The interoception curriculum was created by Kelly Mahler, an occupational therapist from the US who devoted her career to change the way we view what is often called ‘challenging, disruptive or purposeful’ behaviour.

The curriculum can be given from age 4 till 99 and is aimed at anyone who can benefit from increasing their bodily awareness. I think we can all learn more about how our body is feeling but research has found out that individuals with learning disabilities, trauma, ADHD and ASD struggle even more noticing how their body is feeling and then to connect them to the right emotion.

So how does this curriculum work?

The curriculum consists out of 3 steps:

Step 1: NOTICING body parts namely hands, feet and toes, mouth, eyes, ears, nose, voice, cheeks, skin, muscles, lungs, heart, brain, stomach, bladder, and the whole body.

Step 2: CONNECTING those body signals to the right emotions. 

Step 3: ACTION, using feel-good strategies to cope with the inner sensations of the body

The first step is NOTICING how your body is feeling. After the initial assessment, a mutual decision will be made to focus on which body parts . There are 15 body parts + the whole body. Not everyone will need all the body parts but some of the children will. Some might need 1 session per body part whilst other children need more than one session. This will be discussed after the assessment and first session. The work done with me, needs to be reinforced at home. It is only with repetition and asking yourself/your child how your body is feeling several times a day that we might get a better understanding of those feelings.

After the first step comes how to CONNECT those feelings to the right emotions. Here we go from NOTICING the feeling to: Does it feels comfortable or uncomfortable? Either way we can do things to change how our body is feeling. These will be linked with EMOTIONS.

The last step will be working together with the individual by gathering all the information we have from the previous 2 steps to write up feeling-good STRATEGIES to make an uncomfortable body more comfortable and allow the individual to SELF-REGULATE their own feelings and emotions by taking ACTION.