From a young age, Emilio was always what you would call “smart but scattered”. When he was into something, he knew absolutely every detail about it. Like, EVERY detail – he was the kid correcting the tour guide at the insect exhibit at the San Francisco Zoo and reciting entire Power Rangers episodes at the dinner table. But, at the same time, he would forget his sweater on Monday, his lunchbox on Tuesday, his notebook on Wednesday…you get the deal.

No biggie, right? Everyone forgets stuff sometimes. Well, Emilio also started struggling in school at a pretty early age. His intelligence was far beyond his peers, but he just couldn’t seem to sit still. When he found a way to sit still, he couldn’t stop asking questions. When the teachers told him to stop asking questions, he couldn’t stop staring out the window thinking about his questions. Yup, you guessed it: my mom ended up having to move him to 13 different schools from kindergarten to high school. As he got older, the struggles just kept coming. He took a really long time to learn to read, he couldn’t learn his multiplication tables even in middle school, he struggled to memorize any history or geography.

So, what did my parents do? They did what most parents do in these situations: look for help! They took him to all the specialists, all the therapies. He did vision therapy, horse therapy, psychotherapy, social skills therapy, “learning therapy” – whatever that means – all of them. He was eventually diagnosed with ADHD and given medication for it, which my parents stopped immediately when his personality disappeared and he told us all that “his brain felt fuzzy”.

All this time, he struggled to find a close group of friends. He had buddies he’d hang out with during recess, but making close friends became increasingly challenging for him. This got worse as puberty hit and he got older. He became very self-conscious, shy, and quiet. In his own words, “the words in my brain wouldn’t come out, and by the time they did everyone had moved onto a different subject.” And as a teenaged boy, his struggle with gross motor skills and coordination was no help to his social situation. He was constantly running into people, running into walls, dropping things, tripping, and of course, his biggest enemy: the bicycle.

By the time Emilio was 15 years old, his struggles had us all worried: how is he going to make it through college? Those of us who knew him knew how smart, sweet, funny, creative, and funny he was – how could we help him fulfill his amazing potential?

This is when everything changed. This is when, through a random coincidence, my mom found Brain Reorganization. After my parents and I started learning about the primitive brain, Emilio’s struggles made so much sense! He wasn’t “not trying hard enough”, he physically could not handle the demands that life was putting on him because his lower brain was underdeveloped!

Over the next 10 months, Emilio started a brain reorganization program with my dad as his coach. And at age 15 with a disorganized brain and an intense aversion toward any physical movement… it was not easy! My parents had to practically bribe him to do it, but he did it.

And now? Well, let’s see what my mom has to say about it:

“This was the tipping point: ‘I moved my foot – did you see that? I moved my foot out of the way.’ We were in the kitchen, and my boy had rapidly and instinctively his foot out of the way so that frozen foods falling out of the freezer didn’t bash his bare toes. Big deal, right? Yes, it was a huge deal and that was the tipping point in my boy’s story of neuroplasticity and his transformation. My sweet, handsome, quirky, and super-smart son was 15 at the time. Despite being completely delightful in so many ways, he was failing in school, socially, was awkward and very accident-prone (bumping into things, dropping, tripping). You see, my son was a very coddled premie baby. As such, he never crept, he never crawled, he spent his babyhood either in someone’s arms or in a swing, moving him right into a walker when he was 8 months old. So, when I heard about the method and he did the crawling test showing that parts of his brain were underdeveloped, I convinced/bribed him to do the brainwork. 3 weeks in, he hit the tipping point I just described and there was no going back. In that time his brain had developed enough for him to react to impending danger (bags of frozen food) before getting his toes bashed. This is not something he was able to do before, and things were constantly falling on his feet! As the weeks went on and he continued his brainwork, so many other things became easy and natural for him. As his brain became more organized, he could feel his own progress in terms of priority setting, concentration, as well as making and keeping friends. He was able to control his body movements and even showed some interest in trying sports again. All these simple things that were a struggle before, became part of his life within just a few weeks. It wasn’t easy to get a 5´10″ adolescent to creep and crawl daily, but we stuck to it. Today, just a few years later, he lives totally independently in Australia, where he arrived knowing no one, he holds a college degree, has a wide circle of friends, a high-paying job that requires him to be on camera often, and a side-gig. I couldn’t be more enthusiastic in recommending the ITC system if you, your child, or anyone you know is suffering the consequences of a disorganized brain. Neuroplasticity is real and it does make all the difference.”

– Carol Cruz (Emilio’s and my mother)