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Whole Body Apraxia and Autism: What Every Parent Needs to Know, with Dr. Dana Johnson

Episode 155, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: November 11, 2024 Guest: Dr. Dana Johnson, PhD, MOT, Founder of Spellers Center (Tampa & Atlanta), Co-Founder of the Spellers Method, Executive Producer of Underestimated: The Heroic Rise of Non-Speaking Spellers

Key Takeaways

• Whole body apraxia is the breakdown in a child’s ability to sequence, plan, organize sensory input, and execute intentional movement, and when that system is disrupted, every other system (speech, behavior, digestion, regulation) struggles downstream.
• Traditional therapy approaches like sensory integration and ABA address the outer layers of autism, but skip the foundational neuromotor layer that makes any intervention possible, Dr. Johnson spent 10 years in traditional OT before non-speaking clients revealed the missing piece.
• The Perfect Storm of maternal distress, physical birth trauma, and early toxin exposure disrupts the neuromotor system at its earliest formation, shutting down the vagus nerve and brainstem before a child ever has a chance to build foundational motor plans.
• Children with severe neuromotor dysfunction progress through three stages: fight (hypersensitive, wound tight), compensate (dyspraxia, the “drunken bull”), and exhaustion (complete shutdown, no initiation), and ABA or probiotics cannot reach a child stuck in stage three.
• When a child is fully shut down, the most effective first step is often a 90-day pause on all other interventions to clear neurological space for foundational motor planning work to take hold.

What Is Whole Body Apraxia, and Why Does It Underlie Autism?

Whole body apraxia is the breakdown in the ability to translate thought into action. It’s not just about speech. It affects every intentional movement a child makes, from getting off the floor to navigating a doorway to responding to a request. When a child with autism appears defiant, shut down, or non-responsive, the far more likely explanation is that their neuromotor system cannot initiate, sequence, and execute a motor plan.

Dr. Dana Johnson defines it precisely: “Not being able to put the thought into action.” The demand exists, the parent asks, the teacher prompts, but the child’s brain cannot get the signal through the body. This is categorically different from classic dyspraxia (clumsiness and incoordination), which is the intermediate stage. Full whole body apraxia is the deepest level: initiation itself is offline.

The reason this matters clinically is that every other system the autism community focuses on, gut function, behavior, speech, sensory processing, requires an intact neuromotor foundation to improve. Dr. Tony Ebel draws this clearly: gross motor initiation and coordination sit at the core, with gut issues, sensory issues, and behavioral challenges layered outside of it. You cannot get lasting traction on the outer layers if the foundation is offline.

Dr. Dana’s Awakening: From Sensory Gyms to Motor Planning [00:06:00 – 00:13:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: This conversation is one I’ve been trying to have for months. We’re both teaching the same neurosensory motor framework, but the way Dr. Dana frames whole body apraxia, from inside an occupational therapy career, fills in a piece that chiropractic alone doesn’t always get to.

Dr. Dana, where did this start for you? Was there a moment when you realized the sensory integration model wasn’t enough?

Dr. Dana Johnson: It’s been a journey. I came out of OT school convinced that everything was sensory integration. I built a sensory gym, swings, ball pit, scooter boards. And then I started working with non-speaking communicators who used alternative communication, and they told me directly: “OT was fun, but it was missing what I really needed, the connection between my intention, my idea, and getting my body to actually do it.”

That stopped me cold. I had learned about praxis in OT school. But I hadn’t understood this actual disconnect, the breakdown at the very first step, before the movement even begins. Non-speaking individuals were being presumed intellectually disabled and given fine motor work, when the real issue was that their nervous system couldn’t execute intentional movement at any level.

That’s when I gutted the sensory gym and replaced it with a treadmill, a squat rack, medicine balls, and weighted bars. I needed to build functional movement patterns that would then allow intentional movement to follow.

Dr. Tony: How many years did you practice traditional OT before that shift?

Dr. Dana: About 10 years.

Dr. Tony: And that shift, from sensory integration to motor planning, what happened to your results?

Dr. Dana: Parents started coming in saying, “We worked on this in the session, and he went home and did it on his own.” That’s the motor cortex building plans. That’s how motor learning works. You build the pattern, and it generalizes because the brain made it automatic. That didn’t happen in the sensory gym.

The Missing Foundation: Why the Gut-Brain Model Isn’t Enough [00:13:00 – 00:22:00]

Dr. Tony: Here’s what I run into constantly. The conventional medical system says autism is genetic, predeterminism. Our community moved past that. But now the loudest voice is the gut-brain connection. Diet, microbiome, detoxification. And those things matter, I’m not dismissing them. But I keep meeting parents who’ve literally exhausted functional medicine, and nobody told them to look at their kid’s motor planning.

When you look at a child who’s been through every gut protocol and hasn’t turned the corner, the whole body apraxia is sticking out. Subluxation. Sensory motor incoordination. Visible, if you know what to look for.

Dr. Dana: The first volitional movement a child makes is vision, ocular motor control. If that’s disrupted, everything downstream is a domino effect. From vision, you get to cervical motor control, head and neck. From there, torso. The sequence is set. If any of it is off early, the child develops compensatory strategies, and then strength and tone and all those systems start playing catch-up from a compromised foundation.

“If we’re not talking about the neurosensory motor whole body system, we’re missing the foundation.”, Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP

When I define whole body apraxia for parents: you have an idea, you develop a plan, you sequence it, organize it, then you initiate, execute, and adjust. That full chain is praxis. When that chain breaks, anywhere, everything gets hard. Speech gets hard. Behavior gets hard. Digestion gets hard. Because the motor system is the most neurologically dense, connected, and important system in the body. Shut down its perception and initiation, and nothing else can work efficiently.

Dr. Tony: Dr. Bruce Lipton, a cellular epigenetic biologist, put it this way: “The function of the nervous system is to perceive the environment and coordinate the behavior of all other cells.” Parents coming from the ABA world focus on the last word: behaviors. We focus on the front of the sentence: perception, coordination, function. Those come first.

The Three Stages of Neuromotor Dysregulation [00:18:00 – 00:43:00]

Dr. Tony: When I started doing this work, I noticed three categories. First is what I call the raging bull, hypersensitive, sensory overdrive, classic ADHD presentation, wound tight. High neuromotor function but no outlet for it.

The second category is the drunken bull, dyspraxic, clumsy, everything a little slower. That’s where most people’s understanding of dyspraxia sits.

But then I started seeing a third category. Take the drunken bull and push it into exhaustion. Subluxation and nervous system interference that’s so pervasive, initiation itself shuts off. That’s not clumsiness. That’s a child who literally cannot get the engines to fire.

Dr. Dana: And that exhaustion stage is the one everyone misreads. Hyperactive is obvious. Clumsy is recognizable. But unable to initiate from a foundational neuromotor level? That looks like defiance. It looks like laziness. It looks like “they don’t want to.” ABA goes straight to behaviors when what’s actually happening is the motor system is offline.

Dr. Tony: And that’s the trap for parents. They’re told applied behavioral analysis is the answer. But if a child can’t initiate, if the signal from intention to action is blocked, behavioral prompting doesn’t reach that layer. You have to go deeper.

“The motor system is the most neurologically brain-based, connected, potent, important, intricate system.”, Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP

What we found is that these children have gone through three stages of nervous system dysregulation: first they fight, that stiff, arching, hypersensitive infant. Then they compensate, dyspraxia, incoordination, the drunken bull. And then, stage three: exhaustion. The system shuts down. The lights go out even on motor planning.

Probiotics, ABA, and gut protocols cannot penetrate that. You have to work from the ground up on whole body coordination and motor planning.

The Perfect Storm: What Throws the Neuromotor System Off Track [00:39:00 – 00:42:00]

Dr. Tony: Do you see patterns in your case histories for what causes this level of neuromotor disruption so early and so severely?

Dr. Dana: Two things consistently: trauma and toxin exposure. Birth trauma, and maternal trauma, including chronic stress during pregnancy. And then direct or indirect toxin exposure during that developing window when the brain is most sensitive.

Dr. Tony: That’s exactly what we see. I’ll try to summarize The Perfect Storm in 30 seconds.

Number one: maternal distress. When a mother’s nervous system shifts into sympathetic dominance during pregnancy, the developing baby’s nervous system follows. That’s the same as shutting down the vagus nerve, which is brainstem-level function.

Number two: physical birth trauma. Injury to the neck, brainstem, and skull from forceps, vacuum extraction, prolonged labor, or c-section. That’s where motor initiation, coordination, and expression are controlled.

Number three: toxins. Antibiotics, medications, and environmental exposures that continue to compound the neurological load, even in children who didn’t have the first two components.

“Nobody yet has slowed down to speed up and gone back to the basics and gone to the foundation.”, Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP

That’s the storm. And it explains why gut protocols, even effective ones, hit a ceiling, because the neuromotor foundation that was disrupted by the storm was never addressed first.

What Assessment Actually Looks Like [00:24:00 – 00:34:00]

Dr. Dana: My assessment starts before the child walks through the door. I watch how they get out of the car. How they step up a curb. How they move through the entrance. Because how a child moves through space tells you everything about where their neuromotor planning is.

Inside the clinic, I’m watching initiation, is it there? What about regulation? I’m looking at physiological signs: dilated pupils, fight-or-flight markers. What I see on the outside doesn’t always match what the child is experiencing internally, so I have to read both.

I also look at what I call low ground versus high ground. Low ground is minimal contact with the floor, standing. High ground is full-body contact, lying down. Many of my most dysregulated clients gravitate to sitting or lying because they need that proprioceptive input to figure out where their body is in space. That’s not laziness. That’s the nervous system compensating for missing input.

Dr. Tony: Same. I use the windows in the front of the clinic. I want to see the child get out of the minivan, handle the curb, walk through the door. Because everything parents want help with, the speech, the socialization, the behavior, the emotional regulation, is downstream from how the child moves.

Dr. Dana: Parents often come in expecting a full traditional assessment. And there are times when the child cannot get off the floor. That is the assessment. I explain to every parent: this is where we’re starting, and we need to go through it at the pace this child’s nervous system can handle.

The 90-Day Pause: When Less Is More [00:46:00 – 00:55:00]

Dr. Dana: When I see a child who is completely shut down, neurologically exhausted, fully in stage three, I do recommend stopping other interventions. Not forever. But there are times when all the things being done are jamming the nervous system rather than helping it.

Parents are frightened by this because they don’t want to drop the ball. I understand that. But there is a point where less is genuinely more, and continuing to pile on interventions can actually produce regression.

Dr. Tony: Any intervention can produce one of three outcomes: it works, it stalls, or it makes things worse. Most families I see today are in outcome two, spinning their wheels. Too much is happening, the nervous system is jammed, and progress has stopped. They’re not getting worse, but they’re not getting better. And if you push past that without clearing the foundation, outcome three becomes possible.

The 90-day pause creates neurological space. It gives the foundational motor planning work room to take hold.

“Whole body apraxia is the breakdown in our ability to sequence, plan, organize, take in sensory information, and be efficient with our motor output. If there’s a breakdown in any single part of that, everything will be hard.”, Dr. Dana Johnson, PhD, MOT

Dr. Dana: When families come in and say “we did nothing today” after a session, that’s the hardest part of this work to communicate. We didn’t do nothing. We started where we needed to start, and we went at the pace this nervous system required. That is the work.

A Mother and Son: When the Foundation Changes Everything [00:59:00 – 01:02:00]

Dr. Tony: Can you close with a story? A family who’d tried everything, was going nowhere, maybe getting worse, and you took it back to the foundation. What happened?

Dr. Dana: I think about the families with older children, adults in their twenties and thirties, non-speaking or unreliably speaking. They’ve heard of apraxia, think it’s about speech, tried everything. Usually very dysregulated, sometimes self-injurious. And the parents carry compounding trauma.

One family I worked with, I was able to work with both the adult son and his mother. Session by session, we worked slowly through foundational movement. And yes, he gained more control of his body. But the moment that got me was watching his mom sit comfortably next to him for the first time. Not anxious. Not bracing. Comfortable. And relaxed.

That’s the relationship. That’s what healing at this level produces. Not just motor control in the child, but connection. Safety. A mother and her son, finally at ease together.

Dr. Tony: That’s a miracle. That’s the kind of result that isn’t captured in outcome measures or behavior checklists.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is whole body apraxia, and how is it different from regular apraxia?

Whole body apraxia is the breakdown of intentional movement across the entire body, not just speech. Traditional apraxia is typically associated with speech (apraxia of speech), but Dr. Dana Johnson’s work shows that many children with autism have a much deeper dysfunction: the inability to translate thought into action at any motor level, from initiating movement off the floor to responding to a simple request. It is not clumsiness (dyspraxia), it’s the absence of initiation itself.

Why doesn’t gut-focused treatment alone help some children with autism?

Gut protocols, diet changes, and detoxification address outer layers of dysfunction, but the neuromotor system is the foundation every other system depends on, including digestion. As Dr. Tony Ebel explains, gut function follows the same motor planning pathways as everything else. If the underlying neuromotor and brainstem function was disrupted by The Perfect Storm of maternal distress, birth trauma, and toxins, gut interventions will hit a ceiling. The foundation must come first.

What are the three stages of nervous system dysregulation in children with autism?

According to Dr. Tony Ebel, children with severe neuromotor dysfunction tend to progress through three stages: Stage 1 (Fight), hypersensitive, wound tight, arching, sympathetically dominant; Stage 2 (Compensate), dyspraxic, clumsy, the “drunken bull”; Stage 3 (Exhaustion), complete neurological shutdown where even basic motor initiation is offline. Children in stage three are frequently misread as defiant or lazy when they are neurologically unable to initiate.

Can birth trauma really cause whole body apraxia and autism-related challenges?

Yes. Physical birth trauma, from forceps, vacuum extraction, prolonged labor, or c-section, causes injury to the neck, brainstem, and skull, which is where motor initiation, coordination, and expression are controlled. Combined with maternal distress during pregnancy (which shifts the developing nervous system into sympathetic dominance) and toxin exposure, this Perfect Storm disrupts neuromotor development at its earliest formation. Both Dr. Tony Ebel and Dr. Dana Johnson consistently find these patterns in case histories.

Should we stop other therapies while doing foundational motor planning work?

Sometimes, yes. Dr. Dana Johnson recommends a 90-day pause from other interventions when a child is fully neurologically shut down and exhausted. The reasoning: multiple simultaneous interventions can jam the nervous system and prevent the foundational motor planning work from taking hold. Continuing can stall progress or cause regression. The goal is to clear neurological space first, then layer other supports back in once the foundation is stabilizing.

Where can I find a PX Docs chiropractor near me who understands this approach?

Use the PX Docs Directory to find a Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic office near you. PX Docs providers are trained in the same neuromotor and brainstem-focused assessment approach discussed in this episode.

Resources & Related Content

• Whole Body Apraxia & Autism, PX Docs Autism Resource Page
• Birth Trauma and Neuromotor Development, PX Docs Birth Trauma Page
• The Perfect Storm, PX Docs Perfect Storm Framework
• Sensory Processing Disorder, PX Docs Sensory Resource Page
• Vagus Nerve Dysfunction in Children, PX Docs Vagus Nerve Page
• Find a PX Docs Office Near You, PX Docs Practitioner Directory
• Next Episode: Q&A: Navigating Anxiety, Root Cause Answers and an Approach That Works