Can we, can't we, can we, can't we, can we help him join the dance? The need for multimodal processing in the move towards meaningful communication

This paper charts the journey made towards verbal communication with Mackenzie, a boy who was three years old at the start of treatment and diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder. In this paper, I bring together diverse areas of research and demonstrate how they inform my clinical practice. Together, these ideas created a multimodal and synergistic way of working that enabled Mackenzie to make connections between the internal and external world, moving towards self-agency, thus allowing him to start to enter the world of verbal communication. The research that I applied to practice included: the role of prediction in Theory of Mind (TOM), 'dynamic systems' theory of emotions, affect regulation and interactive regulation, embodied perception and entrainment.