So the first time I encountered Brain Integration Therapy was around the spring of 2010. I met with a lady locally who had an office in her house. The crux of BIT is that you can retrain the brain by reprogramming through a series of repetitive daily exercises, this is from the “Brain Integration Manual 2010 Edition”
“… hemispheric connections, which appear to be absent or “disconnected” can be encouraged to reconnect by using specific body exercises that cross the midline of the body. When these short, daily exercises are combined with the more powerful once-a-week Brain Training, these vital connections are slowly, progressively made each week. By using this process, parents and teachers see the learning process (elimination of visual and writing reversals, remembering phonics sounds, etc.) become easier after just a few weeks. However, it is important to continue this process for at least 3 -6 months, so that the gains are not lost.”
We spent $50 a week for about 6 weeks doing the exercises daily, which took about an hour and were hell on earth toward the end to get him to comply. I confess I gave up trying to make him do what he needed to do after about 4 weeks as we were seeing no progress in reading, writing or compliance. We met once a week with the practitioner where she would talk to my son and evaluate his progress, she also did some retraining using what appeared to be a training clicker, but she referred to it as sparking. I am not sure what or how it worked but it was part of the program so we went along with it. There was no physical contact involved she just clicked it while he looked in one direction or another.
In the end the practitioner we were using proved just too scattered for me, she would cancel appointments or would confuse our appointment times and her house seemed to be a really busy place as there were always other people around, the last time I was there while I was waiting I endured listening to a very long telephone conversation between a man and I am suspecting his girlfriend or wife about his job search and his life in general in great detail, which made me really uncomfortable as he was so loud and I had nowhere else to go to avoid listening. So for me, the house had a weird feeling to it, which had we been seeing fantastic results I probably would have forged ahead and said to hell with it, but unfortunately we didn’t.
It always struck me that if the therapy was so amazing why didn’t she work on her own ADD first before she met with clients? I also wondered if she had and it hadn’t worked for her either!
It could very well be that we just didn’t stay the course or give the therapy enough time, or it could be that this practitioner just wasn’t right at the time. Again, this is a treatment that theoretically should make a difference. I am about to try another very similar therapy with the neuro reorg so I get the possibility of it. Anyway, around the same time another friend of mine found a guy doing BIT in a slightly different way, and he promised a much faster progression without all the tedious exercises. Yes, I admit I was looking for a quick fix! 🙂 So we left BIT x1 to go for two weekends of BIT x2.
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