Transcript: The Benefits of Bodywork & Craniosacral Therapy for Infants
This is a text transcript from The First Time Mum’s Chat podcast. The episode is called The Benefits of Bodywork & Craniosacral Therapy for Infants and you can click on the link to view the full episode page, listen to the episode and view the show notes.
Helen Thompson: This is Helen Thompson. Thank you for being here today. If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you so much, mums. You always are amazing, and if you’re here for the first time, make sure you subscribe to the show. You’ll find First Time Mum’s Chat on all the main platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, as well as now on YouTube.
If you’re looking for ways to soothe your baby, then you won’t want to miss this episode. I’m chatting with author of the Body Work Book series, Susan Vaughan Kratz. Susan has 40 years of occupational therapy experience and participates in clinical research of current innovative ways to assist her clients and families to overcome their difficulties.
Her books offer real solutions, that have helped real babies and real families and she routinely teaches these to parents, seeking help with their little ones. During our chat, you’ll hear Susan talk about issues including torticollis, umbilical cord issues, digestion issues, including colic, reflux, and constipation.
I’m certain you will find it as fascinating and amazing as I did, when Susan shares her experience of utilizing Dr. John Upledger’s craniosacral therapy on a baby that was challenging their parents, screaming 24×7 before her help.
Now, let’s meet Susan and get on to the interview.
Hi Susan and welcome to First Time Mums Chat. I’m delighted to have you here today and to hear more about your books and how you help families through your body work. Could you please start by telling us about you and your background?
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Well thank you for inviting me, I’m honored for the invitation. My name is Susan Vaughan Kratz, I’m an occupational therapist and I’m celebrating 40 years of practice year.
Helen Thompson: Congratulations.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Yeah, that’s a milestone. It surprised me when I realized that and as an occupational therapist, my background, I started in trauma and brain injuries and spinal cord injuries and I moved into autism and learning disabilities and pediatric head injuries. I actually saw that pediatric head injuries and autism was a lot of. the same kind of things that we needed and that the children needed and so I learned my pediatric therapy interventions based on those populations.
I’ve been twice trained in Jean Ayres sensory integration certification, so I’ve been certified twice in these 40 years. So my foundation of understanding sensory integration and talking about it, is helping people understand how humans behave based on our hidden senses. We have senses that we’re very much aware of, the five senses that everybody thinks we have, but there’s five hidden senses that we don’t really think about it because they’re processed subconsciously.
How we feel gravity and how we feel our legs and our arms and position and movement and even our insides. We have a sensory system that helps us feel our organs and even the tension of our blood vessels has its own unique sensory system and everything that is comprised the human body is wrapped with a really thin fabric called fascia.
Fascia, like the slimy stuff under chicken skin, or the membranes that hold an orange together, that’s fascia. Fascia, it turns out is a sensory organ, has long sensory fibers called telocytes. Fascia being one organ retracts as a unit and fascia is probably contributing to when we pull in for protection with a real or perceived or remembered threat or injury or harm.
If our senses are alarmed, like too much bright light or too loud of sound, our body is going to react by tightening up and if that happens over and over, our body gets stuck in a fight or flight state, and we’re going to be closer to a stress reaction than if we weren’t tight.
If we are in the opposite state inside our body, it’s called parasympathetic state, we’re in the rest and digest state. That means our blood vessels are relaxed, our organs are relaxed, we’re going to move food through the digestive system better, and we’re going to be more calm and relaxed and react to senses in our world without being alarmed by them, not feeling threatened, but feeling more comfortable in our skin if we live in the parasympathetic world.
So I was halfway through my career when I learned about Dr. John Upledger’s craniosacral therapy, which is basically a hands on, osteopathic, very gentle, non invasive touch therapy to reach the nervous system and to help the nervous system get into a parasympathetic state. So helping the body get out of tension. I believe it doesn’t matter what kind of gentle touch therapy we use. could massage, it could be craniosacral, it could be myofascial release, as long as the person receiving that input is not threatened by it.
Helen Thompson: How would you know if somebody was threatened by it?
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Really good question. The person doing the touching should be very well trained or very astute in watching the person’s reaction. So recognizing a very simple reaction to stress is pulling in tight, not unlike a turtle pulling into its shell. So visually, you can see a sign of stress when a turtle pulls in. Or I like to quote the functional reaction of a sea anemone. If a sea anemone senses a real threat, even the whisper of a threat, that sea anemone is going to pull their tentacles in real tight.
Helen Thompson: Yep.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Protect themselves from the world. What I’ve learned from having my hands on children who struggle with being comfortable with their senses is that they constantly are pulling in tight. Their muscles are tight, the blood vessels are tight. You can feel cold hands, cold nose. Behaviors of being tight on the inside is fussiness and irritability and maybe not settling well, not sleeping well, not breastfeeding well. Many of the children I worked with, with sensory integration struggles had a history of being colicky or constipation or a lot of reflux. So the three indications of in the digestive system that you’re in a state of fight or flight is, you’re not moving. You’re not in the rest and digest so your digestive system literally shuts down or tightens up to prevent that activity so that blood can to the organs that you have to run away from the threat, meaning your lungs and your heart get the blood.
So when you’re in a state of fight or flight, you’re not digesting food and so it’s hard to be calm and ease through a breastfeeding. So even babies can get stuck in fight or flight state. Oftentimes it’s from how the birthing process happened.
Helen Thompson: Mm-Hmm,
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Sometimes it’s what happened to the umbilical cord, either during the pregnancy or with the clamping. It can create a tension within the stomach cavity itself. We learn all this by having our hands on babies and children’s bodies to feel where they’re actually tight and then compare it to the behaviors that they’re struggling with.
Helen Thompson: Yeah, it’s interesting you talk about the colic and the reflux and the digestion, because coming from a baby massage background, I’m aware how baby massage can help. I don’t actually massage the babies, a bonding process for the mother to massage the baby but somebody like you would be actually touching the baby and feeling tightness and stress in the body.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: I think infant massage is a fantastic tool. It is meant for bonding, it is meant for play and calming but the question is, and this is where a therapist comes in, is what if the baby hates massage? What if the massage causes them to be more irritable? So back to your question, how do you know if they’re stressed?
Helen Thompson: Follow their cues as you said, and I always say this to mums, if their baby’s crying, or if their baby’s pushing them away, and not having eye contact with them, I would say, look, don’t massage them, just take the time, do something else with them, be playful, have eye contact with them but don’t necessarily touch them. I just wanted to bring back what you said about the umbilical cord because that was something that really intrigued me because you’ve got a post about that on your Instagram page. You mentioned about the organs and the blood vessels that may not resolve with just tummy time or when they’re growing out of it. What are your thoughts on the umbilical cord and the organs and tummy time?
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Well, the umbilical cord, typically it has three blood vessels. We’re seeing more and more babies that only have two blood vessels.
Helen Thompson: Why’s that?
susan-kratz: We don’t know. It’s interesting. We also know that umbilical cords are shortening up. On average historically umbilical cords were averaged 24 inches long and now they’re averaging between 21 and 22 inches long and we don’t really know. We have seen babies who have remarkably short umbilical cord and we have some now remarkable MRI videos. It’s a functional MRI where you actually are seeing thousands and thousands of still pictures put together in the movie. So it looks like a video of a baby and uterus in utero. You can see what’s happening to the umbilical cord while they live in that environment.
Helen Thompson: Hmm.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: The cord can get wrapped around a leg. It certainly can get wrapped around their neck. It can get wrapped around their belly, and if that cord gets tight, there’s videos on YouTube. You can just go look for ’em. You can see that umbilical cord pulling into their abdominal cavity. You can see organs being displaced because the umbilical cord is a tube of fascia, and the fascia of the cord is connecting to the fascia around the liver and the stomach and the intestines and the blood mass of 25 to 30 percent of your blood vessels are woven between the small intestine in the mesentery.
So the hallmark of stress is vasoconstriction. Scientific studies will measure the autonomic nervous system, either the sympathetic or the parasympathetic, that continuum based on the biomarkers of our blood flow of our circulatory system. When you see structural compression into the circulatory system or the visceral organs because that’s where the autonomic nervous system is really housed. A lot of it is in the belly. If you see structural stress there, you can think that babies are born with stress in their tummies.
During the body work that I’ve come to understand, Dr. Upledger told us never underestimate what happens to the umbilical cord because the story of what happened to all the organs are left in the scar of the belly button, that’s a scar and the remnants of the belly button go right to the liver and behind the belly button is the remnant of the umbilical cord called the falciform ligament and the round ligament and that can be extremely tight and it can pull and it can misshapen the belly button. So some of the evidence of autonomic stress in a baby, you can see right in the belly button. How do I support that? Well, because we’ll do one session of body work and we’ll get head to toe and inside and outside. We work with all the organs and the blood vessels pathways of nerves and the belly button will change shape and you will see the tension just evaporate by the change in the belly button.
Helen Thompson: How old would you do that?
susan-kratz: Three days is the youngest I’ve worked with.
Helen Thompson: oh okay, so at three days you can tell whether it’s abnormal. I don’t want to say the word abnormal, but you can tell.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: We like to say retained stresses from birthing and in utero. Here’s what happens with the umbilical cord. If it’s clamped, it’s clamped. and then it’s cut, they don’t just cut it, they clamp it and wait for the pulsation to stop. Well, the pulsation is actually a transfer of blood from the placenta and research has clearly showed that up to 25 percent of baby’s blood volume is still in the placenta.
Helen Thompson: You should give it at least five minutes before you cut it. I actually spoke to a midwife about that and she’s very keen on not cutting the umbilical cord until at least 5 minutes.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: With the onset of that, what we’ve seen is a dramatic drop in the number of babies who have jaundice, who have to get under bilirubin lights. Probably when midwifery was allowed back into the delivery room and lotus births are when placentas are delivered before the cord is cut, the way mother nature delivers babies. In fact, in the American frontier, the midwives always practiced Lotus births and because they believed cutting the umbilical cord opened the belly up to infection.
Anyway, so now that this delayed cutting has thankfully through the midwifery coalitions worldwide, what we’re seeing is dramatic drop in jaundice numbers because they are delaying the cord cut. So that suggests that we’re having less of a injury to the circulatory system because jaundice is a circulatory issue. It’s dead blood cells. So the liver has a better chance to adjust if you will. The first thing I do on babies is I start right at their belly button and they tell me the story of what’s in there. If the umbilical cord was pulled or yanked, I mean, babies can yank that thing, right?
Helen Thompson: I bet they can, yeah. They can play with it and pull it and have fun in there with it!
Susan Vaughan Kratz: They can because mamas don’t swallow toys, so they’re just real active and they probably get sensory feedback from it. I have laid my hands on baby’s belly and I’ve actually felt livers and stomachs pulled forward in the abdominal cavity. When that happens, we have seven digestive sphincters where different digestive parts of the tract meet. There’s sphincters that control the movement of food and fecal matter. When our organs are displaced or structurally stressed, those sphincters tighten up and if the sphincters are tight, food does not move through the pipes easily and that’s what I believe is the basis to colic and reflux and constipation, depending on which sphincter we have type.
So in the body work for babies, I’ve come up with a map of how to locate those sphincters. The sphincters tell us everything we want to know about the autonomic nervous system because if digestion is going well, we have a happy baby. You ask any parent, right? If they’re eating and pooping, we generally have a happy baby.
Helen Thompson: You mentioned body work. Now I know you’ve written two books. One of them you mentioned when we had the chat was to do with babies and the other one was a bit more sensory integration and you mentioned that they’ve combined. Can you tell us a little bit about those.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: During the pandemic, I finally had time from my busy practice to put some thoughts on to paper because I like to teach and turns out I also like to write. So I wrote a book called Bodywork for Babies. It was directed at professionals who try to help babies when they’re struggling, especially like tongue tie and breastfeeding problems not just colic and constipation, but torticollis, where the neck is twisted or the misshapen heads.
So I put that together in a book and there’s different chapters that focus on the things that babies need to adjust to in the first few weeks of life, the 4th trimester, which is about 12 weeks. They need to adjust their breathing. Well, that’s done easy when the ribs and the diaphragm are loose, but in the birthing process or in the confinement of being in the womb, the ribs can really be tight and even twisted. When that happens, just being on tummy time does not necessarily work out the ribs. So the very first thing that babies might need help with is adjusting their rib cage so that breathing is optimized. When babies struggle with breastfeeding, everybody thinks it’s the mouth and the tongue and oh let’s go get the tongue tie and what tends to get missed is the breathing part of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is 50 percent breathing. So each cycle of sucking on the nipple of the breast is a suck, a swallow, a pause, and a breathe, and it’s really rapid. You have any structural impediment in any of those four stages of breastfeeding, it’s going to be challenging the baby. have to work harder and they may just give up. If it doesn’t come naturally, then babies are going to be stressed because they’re going hungry and oftentimes baby’s jaws is pushed back, they can’t get their mouth open wide enough.
Well, there are babies who actually are having some TMJ (Temporomandibular joint dysfunction) issues because their face can get smushed coming through the birth canal. So that’s another thing that we look at. But after we get the breathing, we want to look at what we call self regulation and that’s where we’re looking into the organs and making sure that the stomach and liver and the intestine and all the fascia and the digestive sphincters are all loose from structural strains, from being curled up inside the womb for nine months. Actually, it gets tight about the last two months. it’s about eight weeks, give or take, of tightness that they’re curled up. I guarantee you I could take any adult listening here and curl them up in fetal position for eight weeks and they will come out with digestive problems because their organs will get compressed, not to mention hips and knees.
So the self regulation is really about making sure that all those internal structures, including the ribs, but also organs like the esophagus can get pulled, the rib is pulled. So we just make sure everything’s balanced and soft and no longer compressed and twisted because fascia, it turns out is our shock absorber. So the structural strains are held in the fascia tissue. When a baby has torticollis, we also want to look at their bodies symmetry and whether or not they’re ready to take on gravity and by that, I mean, can they lift up with their head and start with their shoulders and then when they’re on their back, do they lift their legs symmetrically and if there’s torsions In the fascia down their spine, they’re going to be asymmetrical, and we now see there’s a lot of torticollis coming, especially with the back to sleep campaign with their heavy heads, they lean to one side and we can be developing a torticollis and a torticollis needs therapeutic intervention. They need to work with a chiropractor and or a body worker, preferably a pediatric who understands the developmental reasons that a baby needs to know where their midline is, because if they start asymmetrical, can turn into coordination problems inability to their eyes and certainly structural and spinal posture and stuff.
So the third part of body work for babies, we want to make sure that their body is ready to take on the gravity and the forces that their skeleton has to move against.
Helen Thompson: Yeah, I try and teach a little bit of that in baby massage. I don’t have the background like you do, but I’ve studied kinesiology and brain gym in the past and I know how important the midline is and when I teach baby massage, I’m always encouraging parents to incorporate that and incorporate their senses and I tell them about the midline and I tell them what it involves and there are a few gentle exercises I get them to do. that it’s baby led.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Yes, everything is baby led, but at the same time, I’m on a mission to help educate parents of what to look for, when to be worried about it, so this sense of midline that you talk about should actually happen automatically. We shouldn’t have to exercise, to know that our nose and our breastbone and our belly button line up. That actually happens with breastfeeding because there’s big visual component. If you have a twist or torque in your neck, the baby is not going to turn their head evenly and the babies that struggle with equal breastfeeding performance on sides, that strongly suggests there’s a torticollis. It might be a subtle torticollis, but it can make all the difference in whether or not that baby knows internally where their middle is, because it’s eyes, nose, throat, if people just turn their head sideways, just like 45 degrees, turn sideways. Now try swallowing. That’s what it’s like to breastfeed when you have a torticollis and so then you’re going to get a fussy baby.
If that doesn’t get picked up, then baby’s gonna grow up being fussy around eating. Well, that could turn into a picky eater. That could turn into something even more like an eating disorder or the high strung baby, the fussy baby, and there’s all kinds of behavioral labels that fussy babies are called. Right now, there’s something going on on Facebook called Dragon Children and Dragon Children are just trying to tell us what’s going on inside.
There’s too many labels, and sensory integration taught me that behavior is communication, and the body work taught me by listening with my hands that structure is also trying to communicate. In the pediatric world of autism and sensory integration, there’s this question that gets asked all the time of therapists, is it sensory or is it behavior?
Well, it’s behavior because it’s sensory. We have a third option we have to add to that. Is it sensory, is it behavior or is it structural? The body work has helped me answer the question that oftentimes it’s structural. Even when I work with a 3,4,5 year old child or an 8 year old who’s struggling behaviorally to hold it together in school, 9 times out of 10, I go to their organs, their belly button, their intestines, and they’re tight and they’re twisted. Mom will say, Oh yeah, he had the worst colic and I thought it would never end, it lasted for 2 years and nobody referred them for body work.
I’m here in the States, I’m in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the Midwest where we’re still pretty conservative about things and the Western medicine way does not have any training, unless they’re an osteopath, but these bodywork methods come out of the osteopathic world. There are countries like Australia, where osteopathy was never suppressed. Here in the United States we’re kind of waking up out of this cloud that osteopath was vilified about 100 years ago. So, there’s a bias against that, but what these children have taught me, every single child is my teacher, and what they’ve taught me is that the answers are in the body.
The answers about what’s going on, and I just wanted to give parents and professionals what I’ve learned in my 25 years and there’s very distinct spots, it’s actually pretty easy learn if you’ve got some basic body work training, is there’s some key spots of where we can go help all babies. I believe bodywork for babies should be standard care postpartum.
Helen Thompson: I definitely agree with you.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Every baby on the planet should be decompressed from birth. If you just think about the head pushing into the cervical spine, into the neck, where the vagus nerve is that helps you relax, that head can still be pushed down into the neck, compressed. I’ll work on adults who still walking around with the compression in their neck from birth, it never resolved.
Helen Thompson: Yes.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: It’s a false assumption that babies grow out of these things.
Helen Thompson: I agree with you. I’m a great believer in natural therapies and working out what’s going on.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: The body is the fixer. I’m just finding out where the body is stuck, twisted, compressed, maybe a little dried out. Turns out fascia is 90 percent water and when it gets stuck and twisted for a long time, it starts being dehydrated and that’s where then a tension spot just develops and then it can become chronic.
The sooner that babies get decompressed from being in utero or the birthing process and in the sensory integration, that’s the next part of the bodywork for babies, is to understand where all the nerves, especially the cranial nerves in the head and the face, where they exit bone, they can be compressed. We have a left side and a right side of those cranial nerves. As in our spinal cord, we have a left side and a right side, and oftentimes you get compression on one side or the other, you’re getting a mixed match of signals. Let’s say your ears for example, you’ve got these soft bones that shape the baby’s head, they can be compressed, maybe it’s compressed on one ear, the brain is going to hear two different signals from the ears and it’s going to be stressful because it’s like going into the department store where all the TVs and radios are playing at the same time, you’re hearing too many signals.
It puts the nervous system, your brain into a state of stress and that can be the foundation of the auditory sensory integration struggles because can actually have a bony compression into the sensory, the apparatus that actually feels and receives the sensation of it. The eyes, for example. Lazy eye is routinely corrected with craniosacral therapy because you have two eyeballs, you have two eye nerves, you have seven muscles around each eye, and you have seven bones that create the eye socket all of which can be stressed, compressed, torqued, twisted. You can get one eye muscle pulled from a birth strain and that can create an imbalance of your eyes moving together as a team. Well, if your eyes aren’t moving and focusing together, your nervous system is going to always be in a state of stress compared to having no structural strain. So we work on eye sockets and eyeballs all the time, little ones. And we’ll just with our light little tiny fingers, we’ll get in on the those small structures and balance the tension cause working with babies, let’s face it, it’s nothing but fascia. mean, their bones aren’t even hard yet.
Helen Thompson: So it’s a good time to deal with it when they’re small.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Very easy to release quickly. The behavioral difference is night and day. Can I tell you a real story?
Helen Thompson: hmm,
Susan Vaughan Kratz: So, this mama brought me her third baby, and she was ex military. She was a nurse, and triaged soldiers injured in the field and she was working as a orthopedic nurse. So, there’s not much that rattled this woman and she brought me her seven week old child, screamed 24×7, wanted to suckle on the breast 24 7, was miserable. Full bone colic. The other members of the family convinced that the baby hated them. So they were believing the story that this baby hated them! Can you imagine growing up with that belief system.
So she walks into my office. never met her, she didn’t know who I was, but whoever told her to come see me, she trusted me because she thrust that baby in my hands and she said, fix him. She was so desperate. So, he looked at me. He wasn’t crying then, because car rides tend to calm him down. What we found in this little guy is all of the organs in his belly were pulled forward in the abdominal cavity and he would go for days without pooping. So we went to the key spots and you know, he had big BM during treatment, happens all the time. It took about 3 sessions to get everything and he was a big boy. He was like 10 and a half pounds when he was born. The bigger you are, the tighter you are. Yeah. So I took about three sessions and he just was a completely different child, he’s social, he’s now up and walking around. They come in every once in a while for tune ups for health and wellness. I just marvel at the change in this baby and what his life would have been like if those tight structures inside were not found and resolved.
Helen Thompson: Oh that’s lovely!
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Yeah, so that’s, that’s the whole point of this is that in the 25 years that I have been working with babies, I have only handled four babies that didn’t have something tight or compressed somewhere. That’s about 25 thousand, patient encounters I’ve had in 25 years.
Helen Thompson: So, you mentioned your book. So, if anybody wants to find out about you and more about your book how do they go about finding out about you?
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Oh, that’s wonderful, I’m glad you’re doing this because, you know, information is, is power and it’s empowerment and there’s nothing more helpless than having a baby that doesn’t eat well or can’t resolve colic. So thank you for doing that.
My, my current website is called bodyworkbooks.com. Currently the books that are available are Bodywork for Babies and Bodywork for Sensory Integration. I’m just about to publish a book called A Parent Companion for Bodywork for Babies, and this is refining the techniques that a professional would do, but I put it in a way so that parents can do some of the techniques, so that they can get help right away, and especially if you don’t have a local resource. Not every place in the world has somebody who’s trained in these methods but I teach parents how to do these things all the time. So, the parent companion book is what I routinely teach parents how to do to help with colic, help with constipation, help with tongue tie, tongue tying management before and after any kind of release before the tongue, a torticollis or a misshapen head. Craniosacral therapy can reshape a head in a few sessions. So, that book can give parents some foundation for that.
I’ve developed a training institute called Special Therapies Institute. We haven’t developed that website yet, but we’re going to use. This book website until we’ll merge the two websites here in the not too distant future. Right now, the seminars are listed on that same website and If you’re not in the United States or Canada, to find these books, I believe you should just go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Helen Thompson: Thank you Susan, I’ve actually learned so much from you today. So thank you for being on the podcast today, it’s been very valuable.
Susan Vaughan Kratz: Thank you for inviting me, I’m honoured and touched and I want to support all parents and all babies out there. I’m a mother of 2 and I could have used this about 25 years ago. This information. So my own children taught me some of these things as we navigated through that uncharted territory. I mean, you have these babies and they just send them home with you and say, here, raise them and there’s not any instruction books.
I can field emails if anybody has urgent questions, you can email me at the bodyworkbooks.Com. You can contact me that way.
Helen Thompson: Okay, I’ll put all that information in the show notes, so people can find that. So thank you for being here, and it’s been a pleasure.
Thanks mums, you’re amazing, and I hope you enjoyed this episode. So much great stuff, and I learned so much from Susan. I highly recommend checking out her books, particularly the Parents Companion guidebook that Susan mentioned, coming soon. In fact, I see from her website that this can be pre ordered now.
I’ve included links to Susan’s website and the individual books available via Amazon in the show notes. If you haven’t done so already, make sure you hit the subscribe button, because in the next episode, I’m chatting with board certified lactation consultant, baby wearing educator, and tummy time method professional, Austin Rees. I’ve spoken with Austin in a recent episode and next time, we’re discussing concerns parents can have when their baby has a misshapen, flat or uneven head shape.
So if you haven’t done so already, make sure you hit that subscribe button to find out more about this wonderful topic.