There are things my body learned long before I could put them into words.

This work began long before I knew it would one day become a book or a framework.

It began in my own history, and years later appeared again in front of me while I was working with autistic children. There are things my body learned long before I could put them into words. Something that wasn’t only in their words, in their skills, or in what they did. It was in the way their bodies responded to the world around them.

I began to notice that when a child felt safe with me, something changed. The difficulty didn’t necessarily disappear. But more space appeared. Sometimes a glance appeared, a word, a possibility of staying, of approaching, of exploring. Curiosity appeared.

For a long time I worked from that observation without yet having a language to organize it.

Then came interoception, physiology, neuroscience, and years of questions. And I came to understand that many of the things we tend to look at separately — behavior, communication, learning, regulation, participation — were all occurring within the same living system, continuously responding, adjusting, and reorganizing across time.

And then my question changed.

It was no longer only what is this person doing? It became: what is happening in this system for this to be what remains available at this moment?

From that question, Reading the Nervous System was born. Not as a new way of classifying what we see, but as an invitation to look more deeply — to observe the conditions, the organization that emerges within them, how access changes, and what participation becomes possible.

Because behavior is visible. But it is never the whole story.