Auditory Integration Training, AIT, Berard AIT, Auditory, Auditory Integration

 AIT Helps Improve the Lives and Learning of Those with Autism, ADHD, Hyperacute Hearing, Speech Delays & Tinnitus...in 10 Days.

The AIT Institute is the #1 Provider off AIT At Home Services globally and is the largest AIT resource website in the world.
 

AIT is the #1 clinically studied auditory based educational intervention!  All sessions are conveniently completed at home under the supervision of an AIT Practitioner. AIT services are available in the USA, Canada and other English speaking countries.

AIT requires 10 hours of sound therapy, with 20 sessions of 30 minutes each, done 2 times daily over 10 consecutive days.  This listening therapy helps to correct hyperacute hearing,  tinnitus and other auditory challenges.

AIT has been used successfully with children and adults with many different diagnoses for over 60 years.  

Remarkable results are achieved for many families. There are more than 60+ years of clinical research and 28+ scientific studies on AIT.

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Speech and Language Delay (SLD), Attention Issues and Auditory Integration Training

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Testimonial by S. Byrne, Parent of a 5 year old girl, Milpitas, California.
Reprinted by permission. 04-12-2005.

"After 2 years of talking to various teachers and speech therapists about her mispronunciations, how do we explain that it instantly and spontaneously corrected over the school break (while we did Berard AIT)?"

Auditory Integration Training, AIT, Berard AIT, speech delay"We completed our Berard AIT and I went into with much the same trepidation other parents are feeling. It is a lot to fork over and, having tried to explain this technique to my very practical and stoic family members, felt quite strange and "new agey" and worried that if it failed I might be left looking like a pretty strange and goofy mom. My husband, an earthy "prove it to me" engineer, looked upon it as rather akin to horoscope and commented that, if every someone wanted to set up a scam, AIT would be a great way to do it.

So, having said all that, I can now tell you that I am very happy I proceeded against all my fears and instead went with my mother's instinct, holding fast to all I had read and researched.

I wish I had done one more thing prior to the AIT to allay my concerns and fears: a simple Berard AIT audiogram. We had one scheduled, as required, for just a few days prior to the start. My daughter had had numerous conventional audiogram over the years that had shown some ear drum repression. The advice was to go home and blow up balloons to try to pop the drum out. The audiogram showed what none of the conventional ones had: that she heard different frequencies in each ear  and that her stapedius reflex was high (in other words, a noise that triggers the ear to protect itself from loudness had to be louder for her than what is considered normal).

She scored about 42 on the AIT Checklist. What pushed me to follow through was my sense of recognition of the behaviors and reactions of the children in Annabel Stehli's books of collected stories of children healed through Berard AIT. So much of it seemed to be a bit like my daughter. And I considered the sources of the information as well: highly educated, critically thinking, and skeptical parents like myself...some even trained in traditional medicine (Dr. Guy Berard himself, for example, was a surgeon in his early career!).

Long story short: you may choose to get an Berard AIT audiogram done to give yourself some extra peace of mind and some data to support your decision.

What I meant is that I made the decision and commitment, financially, to proceed with Berard AIT BEFORE having had an audiogram to inform me of the specific hearing issues Amelia had that were only revealed by the audiogram.  I did not know previous to having the audiogram results that there were so many different types of audiograms.  I thought we had had the one and only available type, the one that showed Amelia's hearing was within normal limits. 

The audiogram confirmed that her hearing was, indeed, within normal limits, but it revealed what the conventional audiograms had not:  that she had a discrepancy in frequencies that she could hear in each ear, that her reflex was high, AND that adding background noise dramatically diminished her ability to discriminate the human voice (I forgot to put that in the send to the new members). 

I asked my AIT Practitioner about why her other audiograms had never revealed these things and only then learned that there are many and distinct types of audiograms.  Had I known that, I could have simply spent $125 to get an Berard AIT audiogram months back, when I was trying to decide whether to do Berard AIT with Amelia.  We would, of course, had to repeat it just prior to the AIT, for the filter determination, but that minor expense would have added dramatically to my comfort in making the decision to proceed.  I did get that comfort, finally, but just days before the actual Berard AIT, and weeks after having made the commitment. 

Those interim weeks were filled with anxiety and questions "Is this the right thing?" or "Will it be a waste of time?" or "Could it actually do any harm, even psychically, to her self-image, or just cause confusion?" etc.  Once I had the results from the audiogram, it confirmed all my instincts and eliminated many of my worries.  I think everyone "wondering" if they should do it should be advised to go request an audiogram,  to help make their decision easier and take some of the guesswork out of it.  Especially since Amelia didn't strongly match the AIT Checklist, and I have passed that list to many friends whose children I KNOW need AIT, but they don't match the list strongly either. 

Before Berard AIT:

  • Amelia was highly distracted.  I usually had to call her name several times to get her attention before I could even begin to say or ask what I intended to.  "That was a question, Amelia, and a question needs an answer." was something I repeated over and over.  As she grew older, she began to tell me that she was going to answer, but just needed some thinking time. 

  • She had strong perseverations that lasted weeks and months on end.  When it was whales, we had to watch the same whale videos over and over, read every whale book we could find. 

  • She was totally logical and reality-based, with little fantasy life or imagination.  At age 3 she asked her father what dolls were for!

  • She was always fidgety, couldn't sit through a story or video without doing cartwheels and headstands.

  • Her "conversations" with family or others consisted primarily of reciting her voluminous memory of rote facts...about whales, scientific principles, car makes and models.  She would grill us with endless questions for more facts on these lines to file away.

  • She had a strong inclination and preference to be by herself, and would often retreat to the back yard to spend hours simply looking at flowers and creatures she could find.  In the house, she would try to stake out a "private space" and defend it against invasion by her highly devoted and sociable baby brother, causing lots of tears on his part and scolding and exasperated pleadings on my part.  When I set up play dates with friends, she would retreat and tell me she just preferred to be on her own.

  • Though she has long been able to dress herself, she would always refuse to do so and insist that I do it for her. 

  • She had little awareness of her self-image and always came out of the bathroom with her clothes on sideways and things half tucked in, "pucker tuckers" we called them.  I had to endlessly remind her to fix her pucker tuckers.

After Berard AIT:

  • Her quality and content of conversation became markedly more appropriate to the context and company; she would talk about the surroundings, what people were doing, random thoughts that occurred to her. 

  • She offered more and extracted less information.  She is more attentive to what is happening around her and what is said to her, needing little if any prompting to focus and respond to statements or questions.

  • Her perseverations have dramatically decreased in duration and intensity.  She now becomes deeply interested in something for a day or so, and is no longer exclusive about her new interest but can now manage to include it and share her mind-space with other interests simultaneously.

  • She is more aware of her self and of others, spontaneously and voluntarily asking about others and how they feel, showing compassion for them if they are hurt.

  • She now watches Disney videos and cartoons in which she never had an interest, and she watches them just one time, rather than over and over.  She has shown a wonderful sense of humor and a truly poetic little soul and has expressed some very imaginative thoughts and shown some interest in fantasy play, which she very rarely ever did before.

  • She is physically calmer, able to sit and read a book on her own rather than requiring me to read it to her; able to sit through an entire feature-length video without climbing all over the sofa or rolling on the floor - she just sits and gets absorbed in the story and really watches it now. 

  • Her conversations are more often than not real conversations.  When she is somewhere, she seems to be "in the now" now, aware of where she is and commenting about what she sees, rather than inside her mind as before and commenting on what she is thinking about (usually one of her natural interests and nothing to do with the here and now of our existence).

  • She has been talking freely, voluntarily and spontaneously about the kids at school, what happened, who did what.  Before we could never get her to answer the question "what did you do in school today?"  Instead of talking about her one friend from last year, she is now talking about all the kids by name in her class.  She has been asking to have friends come over and play, actually expressing a strong desire for social companionship!

  • She has shown love and affection toward her brother, freely bestowing hugs and asking for them in return (she had a touch aversion before), engaging him in games and play, showing tolerance and forbearance more often than the previously dominant avoidance and rejection of his company.  She reads books to him now and tries to find ways to make him laugh and tells us she thinks he is cute and funny.

  • She has been dressing herself and helping herself independently in many ways that were previously never seen.  And I just realized in the last few days that over the 3 weeks since Berard AIT, I have ever more infrequently reminded her about pucker tuckers.  I probably haven't done it at all in at least 10 days!

Now, these things individually can be written off as coincidence, or maybe just a natural part of growing up.  But the fact that they happened collectively in a short period of time cannot be written of as coincidence.  Growing up?  Yes, she is about to turn 6.  But...the stories of other children who benefited from Berard AIT included children much older than Amelia, who exhibited the same overdependence, aloofness, isolation, perseverations, unawareness of self.  And for those children, of various ages, the same patterns of improved behaviors occurred:  increased calmness, increased independence, increased self-awareness, increased sociability, increased inter-activeness.  Yet another coincidence?

We Noted These Differences After Berard AIT:

  • Responsiveness Improved: Before Berard AIT, she was not responsive to my voice, seemingly inattentive to those speaking to her.  The human voice is at one of the higher frequencies, for which Amelia had spotty reception given that she heard different frequencies in each ear. Totally reality based: maybe she was just working so hard to understand reality with a handicapped sensory system that she had no energy left for fantasy? It seems like a miracle for us to see her laughing at the Disney humor and giggling and narrating what she thinks is so funny about it. Not things she ever could do previously.

  • Improved Conversations: well, if she couldn't hear well, how she could interact in the conversation? Instead, like many hard-of-hearing folks, she resorted to relating what she knew and was comfortable talking about...her storehouse of natural facts.

  • Social Skills Improved: Her social isolation and withdrawal: she always went to quiet spaces, where her system could relax and have downtime from it's usual overstressed state of trying to make sense of the sounds around her. Now that she can hear voices, she welcomes the company of friends and family, as they are no longer the invasive assault on her overworked senses that they previously were.

  • Increased Independence: with a more relaxed system, she's willing to take on more, she has more energy and focus to devote to it. It's one of the most consistent, and most rewarding, outcomes of AIT.

  • Visual Impacts: she was super visual, highly distracted by visual input and we worried about how we could ever help her deal with the cluttered visual environment of the elementary classrooms. Our AIT Practitioner suggested she may have been "hyper-vigilant" visually because that was a sense she could receive well, while her audio was not working, so she became overly dependent on her visual for information. That seems to have been a great insight, because now Amelia seems more "balanced", less dependent on visuals, more attentive to sounds and voices.

  • Speech Pronunciations: She also had lots of speech pronunciation problems, especially with softer sounds like "r" and blends like "fl" and distinguishing between "f" and "th". She would always say "flower" as "slower" for example. But just days after the AIT was completed, we heard her correcting the pronunciation of a little friend of hers who say "shottish fishels" instead of "scottish thistles". We were totally amazed that not only could Amelia even hear the mispronunciation, but she easily said the correct pronunciation when she told her friend how to say it.

It is hard to recall the myriad of little improvements, and Amelia's behaviors were never very extreme or obvious to others. Even the AIT Practitioner with whom we worked, told me she initially was thinking to herself "why are you here". But as our Practitioner came to know Amelia and her subtle patterns became evident to to our Berard AIT Practitioner, I came to understand better how Amelia's hearing issues were related to her behaviors.


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