34. From Sensory Surplus to Praxis: a developmental approach

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About This Episode

In this episode, we pick up right where Episode 33 left off — and if you haven't listened to that one yet, we'd recommend starting there. Tracy opens with a beautiful quote from the Sensory Integration Theory and Praxis textbook that perfectly bridges where we've been (sensory discrimination, the high route of S) and where we're headed: the executive functioning box on the SPIRIT model.

We explore what it actually means for sensory integration to be a developmental theory, how Praxis doesn't arrive all at once but interacts with a child's changing developmental competence, and why affect really is the glue that holds all of it together. Tracy shares a rich clinical story of a little boy with Fragile X syndrome whose play shifted dramatically. Not because he was taught new skills, but because his motivational system was met exactly where it was. We also get into some genuinely fascinating territory around sensory surplus, neurodivergence, and what it means when a child needs to spend far longer making sense of perceptual qualities before they can move into representational play.

This one is full of aha moments, a few laughs, and the kind of clinical reflection that makes you want to go back and watch your old sessions through a new lens.

Key Topics & Highlights

• Sensory Integration as a Developmental Theory: What it actually means that SI is a developmental theory, and why the spiralling continuum of development (Gilfoyle, Grady & Moore) gives us such a powerful visual anchor for understanding individual children.

• Praxis Interacts with Developmental Competence: The episode unpacks the quote from Anzaloni and Murray (2002): "Praxis interacts with the changing developmental competence of the child." Praxis isn't a destination you arrive at, it's an ever-unfolding capacity from the six-month-old reaching for a toy all the way to the basketballer executing a perfect shot.

• Affect Is the Glue: Tracy's clinical story of a boy with Fragile X beautifully illustrates how the therapist's affect becomes the bridge. Meeting a child in their interest (in this case, sorting red cars) and using precise affective connection to expand into new affordances and ideation.

• From Affordances to Executive Function: We explore the relationship between early sensory discrimination, object affordances, and the emergence of executive functions like shifting, inhibitory control, and working memory. We discuss why those EF capacities are embodied long before they become cognitive.

• Sensory Surplus & Neurodivergence: A reference to Wired to Feel: Autism as a Condition of Sensory Surplus (Martha Sweezy and Sarah Bergenfield) opens up a genuinely new way to understand why some children need so much longer with the perceptual qualities of an object before they can move forward into play.

• The Landing Pad & the Stretch Point: How the spiralling continuum helps us understand both the foundation a child needs (their landing pad) and the just-right challenge, the next stretch point that keeps development moving.  And how autonomic dysregulation can pull a child back down when the gap is too big.

Timestamps

·         00:00 Introduction & recap of Episode 33

·         01:43 Tracy's quote from Sensory Integration Theory and Praxis (2nd ed., 2002)

·         03:00 Sensory integration as a developmental theory — the spiralling continuum

·         07:17 Cory's clarifying question: what does "developmental theory" really mean here?

·         08:14 Tracy unpacks the embodied experience of a six-month-old becoming a reacher

·         10:34 Praxis elaborating from affordances — the basketball example

·         12:33 Michelle: the interrupted development of Episode 33's little cherub

·         14:22 Tracy reads the key quote: "Praxis interacts with the changing developmental competence of the child"

·         18:00 Connecting to executive functioning — the six-month-old's planning and inhibitory control

·         20:06 Sledging, dysregulation, and the autonomic nervous system (a fun detour)

·         20:33 Affect is the glue — Stanley Greenspan & the basketball example

·         21:48 Tracy's clinical story: the boy with Fragile X and the red cars

·         26:33 Michelle: attunement, pacing, and knowing when to stretch

·         29:00 How you find the affect inside a child's category interest

·         29:08 Learning Journeys community case processing — watch it live

·         30:03 Sensory discrimination as the foundation of executive function shifting

·         31:20 Executive functions are embodied before they are cognitive

·         33:27 Cory's aha: visual discrimination and cognitive flexibility

·         35:00 Stuck in developmental stages — integration dependency

·         37:26 Michelle: from concrete/literal to representational thinking — how does it happen?

·         38:42 The million repetitions problem — and why play partners get tired

·         41:00 Filling the perceptual cup — supporting quality and specificity of perception

·         42:04 Wired to Feel — autism as a condition of sensory surplus

·         44:00 Motivational bias, executive function, and the "not done yet" feeling

·         45:26 Affect as the glue in pathway building

·         47:12 Meeting children exactly where they are — permission to stay there

·         47:23 Michelle: mentoring reflections — what does engagement really look like?

·         49:14 DIR, honeypots, and what it means to really be with a child in play

·         49:55 Did affect unlock self-other connection? Tracy's reflection on pointing and the larger container

·         53:15 Cory: pulling it together for parents — the relief of knowing this is the work

·         54:52 Tracy: we don't teach shoe-tying to 2-year-olds — developmental readiness

·         55:20 Outro

References & Resources Mentioned

• Sensory Integration Theory and Praxis, 2nd edition (2002) — Chapter by Marie Anzaloni and Boo (Elizabeth) Murray. (Note: the podcast primarily references the 3rd edition in other episodes.)

• Children Adapt — Gilfoyle, Grady & Moore. The spiraling continuum of development.

• Stanley Greenspan — "Affect is the glue" (Developmental, Individual Difference, Relationship-based model / DIR)

• DIR / Floortime — Developmental, Individual Difference, Relationship-based model referenced throughout; "honeypot" metaphor discussed

• Wired to Feel: Autism as a Condition of Sensory Surplus — Sarah Bergenfeld, Martha Sweezy, Beth Ann Malow et al. (2025)

• The Felt Sense Polyvagal Model — Jan Winhall. Tracy references a recent shared podcast episode.

• Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) — Sally Rogers. Tracy references distal pointing and pairing to affect.

• SPIRIT Model — Tracy Stackhouse, Developmental FX. Clinical Reasoning framework used throughout the podcast.

• DFX Learning Journeys Community — developmentalfx.org.

Reflective Practice Prompts

These questions are designed to help you sit with the ideas from this episode and bring them into your own clinical thinking. They also align with the downloadable reflection worksheet below.

1. Think about a child on your caseload. Where would you place them on the spiralling continuum right now in terms of praxis or regulation — what is their landing pad, and what is the stretch point that's just one step above it?

2. Affect is the glue. In your last session, how did you use your own affective attunement to support a child's motivational bias? Was there a moment where your energy met their interest,  or a moment where it missed?

3. From affordances to ideation. Can you identify a child who is currently exploring perceptual qualities of objects (categorising, lining up, sorting) without yet moving into representational or pretend play? What does the sensory surplus or perceptual cup framework offer you in understanding what they need?

4. Executive functions are embodied first. Can you name one executive function a child is struggling with, and then trace it back to its sensory discrimination or motor foundation? What would it look like to work at that level rather than at the skill level directly?

5. "We don't explicitly target the acquisition of skills — the goal is to improve the underlying capacity." How does this sit with the goals currently written in your reports or session plans?

Related Episodes

• Ep. 33 — Another Look at Praxis: Stories from the OT Clinic (Direct predecessor — listen first!)

• Ep. 32 — Unpacking Clinical Language: Eye Control and the Vestibular System (High route of S → High route of A connections)

• Ep. 28 — Therapeutic Power of Playfulness (Affect, play, and relational therapy)

• Ep. 27 — Just Right Challenge: Adaptive Response (Landing pads, stretch points, and adaptive responses)

• Ep. 26 — Following a Child's Lead (Meeting children developmentally in play)

• Ep. 3 — The Power of Praxis (Back to the beginning of the praxis conversation)

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Cory: We have two days in a row here. You guys don't, but we do, which I think will actually be helpful for listening because we can remember what we've said in the previous episode. And so if you haven't listened to the previous episode, we will talk about that a little bit in this episode. Just, it just builds on the conversation we were having. Michelle, at the end of our last discussion, brought up a child who was demonstrating praxis emerging really, in a beautiful way. He was playing with a barrel actually in a session with another clinician. But that example was a great way for us to demonstrate some of those core praxis functions. We were trying to help go through some terminology of praxis and we really wanna jump over to the executive functioning box on the Spirit model. We get lots of questions about executive functioning, and I know personally I always could learn more in that box. And so Tracy found a beautiful quote that she believes — I'm sure is correct, I have much faith in this lady's opinion — that will jump us from the high route of sensation, so the sensory discrimination box, and help us move across into the executive functioning box and how our executive functions help us with praxis and planning. So. Did I cover everything, Michelle? And would you like to share your quote now, Tracy?

[00:01:43] Michelle: Yes and yes.

[00:01:47] Tracy: Okay, so — I'm gonna do a little bit of story hour reading to you all here for a moment. Where I'm pulling this from is actually the second edition of the Sensory Integration Theory and Praxis textbook. So we currently mostly reference the third edition. This second edition was published in 2002. So it's a bit older —

[00:02:20] Cory: Fine wine.

[00:02:22] Tracy: — and it was written by Marie Anzaloni and Boo Murray, Elizabeth Murray. And it's about assessment, but what they're talking about in this section is how sensory integration theory is in part a developmental theory. So in the Spirit model, I lean heavily into developmental theory. Ayres did think about sensory integration as a developmental theory. We don't have every aspect of sensory integration mapped out developmentally. And one of the cool things that the Spirit tries to do is at least hint at how developmental capacity underlies all the things that we do and the interrelationships between sensation, affect and motor as the supports to capacity. Those are sort of foundational things that are within the Spirit model. And I was so lucky to work with Ellie Gilfoyle and Ann Grady and Josephine Moore, who wrote the Children Adapt book back in the 1980s. And this spiraling continuum is something that I really anchor my thinking into. And when we talk about that spiraling continuum of development, how it creates the kind of visual model of developmental theory. You can picture development by looking at this spiral forward. And then I kind of come back and I start to establish my foundation, that landing pad. And then I have these stretch points and development has a dynamic nature to it. It kind of goes through some predictable things. Some stages, if we will. They're not rigid or fixed, but there's some predictability. And also that there are skills that are way up the ladder, way up the arrow, that are far away from where I am maybe right now. If I am a 2-year-old, I don't have the capacity that a 3-year-old or a 10-year-old or a 30-year-old has. My developmental story will unfold and get me there. So we have to know a lot about development, and sensory integration in this way is a developmental theory.

[00:05:20] Michelle: I need to pin it on the wall actually. It just helps provide that image of why things are different in different places. Why children, siblings evolving differently — it just is. My tattoo. Maybe that's what I'll get is a tattoo.

[00:05:53] Cory: A spiral.

[00:05:55] Michelle: Because I think — you know what I mean — I'm in! And we've got all our techno sorted for the podcast, so it's like yeah, we're moving up the arc in podcasting. A spiral tattoo!

[00:06:11] Cory: Yeah, we are next. It'll be virtual reality us meeting together, but let's not go there right now.

[00:06:17] Tracy: I love that in certain little circles of the world, people are starting to refer to the spiraling continuum... You know, it was one of my things — when I talked to Ellie Gilfoyle about it, to get permission to use it, I just said this is too essential. In our field, especially in occupational therapy and sensory integration, we have to have a developmental approach. So having a model that's visual, that helps us, and we can elaborate it in lots of different ways. We can add colour and nuance and dimension. We can add width. We can think about that arrow not being a single thing but lots of things within it. And we can start to really put a lot of story to that. But it's because essentially sensory integration is a developmental theory and it matches onto developmental thinking.

[00:07:17] Cory: By sensory integration being a developmental theory — by that kind of statement — do you mean that as our ability to process and use sensation, the integration between the sensations for use, unfolds in a developmental pattern, roughly, for most people? Is that right? So like as the vestibular system and the proprioceptors and the auditory system and the visual system come together, they do that in a developmental sequence roughly?

[00:08:14] Tracy: Yeah, that — but I think it also means our brain as the container for our learning and experience starts to enrich the neural connectivity that allows for capacity to express itself freely. And so that requires experience. And the experience that our brain is bathed in is a sensory affective motor experience on most levels. The thing we're experiencing is the embodied experience. Our memory, working together with the embodied experience, allows our brain to start to have the representation of, oh, I've got that. Whatever that is. Maybe it is — since we're talking about praxis and executive function — when you first start to be a little person who's moving, maybe we're talking about a six month old laying on their tummy on the ground and they start to have the felt embodied experience that I can roll, I can move into sitting, I can weight shift. That weight shift allows me to reach out in space. So now I'm a reacher and a grabber. Now my space starts to elaborate. The movement experience — proprioceptively, tactilely, vestibularly, visually — is now helping to build this schema of, I'm a weight shifter, I'm a reacher, an obtainer of the world out in my space. And as that starts to happen, now I start to be more planful about that. I want that thing that's a little farther away. Uh oh. Over there. I can go there. Okay, so as that elaborates, praxis is online now, and I start to be able to — from the affordances of my weight shifting capacity and my reaching capacity — now I start to be able to conceptualise that I can reach to lots of places. So now reaching has different meaning. And then as I discover that, conceptualisation leads to: what else could I do here? So ideation and planning start to become richer. And the motor execution itself, the enacting and the accomplishment — or the errors and the correction of the errors — starts to calibrate my system. My proprioceptors: don't reach so hard, you're gonna tip over. Right? And so all of that elaboration, making it possible for me to be more purposeful in repeating the patterns. And that's how Praxis initially starts to develop.

[00:12:33] Michelle: And consider the children for whom it does unfold that way — drawing back to that image of the spiraling continuum of development, if it continues pretty smoothly, that impact of being a successful agent of change and being able to have that motivation to continue and maintain regulation helps them keep going, keeps being a little person that keeps trying. And it's not interrupted. I guess your little cherub from the last episode, Cory, where for whatever reason that was interrupted, possibly due to the sensory discrim processing issues — it interrupted that development. And so then you had that issue with regulation, the impact on self as an agent of change, and you know, successful little cherub. There was a giving up, a withdrawal.

[00:13:04] Cory: There was an autonomic overwhelm. Because of the gap in the capacity, the integration hadn't happened, so the autonomic nervous system kind of took over.

[00:13:12] Michelle: And maybe that's part of that prediction making — I'm not successful, I'm not successful. Like showing up, and that grit, that resilience, that stick-with-it that helps you keep trying and then perhaps improving sensory processing — moving a bit further afield to help that development unfold — isn't the landing pad. He slid back down to that collapsed protection.

[00:13:50] Cory: Came to more protection with his autonomic nervous system, because that's where his landing pad was, to keep him safe.

[00:14:02] Tracy: And really, for any child that we're treating, part of what is available to us in understanding them fully is to look at this from that integration and a developmental perspective. And this is from that quote. It says: "Sensory integration theory is in part a developmental theory. However, when using a pure sensory integrative approach to intervention, we don't explicitly target the acquisition of skills because the goal is to improve the underlying capacity rather than the skill itself. Nonetheless, we must understand children's developmental capacity in order to engage them in appropriate therapeutic interactions and activities. Sensory integration theory helps us to understand these certain aspects of skill acquisition." Then it shifts and says: "Praxis involves conceptualising, planning and executing purposeful actions." That's from Ayres. And then they say this important sentence: "As such, Praxis interacts with the changing developmental competence of the child. Praxis enables children to develop skills readily, and it becomes the basis for our occupations."

[00:15:35] Tracy: What I love about this quote is that Praxis is interacting with the changes in our developmental competence. So what that tells us is that Praxis isn't one thing, and it's not like we suddenly become practically available. It's this ever-emerging journey. It's a capacity that allows us to take what we have available right in this moment, match it to the demands of environment and supports, and then enact that adaptive response. When I think about Praxis, it's not like you've just arrived at Praxis or not — it's always coming to you in a developmental story. So how that six month old is a reacher is very different than... my head just went to sport and I was thinking about a basketball player and how they reach through space from wherever they're standing and they shoot that ball through the air. Their hand and their trajectory and their praxis goes all the way to the target, which is way over there and way up there in the sky. And their efficiency as a motor actor is connected to the whole loop of ball in my hand to ball in the hoop. And Praxis is a representation of that giant event that just happened. And so as a reacher, a six month old can't throw a basket into a hoop. But the skill is the same — the foundational function is still Praxis, and it's still about limb trajectory and understanding space and understanding my relationship from my body as it interacts. So Praxis is a part of that story, and it just elaborates and becomes more sophisticated.

[00:18:17] Tracy: A six month old's executive functions are a match to the rest of their skills. So it's the sensory, affective and motor systems — and the high route of A in the Spirit model is kind of this connection to all of our executive functions through our motivational bias, because that's the anchor of it really. When you're a six month old, it's not like you don't have executive functions — you do have planning and sequencing available at a very early level. You do have inhibitory control where it's like, I'm reaching out and I want to get that ball, and my weight shift made me roll, but then I come back into the position to reach — my motivational bias and my working memory helped me to say no, what I wanted to do there was get the thing, not roll over. And so what drives me to take this action again, and to not be undone by my working memory short circuiting me?

[00:20:06] Michelle: In Australia, the term is sledging — where you say something provocative to get the person emotionally dysregulated, and their performance deteriorates. When dysregulation happens, you slide back to a different level.

[00:20:33] Cory: That reinforces Stanley Greenspan's "affect is the glue." Because that baby, that six month old — it's always the integration across sensation, affect and motor. At that point the reaching, like you described, is from a want — which is an affect, a motivation — for the sensation of their own body and the position they're in, to then plan to reach towards wherever the thing is that they can see. All sensory based. All the feedback visually, all the current information about where their body is, where it needs to be, where it ends up — if it's not right, how to get back. That's all sensory information that then has to integrate with the motor system to actually reach. So I was like, yes — affect is the glue for Praxis.

[00:21:48] Tracy: So I have to tell this quick story. I was working many years ago with this little boy who was four and a half, and he had Fragile X syndrome. He came for a therapy intensive. At the time he had a little brother who was two who doesn't have Fragile X. So his brother is wanting to play all the ways of a 2-year-old. They love cars, both of them. But the older brother — he loves cars because he loves to take the fire engine and the ambulance car and those are sort of like each other. So they go over here and all the red cars go together, and all the blue things maybe are over here, and things that are bigger go over here and things that are smaller go over here. And he's really into categorising the affordances. Whereas the 2-year-old wants the cars to be cars — he wants them to crash into each other, to drive on the road, to make vroom vroom sounds and do all this stuff. So their play is at two very different levels. And pretend play is related to praxis and affordances drive a lot of our ideation, and that drives a lot of our playfulness. So they're in really different places. Where affect is the glue is that when I started to really connect in with this guy around the red cars — oh, red, red, red, just like really juice it up, this is the coolest thing that all the reds are together, of course it is — and then my affect became an anchor for him to be curious about, well, what else could we do here? So for the 2-year-old, his own internal motivation, his motivational bias, was driving that. But for this other guy, he was sort of stuck in affordances and my affect of the wee wah wee wah car can go fast, this heavy truck goes slow — I'm differentiating affordance now, and I'm showing him possibilities. I had this kind of squishy pillow triangle and put it into a container and now the car can go down it if I push on it. It's affordance-based play, showing him cause and effect almost. Now the car is a goer and it's going into a thing and it's crashing into a thing. And then that starts to change from: I'm excited about red cars, to: I'm excited about red cars falling and rolling. But the affect of my helping him to really feel the interest and excitement about all those things is what helped him move from a very low level of play into a very much more emerging pretend play in just a couple of sessions.

[00:25:01] Tracy: And so affect is the glue. It's the thing that pulls our capacity forward. When we think about the landing pad, regulation is the base — the low route of A is the foundation. But the high route of A is the motivational bias that pulls us forward.

[00:25:21] Cory: To go to your stretch point. So cool. One pulls you forward and one anchors you where you need to be. Gives you the foundation.

[00:26:05] Michelle: That bandwidth — how low do you go, how fast — if I had a blue car and I was using that to slide down the slide and crash into the red car, that was a no. Blue's not okay. It's red. But if I stay in the red car and start to, you know, have a red car I can begin to work with — you stay in the red car zone and then you can start to play in different affordances, to the point where you start to see them getting wobbly and sliding back down again, and you have to focus on regulation. But that's the attunement and the pacing — working out how far is that stretch, how far can my relationship keep you glued to and supported by this new idea?

[00:27:17] Cory: Unfolding potential here. Because sometimes it's really hard to figure out the affect that's interesting inside a category. You were like, oh yeah, I can see the categories and then add the affect to the category that was interesting to him. That can be hard to do, because sometimes it's like: are they actually into the line? Or is it all the lights that are matching at the same height? Or is it the shine on the top of the car? My perception is going to be different and I have to do the detective work.

[00:29:08] Tracy: If you're interested in that example — on our Learning Journeys community, a case processing example will be posted there so you can watch me process the Spirit on that case. And you can watch video of me treating that little boy. So it's really alive in my head because I just recorded that case processing for the Learning Journeys community. Head to developmentalfx.org for more information.

[00:30:03] Tracy: When we think about the developmental nature of sensory integration — what's hard when you're treating kiddos like this is that you have to just stay with them in the moment. But in my head, I was noticing how he was trying to be interested in the shifts that might be available. So that's an executive function that happens for kids when they discover affordances or properties or qualities of things that are the same or different, and they're exploring that. And that early sensory discrimination foundation is the foundation of the executive function system of shifting. Is this thing still the same when it's like this or like this? And that early, early perceptual system is what gives rise to awareness and cognition and construct and all the things that we end up operating on. So there's always a relationship between sensory discrimination and executive functioning. It interacts through our body. Because where we get executive function, before we have higher level cognition and meta things going on in our head, it's happening as we enact it — as our body and our eyes shift and look. And then as our eyes look away. And as our hand reaches and touches. So executive functions depend on these sensory, affective and motor embodied experiences.

[00:32:22] Cory: I had an aha moment about the shifting — the flexibility being related to the fact that my sensory discrimination system can still identify an object no matter which way it's facing. So if I have my car and it's on its wheels and I turn it upside down, I can still recognise that it's a car because I have visual perceptual, sensory discrimination functions that allow me to do that. And that helps me be flexible about which way the car could be oriented in space.

[00:33:27] Tracy: Absolutely right. And also — in that same video, this little guy got really interested in how if the car is on the surface it will roll, but if you put the wheels behind the edge of the pillow, it stops. Because those two affordances are interacting with each other. It's stuck. And so this is the car that can go and this is the car that's stuck. And that's affectively really interesting to him.

[00:34:29] Tracy: Then he doesn't have to be stuck on: I just always put cars together. What do cars do? And that's a precursor to the representational play that comes later. I think a lot of our kids get stuck in these developmental stages because it's integration dependent. I have to see how the sensory discrim, the motor action, the properties of the world, interacting with the object of interest — and then how all of that leads to potential plans and potential options. We're integrating across high route of S, high route of A, low route of M, and keeping that low route of A kind of super juicy. And with this little boy, because he happened to have Fragile X syndrome, I also had to work in his window of tolerance or I was going to lose him.

[00:37:26] Michelle: So Tracy, I'm interested in the moving from that very concrete, literal understanding of how the world works to abstract thinking and representational thinking. Do we have to have, developmentally, a bank? I heard someone talk about it in terms of: we're a prediction machine. Do we have to have this suite of really expansive repertoire — up, down, stop, go, rolling — so that we can then go, oh okay, I can put that together when you start going wee wah, and I can make the inference that you're representing an ambulance? Is that how representational thinking comes about?

[00:37:54] Tracy: So much, yeah. It is all sensory affect and motor, kind of repeated sequences of lots and lots of exploration. On some level it's partly that you have millions of repetitions of this sensory representational thing — this thing that has affordances, I can hold it, touch it, feel it, it has something that moves. And as I interact with those two things, the affordance of it's pickable and lookable and spinnable, to a: this thing can interact with the supporting surface and do something. You have to have lots and lots of repetition of the perceptual experience of all of that. And that's coinciding with a partner — usually an adult or maybe a sibling — doing the representational thing and talking about it and naming it. So the language stuff layers on adjacent to the perceptual experiences. But the perceptual experience bucket has to be pretty richly filled for the rest of that to even start to be accessible. And it's all a simultaneous experience — we have to have both.

[00:38:42] Tracy: What happens to lots of our kids who have difficulties in this developmental area is that it exhausts the play partners. If you're with a nine-month-old, you're very excited to hold the car and go vroom vroom lots of times. And then pretty soon the kid is going to start to do it with you because their imitation skills have them start to do it. And your affect is in synchrony and you're sort of in partnership. But if you have a child where this development is going to be slow, they're going to need a million — not a hundred — repetitions. And the play partners get tired. And so the kid is maybe doing this thing, but we don't keep doing the I'm-so-excited kind of thing. Because it doesn't feel so available somehow. And if their perceptual cup doesn't have enough abundance to it, and also specificity — it's kind of both of those things working together — they don't fill that cup very well, and so it doesn't transition as easily.

[00:42:04] Tracy: I was on a podcast recently with Jan Winhall, who's a dear colleague in the Polyvagal faculty with me. Her approach is called the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model. And there were two women who wrote a book together that were also on the panel — Sarah Bergenfeld and Beth Ann Malow. They wrote a book called Wired to Feel: Autism as a Condition of Sensory Surplus. Here's the thing that's interesting. They're describing that if we're talking about this little boy who happens to have Fragile X but could also have a formal diagnosis of autism — his brain is a brain of sensory surplus. So when he's looking at cars, a lot of what he's taking in is an overabundance of information, differently than mine is taking it in. So when he's seeing categories of colour, that's because that's giantly important to his brain. And where his brain is taking in the abundance of that in a way that could be overwhelming, he needs to spend a lot more time trying to figure out how to make sense of that overwhelm. The colour feature, or the shine feature, or the feature that it has movable parts and still parts — that's very confusing when your brain takes that in with an abundance and a surplus. So you have to spend a whole lot more time dealing with the surplus before you can move past it to what else could this be? And I don't think we always appreciate that some neurodivergent presentations require different kinds of exploration — not just exploration for the purpose of cars are cars, but all of this stuff, I need to make sense of the overwhelm.

[00:44:02] Michelle: Goosebumps when you read that — it's fascinating. Interestingly, for me that tips into that exec functioning motivational bias, because that's what's also kindling up with those sensory qualities. Like, let me look at that, let me look at that. And for me, for my experience of that — if I had a blue car and I was using that to slide down the slide and crash into the red car, that was too much. A no. But if I stay in the red car zone, that motivational system is like, oh no no no, I haven't finished with sorting the redness over here. That's another classification. It becomes a sticky thought or an exec function skill gap — I've still got work to do here in that sensory abundance.

[00:45:26] Cory: And I guess if you need to lay down a neural circuit, a pathway that tells you what red is and there's a lot of noise — you need to do it a lot to get the right thing to come together. And the affect is what will help with the pathway building.

[00:46:12] Tracy: That's right. Because in the Spirit we talk about the A function — the low route is social-emotional in character, and the high route is this motivational system that hooks us into executive functioning and effortful control and all of our self, self-other systems around that. But they're both affective, they're valence-based in nature. And that is the glue of the system. It's so very powerful to see those relationships — how that foundation of sensory discrim, the critical importance of affect as the source of regulation and the source of motivation — that's what allows that landing pad to have width and dimension. And we see it in real time in the work we do. It's beautiful to just watch that unfolding. Give ourselves permission to just meet them exactly where they are. And not have to add meaning until meaning makes sense.

[00:47:23] Michelle: As I'm mentoring some of the wonderful OTs, they're showing little videos. And lots of times the questions are: how can I get more engagement with this child? Often when I see the little video, it's this example of a child with absolute interest in the perceptual qualities of the car — whether it's red, that's their focus. And so there's not that — well, we don't need it, but there's no orientation of the body to the other. There mightn't be any eye gaze to the face of the other. There's no reciprocal vocalising. So you could say — if we're thinking about DIR — there's interest in the world and there's emerging engagement with the other. And it's interesting because sometimes we are wanting that little one to interact with us and engage with us. But do you know what — they're still engaging with the features of that car, and that's where we need to be. If you want engagement and you want to be with them, it's around the car. Because your face isn't the thing they're exploring right now. And so don't worry that they're not looking at you or orientating their body to you or whatever. There's still beautiful reciprocal engagement in that play. But the salient point for them — which we're meeting them at — is perhaps the perceptual qualities of that or the thing of interest for them at the time.

[00:49:14] Cory: Did you unlock a little bit more self-other-ness in your example, Tracy? Like I, you know, we all get those moments in treatment where you do something and the kid's like... they look at you. They're like, do that again. What did you just do that was magic?

[00:49:54] Tracy: Oh, totally. The other thing that's really interesting — he had this interest in really wanting to see what my face was doing. Really wanting to look. Because it was connected to the affect of the things that he was interested in. Sometimes I think when we share affect, we're sharing it more in the reciprocity space. But when you have a child who's still kind of cooking more at level two, and they're really in engagement and they're sort of trying to find you, sometimes your affect really is about the object. It's not about the you. Because if you pull into reciprocity too high, that's not so interesting. It's sort of meeting them where they're at and letting affect be within that. And then what's so funny — and this is also just a reflection of my training — Sally Rogers is one of my mentors, and she's the author of the Early Start Denver Model. One of the things that happens in ESDM, when the child starts to be ready for it and they're pairing to your affect, is that you might use some distal pointing to help them understand: me and you and this thing around us that is the world. I noticed in this video that I was using a little bit of that pointing strategy, because this little guy was trying to figure out how to work with me with the cars and with the option of an action that happened over there. So I'm kind of queuing him affectively, but I'm also trying to help him see: we're in this whole space here together. It's not just you and me, and it's not just you and the cars. It's you and me and this thing that's happening. And sometimes when our kids are in this sensory surplus, the intensity — they can get into a very singular, insular kind of space. And then your affect kind of helps them to broaden that.

[00:52:32] Tracy: It's the developmental process of praxis. Trusting that when I get that online, it's not just the social system, it's the praxis system.

[00:52:45] Cory: And you were pulling in through your high route of A function, in terms of the affective queuing — you were pulling in the executive functioning of shifting. Not just shifting between the car and your face, but you weren't intentionally trying to make him look at your face, but that executive function was happening because he was now shifting. And you were kind of shifting him further out in space. And again, that reorient to midline function as well. And gosh, no wonder it's so hard if you have so much noise, to have some of these things land in the right way. And no wonder you would want it to be so controlled sometimes — because all those little bits and disruptions make it so hard. So it's like: I'm just trying to land a pathway, my brain here, people! I think it's a very good thing for everyone — me included — for us to be able to have that in mind, so that we don't do the jumping ahead. Because the pull to go too far above where they are developmentally is so strong. And it helps for us to have the language to explain what is really important about the fact that we stay right here. And it's a relief, actually. It's a relief for me as a therapist to know that that's way more effective for me to be doing that, than it is for me to be trying to teach a thing that's above the developmental capacity. And it would be relieving for parents, I would assume — as a parent, it would be a relief to know: oh, this is the work right here, rather than having to teach this thing that the developmental capacity is just not ready for yet.

[00:54:52] Tracy: We don't teach shoe tying to a 2-year-old because they don't have capacity. We don't give a piece of gum to chew to a little one because they don't have capacity. We don't have kids learn how to drive cars until they have capacity. There is a developmental story here and we have to really meet everybody right where they're at in development. The D in the DIR — right?

[00:55:20] Outro: 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 with you, we would love for you to share it with anyone you think it would resonate with — anyone on their own learning journey. And speaking of learning journeys — you can find and access any information relating to the podcast from our website, but also you can come and join us in the many different courses and communities that the wonderful Developmental FX team have put together. So head to developmentalfx.org where you can get any information you need about mentoring with any of us. And lastly, if you're enjoying listening to us trialogue together, please just take a moment to either subscribe or just leave a review — it will genuinely help more people find us. So until next time, keep the conversations going.