering. And it's cyclical. So, you know, if go is working and it doesn't work, do you go back to ready or do you go back to steady? And what's the power-up that you do? And then when you go back into go, did it help you and how do you know? I mean, that's what we're really, there's a real, there's something left unarticulated, if that's a word, in my life that I feel like I need to articulate for people. And again, we're always doing things when we teach that we most needed to know, right? Or things that for me, I've been in this for 43 years. I'm still very active as a therapist. I don't think that that's true for a lot of people. And I wanna share what I've learned that I've been able to translate to people who have worked closely with me. So it is translatable, but it needs more clear articulation. And I've partnered with Tracy Bjorling with that because she's really more of my left hemisphere or, and so, I said to her the other day, here's the problem, Tracy, I think in fields and you are the only person that I've ever met that can meet me at the field and take it to more words. And organization, also taking it into, constantly I'm reading research and synthesizing it, but I'll get a kernel out of it and then move on. But then taking it back, what's the path, giving those longer articles so people can get the depth of it because my mind crunches a lot of information. It always wants to take away what Kris Worrell said, the to-go's. And I wanna take that with me because how am I gonna use this? It's not just reading research doesn't mean anything, but how do I use it? How does it inform how I observe? How does it inform how I think about things? How does it inform what I'm going to do as a part of treatment? So that's kind of where I'm at now. I don't know if that's gonna be, and then going back and getting clarity. So it's like I'm 65, 66, am I? 65, I think I'm gonna be 66. I think a good 20 years, I hope. I wanna go back and clarify and rewrite another thing we're working on is really working on fidelity in Therapeutic Listening and rewriting a third edition of listening with the whole body, but potentially more as just a fidelity component to that. And really, so right now we would say we're working on a stage two manual to get to fidelity. So research takes a long time to do it really, really well.
Amy: Absolutely.
Sheila: And I think that the beauty and the difficulty with what we've done with therapeutic listening is that doing it as a clinical reasoning model. So it's not, how do we make that, that people can replicate that?
Amy: Right, for people who don't know Therapeutic Listening, from my perspective, the way that it's different than some of, or one of the ways it's different than some of the other programs out there is that the clinician is making decisions about the music selections that are used based on their clinical reasoning of looking at the whole body and the whole system rather than having a program that says, a child has kind of a global issue in this area. So you're gonna listen to 60 sessions. So there is a learning curve to it, in my experience, that makes it harder to do fidelity kind of testing with because you have to have clinicians who know what they're doing and are making choices that align with the way you would use it. Even though I know that there is, you learn from clinicians new ways of doing things too.
Sheila: I know, I know. But I think it's just, I think that there is a certain basic level of competence where you're not just guessing and that you're really reasoning. And I think that training in clinical reasoning is something that was there inherently from my beginning and many of my mentors beginning because we really didn't have access to high-speed learning like individuals have now. You have so much information at your fingertips. We really had to take a concept and spend a lot of time with it in the clinic before we would, you know, and I would fly to workshops. You don't know how much, how much can you do that in a year? It helped that I lived in the Detroit area for a while. And, you know, here in Madison, I had access to Minneapolis where I could get drive to places, but, and was out on the East coast for a while, but, you know, take in a workshop and absorb it and work with it as much as I could. And there was reading of like a couple of really manuals or books. I mean, even Ayers writing was all theoretical. And so you had to spend a lot more time with it. And I think then when you would get with other people who had a different level of understanding, you were just so curious about how they were doing and what did it look like for me anyway, and their understanding that you would ask so many questions. And I think now it's challenging because we have so much information to sit through and we know so much more scientifically.
Amy: Right. Yeah. I think both are true that we have, there literally is more scientific information to learn than when, I would say, my mentors were starting out that that, you know, they didn't have as much information even available, but then also there is such a huge amount of information. And I have really benefited from learning from mentors who know the neurological information that underlies this information. And I find that not all of the coursework that is available to us as OTs now is built on that really solid foundation of here's how the brain works, that things have become a little looser in a lot of courses and that it can feel like that gives us the opportunity to learn things a little bit easier. But when we're not connecting them to the things that we know to be true and that really solid information, it ends up being more confusing, I think, than when things were simpler and tied to the neurology a little bit closer.
Sheila: Right. And I think when you tie to the neurology, you tie into systems and networks within the brain versus something isn't just tactile or just vestibular. I mean, if you understand what Ayers was talking about, she was talking about multiple networks and deep core systems in the brainstem, which it's an entire symphony. It is not, and each player has to play their part with their instruments in tuned. And without that symphony, it doesn't matter. It's not just about that. I mean, the little guy I saw yesterday, didn't want to play in messy play, didn't have anything to do with tactile defensiveness. His eyes didn't work together. That wasn't interesting to him, just staying there longer, like playdough and whatever. And he had some praxis issues. So how is he going to form stuff? Like that just isn't interesting unless somebody sat with him. It wasn't about, so you could really just tick, tick, tick and come up with that, but that wasn't it. You've got to look at the big picture and all of it and how it relates to function and how that relates to just daily life. It was really fun. I had a great session yesterday, which made me never want to stop treating, which also made me want to work on my mobility and getting up and down off the floor quickly because I don't want to stop doing the work because it's so incredibly rewarding. And it's just, for me, it's where I get my, now I have grandchildren, so I have a whole different joy bucket, but that is like one of my greatest joys in life is treating. I mean, and to be fair, I don't see eight kids a day or six, which then can make it really, I really know I did that at a time in my life when it gets harder to bring that kind of juice to the table because you're seeing so many kids.
Amy: Yeah, that kind of brings me to a question. Another thing that I know about you is that you've also, you talked about doing listening on yourself, but you've done other work on yourself as well. And that is an aspect of what we are talking about on this podcast is that work that we have to do on ourselves to show up in a therapy session is the best therapist that we can be. And I just wonder if there is anything you want to say about that or share with people?
Sheila: Yeah, well, I think that you can always see what work I did on myself by what I'm teaching. So I started with breath. I mean, that was where I really like wanted to see Patti Otter, and I'm still fascinated with breath and breath work. And another thing that was, I learned as, and actually, truth be known, Reggie Boehme had like a little camp for therapists. It was just therapists. And it was a camp where you were invited. And I think she would invite you if you were open-minded, but it was a camp where you did breath work and you worked on yourself. That's a big influence. I went on to become a breath worker. Again, it shows up in more in my personal life. And I continue to follow that path of breath and learn about it in many ways and find that one of the most useful things. And then movement, but more semantics is another thing that I use constantly that I think shows up in my work, but I put, you'd put anything in a sensory integrative perspective because it's how the brain works. But, and really, looking at, as I said to you, movement from an emotional standpoint and affective standpoint, you know, we say, you know, when it drives me crazy and people say he's not grounded, well, what does that mean? That one drove me crazy. If people said somebody wasn't grounded, how do you know? You know, how can you say that about somebody? You know, what does it mean to be in your body? What does it mean to have body awareness? Body awareness in space, we can go back to errors. That, we can look at that. We can treat that. And that's really, I think I was drawn to Ayres because I am an SI child grown up and it drove me to understand what was challenging for me. And then once I overcame some of those things or overcame them, but learned how to be with them. And then also learned how to make changes, like not be scared to death and not be able, you know, I was as a child, if I would climb a tree, cause my friends encouraged me, I had friends that were therapists. They were just destined to get me to do stuff, but I'd get up in the tree and let it be terrified. Cause I didn't know how to coming down was the issue.
Amy: Right.
Sheila: So it was, you know, so I made great improvements, but you know, I still have this body in the system and a brain that is wired the way it's wired. So, and I think really learning to work on yourself is that I also have, you know, I think like many of us done a lot of work in terms of psychotherapy kind of work, you know, people don't always talk about that because, and you know, we're not here to talk about that, but you know, I'm an adult of 65 years. I've had struggles in my life that were personal struggles. We all do, you know what I mean? And we all find different ways through, but I have had a lot of psychotherapy and, and find it super helpful. And you can call it coaching, call it what you want, but having other people that were clear, that could see you clearly that didn't have a vested interest in the outcome in any way, listen to you and help you make your way through it. And I think that's that blend of, but I've always done that with somebody who actually worked with an individual named Jim Morningstar, who was a psychologist, who is one of the first rebirthers in breath work. And I met him through Reggie Boehme, and that's been somebody that has done that kind of work with me. So I've always been interested in the emotional in an embodied way. And I am very interested in the body and the breath, because for myself, I know when that's not well organized, then it's really much harder to find my emotional grounding. And that's like been my journey that may not be true for someone else. And it is what I think I see in kids, but I approach it through play and the body. And you know, I do do relationship, I just that's not where I'm thinking. Do you know what I mean? I do it through my own way. I've actually taken a lot of training in relationship based things, but my mind is not thinking there. I don't believe when I'm with a child that I'm actually I am thinking, but as I said to you, I think in feels, I'm very kinesthetic, I don't think in words.
Amy: So you mean like you're not necessarily following the DIR floor time or TBRI or one of those. But you are a relational therapist in the way you are with a child. Yeah, I would say that I probably am more with a child in a Dan Hughes kind of way, which is more that pace model. I would say that's probably more my style and what I resonate with and what works for me. I think floor time was really, I understand it. And it's a developmental model. It's beautiful. But for me, it's not a resonance where I can take it into treatment. It's not, I don't resonate with it. It doesn't bring out my strengths. It's just like NDT. It's super influenced my work. I really get it. I love to watch my friends who are NDT magicians. It's just amazing. But it's not something I can do. I can't replicate, I can learn from it. And then I do parts of it. Right? I mean, it's not that I don't do any of it. I'm working with somebody and I'm taking them and I'm getting their knee under their hip and alignment and changing the base of support and then having a move off of it. I am doing it, but I don't think that way.
Amy: Right, right. Yeah. Well, and I love that. I love for people to hear that we don't all have to do everything the same way as somebody else, that, you know, we can find our own ways, but you have definitely always learned from some really great sources and have gone in depth in that learning.
Sheila: And continuing. I'm a work in progress as a therapist.
Amy: Well, that brings me, we're getting closer to the end, and I wanted to ask you the question that I asked all my guests about something about you that at some point in your life, you might've considered to not be a positive thing, but that now you realize has become a part of who you are and maybe as sort of one of your superpowers.
Sheila: Yeah. Well, I think it is. I haven't been formally diagnosed, but my son's dyslexic. He's been diagnosed. And I actually, I was teaching a workshop after I took him to a specialist on dyslexia who came workshop. And she said to me, well, you're dyslexic. I don't have to test you. I'm just like, I know. I mean, so if you want to give it a name, but a learning difference, I'm going to say that I learned very differently. And it's really hard for me to, you know, write an email and line it all up, you know, and if you get an email from me, it's like four sentences, you know, it's, it's just I think I use words in a way that's more reflective of how I sense things I can write. I actually, when I sit down and write, I can, it just takes a long time for me to get it out there and I have to be in the right space of it. Um, and actually that's part of my, one of my challenges that I want to take on. And I don't know if you would call this my whatever as I'm, I don't know, going to retire, maybe kind of never, but you know, what would be more retirement for me would be writing versus more, more doing and working with that. So I think that's my greatest gift though, is I see things. I would say, I said it to you already, I think in feels, I feel my way through it. And then I tried, even as we're talking, if you go back and do a transcript, like she said what?, because I'm telling you what it feels like, you know, I'm not, I'm not memorizing a script. I know with, uh, when I taught with Stephen Cool, it was like, he had the, he had scripts and I'm thinking, how did he do that? Like, to say the same thing in the same way. And I could like, after a while, I didn't really memorize it. I was like, Hmm, I know what he's going to say next. And I find that with other friends of mine who are highly academic and very, you know, I would call it left brain, but it may not be, but just in that sequential, this is what's known. This is what's literal. This is how we put it together. I'm not that. I'm completely the polar opposite of that. Now, of course, I'm always attracted to, if you look at all of the people, with the exception of Patti, that I have taught with, with me (and Eileen Richter in between) you would, you would see that I'm always drawn to somebody who does more of that. You know, I taught with Colleen Hacker for a long time, Mary Kawar, you know, working with Tracy has been just such a gift, uh, Tracy Bjorling, cause she's incredibly bright. Uh, she was sent to me by another, what did I say? Mentor and friend, Julie Wilbarger said, I think she'll be perfect for you. And it has been really, really helpful. She remembers things and tells me things that I forgot I said, and then explains them back to me. And I'm like, wow, that's really great. I think because she puts, puts it together in, you know, uh, it's not linear, but in with more clear language. So I think people often get a feel of things and I think I can get people to feel things, but I always partner with somebody who also can support people where that's not their strength, where they really can give the words in a way that people who learn in a different style can learn from.
Amy: Yes.
Sheila: So, but to me, I think it is my superpower because I see things differently. And then I, I think I help people who can't also, who may struggle with some of that more traditional learning or to, if they have that frame, which is like Colleen Hacker has that frame, but just, um, well, I'm not sure I, she really also has the artful frame too.
Amy: Yeah. I'm sure you added to that in the way that she worked and learned from you bringing in that.
Sheila: Yeah. And I think we always, when we, when somebody is in a sort of teaching or maybe a more senior role, I think that they also are getting just as much back.
Amy: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's wonderful. So tell us a little bit, um, about where people can find you and what you are offering right now.
Sheila: So, um, you can find us online at Vital Links. And I think currently on, on Friday, I'm teaching, um, trauma again, more from that body-based perspective, um, and how I see that. And, and really one of the things I think about trauma is we've been treating it. If you're an OT, you've been treating individuals who have, you know, really, if you think of extreme stress and stress that you're unable to resolve, um, as a definition of trauma and that's held in the body's physiology and movement patterns, that's really, we've been doing that our, if you're working in sensory integration, your entire career. Um, so that's, that's coming up and again, continuing to teach listening and, um, as well as, uh, the, you know, in different libraries, the modulated is the, you know, first original listening course, and then the Quickshifts courses. So that's kind of what we're up to now, continuing some of our other courses. We have some things that are recorded. Um, we'll probably go back with some of the things we have a Building Blocks course. That's been really popular that looks at the reflexes, but puts them in perspective. And I just want to say that because we're not treating reflexes, but we're seeing how you, if you look at the reflexes, you can put that into your map for clinical reasoning. And again, always lots of to-goes in that. Yeah. But yeah, but I think that's one that we probably will in the next year rewrite and reframe a little bit, because I think that I do believe the world has gone a little astray because we're not treating reflexes. We're treating people and it is understanding them is part of understanding the architecture of the brain. And so it it's really more about understanding them as well as using them as a little bit of map and treatment. And then, you know, always some powerful things that we find helpful, um, in treatment that can be easily put into. That's one of the things I feel like I always went to workshops and got so excited about anything new I learned to do, um, that I could put in. And I don't want to give you what to do or to go unless it's, it can be powerful, not just to give you some, an activity. It's really things that we have found to be quite helpful in our rule is 80% of the time, you know, that makes, makes it a to-go, if you will.
Amy: I think that that's something about your courses that I have always enjoyed. Some courses you go to it, you learn more about the why you would do something, or how you might incorporate it into the bigger picture. But there was always some of that, “what to do” when I was in your courses. There was also the “why to do it” to go with it, so that we're not just walking away with a protocol. It's walking away with, um, here's some activities that work really well. And here's why we feel like they work well. And here's how you will evaluate whether it worked well for the particular person that you were working with in that particular moment.
Sheila: Yes. Yes. Thank you, Amy. Yeah. I think it's a continued work in progress. The things that, you know, when I'm in the clinic and we see change, it's like, well, this is what I want to help other therapists that are younger or maybe not younger, but newer to the field or whatever. Well, I want you to get there faster. I, you know, I want you to see the power of what the tools we have as occupational therapists, including use of self a lot faster than I did.
Amy: Right.
Sheila: You know, and I think you can speed people up quite a bit. And I think you've had that experience. We've been involved in the Avanti camp and, um, also been involved in the Jabru camp and just to see people come together and learn from that experience of treating and mentoring and being a part of a big picture where there's lots of people with different ideas, but different strengths that can support you in developing yourself.
Amy: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. You have shared so much with us today and I encourage people to reach out and check out the things that you're offering, because you're going to get a really good, big picture with a lot of details in there as well.
Sheila: Great. Thanks, Amy. This was super fun.
Amy: Yeah. Take care.
If you're like me, you're probably starting to notice themes in all of these podcasts, themes about supporting ourselves, seeing the whole child, building our understanding on the neuroscience, being a curious observer and being willing to take chances. Listening to these episodes again, two years after I recorded them, I'm encouraged by their messages. And I'm also encouraged with where they all are now, continuing to share their work, continuing to build connections and getting louder in their messages about what sensory integrative processing is and what we should be doing to support our clients. This episode is going to wrap up my first season. I have so many more people and ideas that I want to share with you, but I can't wait any longer to get started. Thank you for joining me and be looking out for other opportunities soon.
Show notes: Stephen Porges article mentioned