This one is warm and personal before it gets clinical. The three of us own our neuro-spicy, tangential brains and why we keep showing up to the mic anyway, then move into the sensory matrix: how neuroception and sensory modulation are so braided together they’re almost artificial to separate. The keeper is Tracy’s butter story, a masterclass in treating defensiveness through wonder and safety rather than chasing the symptom.
We start by letting you behind the curtain. None of us are trained communicators, and listening back to ourselves is humbling, so we talk honestly about our quirky, neurodivergent minds: Tracy coding the wrong German airport on her way home, Cory’s own ADHD dawning realisation, and Michelle’s recurring urge to drop out of the podcast that she keeps overriding by simply showing up. The throughline is strengths-based: individual differences aren’t deficits, and modelling that is part of why this lands for listeners.
Then we pick up where Ep 30 left off, moving from the low route of S and A toward the higher routes. Tracy works through the sensory matrix, a phrase she credits to Ruth Lanius, and why the line between neuroception and sensory modulation is almost artificial: a braided system of surveillance, detection and mobilisation that adjusts thresholds and activation across the sensory, motor, autonomic and arousal systems. We reframe sticky thoughts as portals into where a child’s mind and body are, rather than deficits, and Tracy tells the story of learning from her mentor Lois Hickman, making butter on a trampoline with a profoundly tactile-defensive seven-year-old, using wonder and safety as the real treatment while the proprioception, vibration and rhythm did their quiet work.
Lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels and chapter markers match the published episode.
Lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels and chapter markers match the published episode.
Cory: Okay, I’m not even going to give context, just keep going.
Michelle: Okay.
Tracy: Okay.
Tracy: One of the things we share is that we’re not trained professional communicators, and yet we have this podcast and we love communicating with each other. When we share our authentic dialogue, it lands for the thousands of people we’re so grateful are listening. The funny thing is, when you create a podcast, you’re forced to go back and listen to yourself, which is hilarious and instructive.
Michelle: And humbling.
Tracy: We all have quirky minds, and in our trialogue we balance each other beautifully, in how each of us approaches thinking, communicating and clinical reasoning. Sometimes I travel; I just came back from an extended trip and I’m a bit jet-lagged. In my quirky brain, I allow myself to trust the lack of specificity, and it’s happened a few times, so I’ll tell you two embarrassing stories.
Tracy: Early in my career, when I was first travelling a lot for training, before the internet, I landed at an airport in Ohio and realised I hadn’t written down where I was supposed to go. So there I was, thinking, where am I going? Flash forward to yesterday, flying home from Europe, from Poland through Germany back to Denver, and somehow in my head I’d coded the German airport as a different one. So at check-in it said, welcome to this flight from here to here, and I thought, wait, I don’t think that’s the right flight. It was this moment of, I know I put the pieces together, but sometimes I release the detail and go with the flow, which is what I learned to do in therapy. In the clinic I want to hold a lot of thought and detail; once I’m in the session, I want to allow whatever unfolds to unfold. Living like that for decades, being precise and specific but also open-ended and flowy, those two things sometimes run into each other in hilarious ways.
Cory: To me that’s resilience. Your strengths-based language is wonderful, because anybody could describe moments like that and be really hard on themselves, and that tendency is strong for many people. What a beautiful model of enjoying the way you are. Yesterday I did a Tracy, I was very loose, brain-wise. Having babies has brought to life the fact that I’m a little spicy.
Michelle: Neuro-spicy.
Cory: Yesterday I was like, oh, my brain, I’ve lost something. So I did a Tracy, because I’ve seen Tracy do it: okay, don’t be hard on yourself, pull it back together, get a bit grounded. But I need to share a really funny story.
Cory: As a new therapist, maybe two years in, I was treating a little boy with a significant ADHD profile, and I said to his mum, wouldn’t it be fascinating to be in his brain for a day, what would that be like? Then, fast forward ten years, I’m at Seed with Michelle, we’re learning about ADHD, and I’m like, do you think I’ll have this? And you just laughed and laughed, you’re like, dude, how long has it taken you to figure that out? And I thought about that kid, and it’s so funny, because there I was, not knowing anything, and yeah, mate, you’re on the same bandwidth, no wonder I loved that kid and was so fascinated by him, because I got him in a way that’s just fun for me. I’ve had to do so much work on matching the kids who need less intensity, and holding my regulation at higher intensity, because I tend to go a bit at the top end, which I like, but I don’t want to be not therapeutic. So that’s my story of coming to realise, oh, maybe there’s something going on here. And of course, being the way I am, I went through the diagnosis and never bothered going back for the final appointment, which is diagnostic in itself.
Michelle: Oh, I forgot, I got distracted.
Michelle: What we have in common is that we’re positive. It’s not that we don’t know our individual differences, we can have a giggle, but we could be fearful. When Cory said, do you want to do this podcast with me, I was like, I don’t speak very well, my thoughts are a bit erratic, I don’t know the neuroscience and probably never will, because I can’t remember it. I remember vividly the feeling and the knowing, those felt experiences. When you had that dawning that you might be ADHD, it was, hold this space, Michelle, giggle, not too much. We could be fearful, and I certainly was when you invited me, it’s not to my strengths, a podcast where we get into the neuroscience. I listen back and think, oh, I have to drop out of this podcast, but you keep showing up. Come on, Michelle. We get lots of positive feedback, and part of what we’re modelling is that we all have individual differences and strengths, and it’s a value, and of service.
Cory: For me, I listen back later and think, who is that, it’s not me, how did I have that thought? I almost feel like I’m learning again from myself, like I’m out of body sometimes during the discussion. I love it, because it’s the learning, and if people come along for the ride, it becomes a collective for all of us. You just have to be aware that we love our neuro-spiciness and it comes to the podcast in great ways.
Michelle: If you’re wondering whether we know when we’re being spicy, yes, we do. We’re tangential, we have different interests, so I feel sorry for you, Trace, because Cory and I will have thoughts at the same time, she goes bing one way, I go the other, and then we say, hey, what do you think, Trace? Thanks for holding both our different thought patterns. And listeners, thanks for sticking with us, we know we’re not always the most polished speakers.
Cory: Last episode I had to help my girl at the end. I missed some of the neuroceptive, modulation and autonomic-state terminology and the way Tracy was describing it, and I listened back while editing, trying to get my head around it, and I’m not sure I fully hold it. So I’ll say where I’m at, and what we hoped to do today. We’re flowy, but we wanted to move toward the high route of S and A, because last time we sat in the low networks of the sensation and affective systems and tried to nut out terminology there. But I’m going to start us back in the low. I want to start with neuroception, that constant surveillance of safety. I keep finding modulation and neuroception tricky, I think because I want to separate them, and they’re not one and the same but they’re so integrated. If you’re constantly surveilling safety, you kind of have to do that sensorily. And if you have a decent ability to modulate, to respond to incoming sensation without being overwhelmed, then you inherently feel safer. So they’re not the exact same thing, but they’re so linked. Tracy, is that a correct way to think about these two? Are they a very shared, almost inter-hashed network?
Tracy: Absolutely. At the end of the last episode we were talking about this phrase that comes mostly from Ruth Lanius, the idea of a sensory matrix. This is evolving language, and I feel like we’re right on the forefront of wrestling with it, alongside people like Dr Lanius and Dr Porges. Over the next year I’m hoping to collaborate more in that space and bring our perspective into the mix. The answer to your question is yes: it’s a very integrated matrix that’s hard to separate out when you talk about the modulation circuitry versus the perceptual circuitry we’ll discuss later. The perceptual circuitry is more specific, mappable, discrete and clear, whereas the modulation system, even from the peripheral receptor level, has a cascading influence that’s tricky to keep discrete. The division between neuroception and sensory modulation is almost an artificial one. So we have to be comfortable with the matrix of it, this set of overlapping hashes helping each other out, with the broad neuroceptive goal of surveilling, detecting and mobilising what’s needed to resource the system. The first level of resource is adjusting thresholds of responding and garnering activation or deactivation as needed. All of that happens simultaneously based on the code, the tag, the label, of relative positive or negative that comes in. We always say it’s a sensory-affective dual process, because affect codes the relative positive or negative value of the sensation. So sensation and affect ride together. If there’s a detection that something is potentially too much for the system, you get a massive set of shifts around thresholds and activation or deactivation. We might use the word mobilisation to summarise that. And it’s not just in the sensory circuitry, it starts in the motor circuitry, the autonomic nervous system, the general arousal system, and then the other A functions like attention. Our orientation thresholds change, what becomes source versus background shifts. It isn’t all-or-none: whatever happens in the tactile system doesn’t have to happen across all systems. If something doesn’t feel comfortable, the discomfort might arise tactilely first, because the source was a crawly feeling, so you might co-mobilise auditory or visual in that direction, but not necessarily vestibular in the same way. So they differentiate. The matrix of surveillance and detection is sensory-based in neuroception, but more complex than that, because if the sensory system itself is already sensitised, how does neuroception relate to that? Our knowledge of sensory-based issues isn’t subsumed by neuroception, it’s additive, but I don’t think most of the world understands that. Is that making sense?
Cory: When you said a situation is going to overwhelm a person, outside their window or optimal range, I pictured that circle of best capacity, and if something’s going to overwhelm you, it shrinks your window. And when your range is shrunk like that, anything falling outside it makes all your A functions more difficult, like you said last episode: is their attention impacted, is their arousal too high or not where it needs to be to land and engage, is it autonomically the mobilisation piece, because now the experience feels outside what I can manage, so it’s mobilising me? That’s where the thresholds change: my whole nervous system amps up the need to detect and surveil everything, so my threshold for tolerating anything else drops, to protect myself from new information. I needed to start there because I didn’t want to think sensory modulation is neuroception, since it doesn’t intuitively feel like the same thing, but they had to be closely interacting. And I really want to flesh out the matrix thing that made me laugh so much, Michelle.
Michelle: Can I jump in on what you said about attention? Attention might dial down, or dial right up for the thing that’s salient. If it’s tactile, the spider-like sensation, or the woollen jumper, it dials up, hyper-focused, I can only think about the tactile. So when the educator says, we’re doing phonics now, it’s like, I can’t do phonics, I’ve got a scratchy wool jumper on, and they can’t shift off it, which makes them look rigid and inflexible.
Cory: Haven’t we all had an experience where something stressful or threatening just grips us, I can’t not think about it, everything keeps going there.
Michelle: That’s where the sticky thoughts come. Tracy’s airport example: have I got the rest of the things right, where am I, where are you picking me up from, because I can’t check. That perseverative thought, because there’s validity in it.
Tracy: Absolutely. The sticky thought is important to consider here. When there’s ease in this system, the low route of S and A with the autonomic functions supporting it, the ease allows for shifting and selecting and honing in and shifting off, all the way from the lowest sensory levels up into cognition and deep meta-thought, thought about thought. The stickiness that can happen is interesting, because one thing we get good at in the therapeutic space is understanding a sticky thought not as a difficulty, but as a portal into where someone’s mind and body are, and where the integration or difficulty with integration is. If I’m working with a child uncomfortable in their body, and that feels like a sticky thing, I won’t label it a deficit, I’ll think, what can we do, what can the world around you do, to help you find comfort where the discomfort is arising. The same is true where a lot of our kids find that if I just attend to the thing I know and hone in on it, that gives my world sense, shape and meaning, and gets rid of the stuff that’s hard for me. Like, let’s talk about door openers, or fire extinguishers, or how the wires run through the building. Understanding that those sticky thoughts are there for a reason. In occupational therapy we learn about purposeful engagement as a cornerstone, and it’s a gift, to understand that everything has a purpose. I use the phrase for the purpose of what a lot, it’s emblazoned in my logic now, and it lets me see the positive side of the coin instead of the hard side. Then we can think through the layers, the neural networks, which is what the SPIRIT does for us. We started in the low route of S and A, but the brain doesn’t stay in one network, because the purpose of detecting whether something is safe, neuroceptively or through sensory modulation, is so we can engage with it and do something with it. And the doing is rarely just to savour the moment, because it gives rise to all the other functions: my attention gets bigger and deeper, my creativity rolls, my social engagement system lets me share it and co-create it through co-occupation. So it’s always for a broader purpose, and that unfolding is such a powerful model to operate from.
Michelle: It’s positive and lets us reframe. Kim Barthel has a course, Behavioural Detective, and I feel like a detective with this suite of understandings you’re helping build, Trace, that lets me be a translator. You were in Poland with a translator; sometimes I feel like a translator, because of how some people perceive a child’s behaviour unless you have a map to reframe it: for the purpose of what. Yes, he’s talking about the flags of the world a lot, and at face value that’s getting in the way, and he needs to stop talking about flags in class time and only talk about them at recess. That path leads you to thinking in a containing way, whereas this is, let’s see this child through a different lens that lets us be different with them and build capacity for all of us. With that lens, possibilities open up rather than close down, and you tend to get less behavioural and containing.
Cory: It makes me think of a mentoring session the other day. I said, you can’t work on the tactile system when they’re outside their capacity. You’re not going to help them process touch if they aren’t inside their window of tolerance. You have to get inside it, then help from that safe space to broaden the ability to move into a discriminative, orient-and-approach response to touch, rather than an overwhelm, withdraw, fearful response. You’ve got to get on the other side of that pattern of protection.
Tracy: This whole visual story just came to mind. When I was very first learning to be a therapist, in my first job, I worked four ten-hour days, and spent a year every Friday with Lois Hickman. Lois was one of the original OT sensory integration therapists, a colleague of Dr Ayres on the very first faculty Dr Ayres put together for the CSSID, which hasn’t existed for a long time. Lois is wise and incredible, my mentor still, and she has a farm where she does therapy, and wrote the first chapter on nature-based therapy thirty years ago. One Friday we were going to work with a little boy, about seven, with really significant, extreme tactile defensiveness. He was a toe-walker who didn’t like touch contact with surfaces, and had only one or two pairs of clothes he could wear. He’d lived seven years in a nervous system always in protection and defence. I’d understood that academically, but I don’t think I’d seen such a classical, intense presentation before. So I get to the session, and Lois has a variety of things available, and she’d also brought a couple of jars of milk from her farm, taken from her cow that morning. The boy was interested in Lois, and curious that she knew all these things about farm animals. We weren’t on the farm, we were in her clinic in the bottom of a church, but she started telling him how we could make butter, and he got really interested. So we poured the milk into little jars, got on the trampolines, and shook and shook and shook, and the milk slowly transformed into butter over about twenty minutes. It became super motivating, because it changes in quality and you’re watching it, and Lois is magical at drawing out glimmer and wonder over any little thing. It was a shared moment of, let’s get really curious about what’s happening here. What she was doing was using warmth and touch and contact, but mostly wonder and curiosity, creating a space of safety so his nervous system and sensory systems could experience it through the lens of safety, connection and curiosity. That was what the treatment was about. We ended up with beautiful golden butter in the jars, and then we could decide what to do with it: put it on crackers, bread, carrots or strawberries; paint pictures with it on black construction paper; mix it with ice cubes to see what happens when it firms. Classic occupational therapy, using activity and exploration, but with this undercurrent of let’s create safety and see what happens, versus let’s chase the symptom of defensiveness. The pressure, vibration, rhythm and bilateral integration, through the vestibular system, proprioception, tactile, interoception, were the qualities allowing it to unfold, but it was the container of safety that made it all meaningful. It was such a beautiful learning for me, an aha, I understand. Those moments with her crystallised a lot of thinking I carried forward.
Michelle: It brings to life neuroception and sensory modulation. In real life this seven-year-old had opportunities to engage tactilely that he was neurocepting as a no, a threat, and withdrawing from, even coming into a clinic. That speaks volumes about having lots of opportunities available, and following the child’s lead and need, because the milk might not have worked. It’s one of those things, oh, I’m on a farm, I brought milk, it might land or it might not. How many times have we all had, I think I’ve got it, this great idea? He might be interested in the farm, because when we hear about children, the first questions are, what’s going well, what are their interests and strengths, because we’re trying to lead toward safety and curiosity. It doesn’t always fly, but the magic, the skill and trust in the process Lois has, is that if it wasn’t milk, it could have been a teddy, a puppet, a ball, something else. It’s about having things available and trusting the child will be attracted to something, and if they are, I can follow it, and if they’re not, I’ve got something else. So the milk and the tramp and the planning, oh, I’ve got one that worked for the last child, I’ll bring more milk, we’ll do milk therapy, I’m being cheeky. But that’s what we’re trying to do: facilitate safety in space and relationship, support it with sensory input that enhances that embodied sense of safety, and keep inching forward.
Tracy: And foster that sense of safety, curiosity and wonder no matter what the plan was. Even though that moment lives large in my mind, I don’t think I’ve ever replicated the milk moment with milk, but many times with other opportunities.
Michelle: And don’t they sit with you? I remember seeing Sarah McKinnis treat in a similar way, and you spoke about the scientists in your clinic. It’s palpable. As an observer you’re not sure where it’s going to go, you might have noticed the milk on the bench and thought, that’s weird, why’s that there. You watch it, knowing and feeling there’s something in it, and later, oh, that was brilliant, because you had all the components. Then, as you said at the start, Tracy, you come back and clinically reason, why did that work today?
Cory: I’m sitting here laughing, because I’m breastfeeding, with the whole sometimes the milk’s not going to land, and Michelle saying it’s milk therapy. But isn’t it powerful, Tracy, how you flipped the narrative from deal with the defensiveness to let’s get curious and get into possibility, and how much that influenced his willingness to engage with touch, to get into the discriminative functions and settle into exploring within a relationship. All the pieces came together, but the initial thing she did was flip it.
Michelle: And it’s the trust we have in ourselves to get to the end goal. The end goal might be toileting, sleep, or increasing the range of foods. Sometimes we’re given the task, toileting has to come in three months because they start school next year. Feeling that pressure, the toilet, the toilet paper, all of that, we’re not going directly there. It’s not that they don’t have the cognitive capacity, they know about timed toileting, if they could do it they would have by now, so we come at it a different way, and there’s no toilet paper for the next ten sessions.
Tracy: Yeah.
Cory: We almost got to discrimination with the butter, that example had some good movement from modulation to discrimination functions, but we didn’t quite get there, so maybe next time.
Tracy: Maybe next time. I’ll connect it one way: if we think about that session, therapy has to start in the low route of A, because if you don’t have a sense of safety, you won’t get far. Once you spark engagement and the social engagement system becomes available, the high route of A also becomes available. So often I’ll follow the low route of A into the high route of A, and that opens the door to where we’re headed, often exploring ideation, deeper planning, schema development, affordance exploration. We’ll probably end up in the high route of S, because so much of the richness of learning and growth emanates from there. But the high route of A holds the motivational biasing system, and if you’re held in protection, your motivation is constrained, the whole system compresses. When it opens to the possibility of, let me try again, let me do it harder, let me try a different way, you get the fluidity, flexibility and grittiness available from the high route of A. So it all weaves together, and we can talk more next time. In the meantime, maybe people will listen to your rap, Cory, about the SPIRIT, because you pulled all the fine points into that ditty, way to go.
Cory: It covers the model, S, A and M. I won’t do it here because I’ll forget the words, but you can check it out on the Spirited Conversations Instagram.
Michelle: That was genius. I love your mind.
Cory: It was fun, and if you’re nerdy like us, you’ll enjoy it. I wanted to show the curiosity and fun that can come from the model, so you can come and learn it with us and let it bring you joy, like it brings us joy.
Tracy: Wonderful.
Cory: This is a good place to stop, so we’ll catch everyone next time.
Tracy: Thanks, guys.
And that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Spirited Conversations. We hope this sparks something for you, whether it’s a new clinical idea, a fresh perspective, or just the reminder that you are definitely not alone in this work. If this conversation resonated, we would love for you to share it with anyone on their own learning journey. You can find information about the podcast on our website, and you can join us in the courses and communities the Developmental FX team have put together at developmentalfx.org. And if you’re enjoying listening, please subscribe or leave a review, it genuinely helps more people find us. Until next time, keep the conversations spirited!