From Carrots to Classroom — Helping Kids Feel Safe in their Body and in the World
- Alahnnaa Campbell
- 20 hours ago
- 8 min read
Who this article is for
If your child toe-walks, struggles with transitions, scans every room for signs of danger or safety, holds deep grudges against certain people, can be demanding and have extreme separation anxiety, demands the same limited comfort foods foods, has minimal patience, hits their head or scratches their face when overwhelmed, and cannot tolerate unpredictable people who do not respect their limits — this article is for you.
These are the signs our youngest exhibited, and we did not seek a diagnosis because our household would have struggled with what a confirmed diagnosis meant and if she didn't meet sufficient criteria for diagnosis all of her struggles would have been dismissed, which is not fair either.
Instead of a diagnosis we opted to cultivate understanding for our youngest in ourselves for what we could heal and in others for what we could not. This is what that journey looked like, using Kirlian photography, over several years.
Her story began before she was born
She was an unplanned pregnancy. I tend to be very sick the entire time I am pregnant, and I said early on that if she was not viable I would terminate. My parents were hard on us for having a third child — my mother said it was selfish. In addition, we induced her at 37.5 weeks so that I could be home and no longer pregnant in time for father's day. It sounds petty now, but I was so sick that caring for our older kids was taking a toll on my husband. The induction involved inserting a weighted foley balloon into her safe space. Both these experiences probably made her feel like she needed to fight to be strong in order to save her life. She has always been physically stronger and more muscular than her peers. Unfortunately it took a while to get the public school to recognize that someone who is physically strong might need just as much support as someone who is physically frail, because strong people can cause a lot of damage. My concern has always been for the safety of others if my child's needs go unnoticed or unmet.
Her initial photos from May-June 2024:
She turned 5 in Jun 2024, and what we see many of these photos are her fingers not just her finger tips. This represents "carrot signs" — a deeply dug-in pattern associated with too much rooting, fear of change, and a tendency toward negative self-image (even now, as she is about to turn 7, when her teacher has the whole class repeat "I am helpful, I am kind" she will tell both myself and her teacher that she likes this activity, but she does not see herself as being kind (mostly because she knows she has strong boundaries and people tell her often that leaving someone out or demanding what she needs is not kind). It took us a while to convert what we saw in these photos into words that allowed others to have compassion for how she might feel.
At the time, she did not want to be anywhere I could not be nearby to help. Her heart was pounding and she was losing her words in stressful situations. The closed toes told us that the moment she experienced stress or a difficult emotion, her body responded immediately — which explains the severity of the fight-or-flight behaviour that looked, from the outside, like aggression that needed to be reign in.
She also had cellulite on her belly — a sign that her staple foods were taking a toll on her body. From an Esogetic perspective, cellulite is associated with testosterone deficiency. Treatment involves addressing the kidney, bladder, liver, intestines, pituitary, and hypothalamus. RestoreChi was the most accessible way to address this for her, as she could wear the speaker belt and go about her day, sleep, or watch TV while her symptoms slowly improved. Minimal disruption to her everyday life. The cellulite is still present, so are the bad eating habits, but the aggression and fear and gone down.
In adults, carrot signs are addressed through attachment treatment. We shifted them by changing the way we talked about her behaviour. Once people around her started responding to her with more compassion, she had less reason to mount such a big fight, her photos and behaviour changed.
She has a very rare Unique Psychology that is hard to explain because everyone wants to feel like their child is special too. The Kirlian photos levelled the playing field — by giving us language to explain how she felt that could apply to anyone, regardless of their spiritual beliefs.
RestoreChi — the tool we lean on most
I lean on RestoreChi and Unique Psychology more than Esogetic Medicine for my children because RestoreChi bothers them less — they don't need to take a photo, wait while I decide what to treat, sit still for treatment, and then see what works, they just strap on a speaker and go, and take it off when they feel better. Families can use it daily and immediately when something comes up, without needing to come back to see me. Esogetic Medicine is excellent for identifying what is needed and making a big change overnight, but this if for people who are showing up for a session, this is what they expect, children who live in your home don't want to have to go through a session every time they don't feel well.
My model is: Families come to learn how to understand and support each other. Some will choose Esogetic Medicine as the thing to learn to treat each other, others will choose RestoreChi, Unique Psychology, or the Information Field.
Even the case studies from Germany, emphasize minimal treatment for children — enough to create a shift — and then let them go back to being a child, developing normally.
RestoreChi has been helpful to address her mistakes in daily living (going out in the cold without a coat, eating cold drink/food, or getting very upset) clearing congestion, diarrhea, and at one point appendix pain with the Liver Gallbladder Pancreas Enhance, Liver Detox, Phlegmatic, Spleen Dampness, Belt Meridian (for hormones), Chill Release, Fire Water Balance tracks chosen based on what we see in the photo.
August 2024 — what a difficult month showed us
After a month with an intrusive cousin on the heels of a year with an intrusive friend, her hands were almost completely missing in the photo. She was coping by dissociating — checked out, not present, surviving rather than living. When I tried to pull her back into her body, her left big toe shut down.
This does not mean the treatment was wrong. It means more time and support were needed. Seeing it in a photo gave me more compassion — for her, and for myself.
November 2024 — improvement but not out of the woods, yet:
Here we see what she looked like before and after I applied treatment to help her body process emotions, that were otherwise causing her 24/7 stress and stomach acidity that was starting to wear down her joints and heart. While you can see some carrots show up again, she also became much more understanding of others, less aggressive, and finally able to enter the classroom at her alternative school, when previously she would just wait outside when all the other kids would go in. She also started to look forward to spending time with people she had previously tried to avoid, showing her window of tolerance was widening.
Her left big toe closes when she is sick, grinding her teeth, can't let go, is under holiday stress, or needs more time to process treament:
Each time this happens I remind myself not to get discouraged, the work is not done in one session, things come back as life challenges us, we all have an Achilles heel. The trick is knowing what to do when it surfaces, and to have compassion for ourselves when it happens.
The 2025/2026 school year
From the → Felt Safety page
She is almost seven now, attends public school, full day, uses the public bathroom, feels safe, and calls me only once a week. She has friends and many aspects of what looked like being on the spectrum have resolved.
The show Extraordinary Attorney Woo and The Good Doctor give me hope and remind me that she may still struggle sometimes — but when I see her happy at school with her friends, I think of the line from Frozen "we removed all the magic, even the memories of magic, just to be sage, but we kept the fun".
What made the difference
It was not one treatment or one approach. It was the combination, applied consistently over time, with a mindset that she is not bad, she is struggling, and our job is to put words to what she is feeling and to narrate the impact she has on the world around her, so that everyone is on the same page:
RestoreChi — addressed the physical layer, the hormones, the circulation, the dampness and chill, without disrupting her day or requiring her to sit still for long.
Unique Psychology and Felt Safety — helped me understand how she is built and how she felt, so we could explain to others what was driving her needs and behaviour
Esogetic Medicine — used sparingly, at key moments, shifted her perception of what she was capable of, probably by making her feel less in survival mode (fight or flight) when options presented themselves.
Changing the frame — when we found the right language to get people around to stop trying to make her behave better and start to understand that her needs were valid, everything started to change. This was as much an exercise for me to feel confident in my parenting as it was for us to find the right words, it is very easy for others to assume you are a bad parent, but when you heal your unworthiness on the topic and speak as if you know what you are talking about, others will prefer to fall in line with kindness for your child too.
What this means for your family
You do not need to come to see me every week. You need to understand your child's Unique Psychology and use Kirlian Photography (or the Information Field) to understand how they feel so that you know what is driving their behaviour, from a place of kindness, which is what is going to help them feel and do better. You can learn to use RestoreChi or come to me for Esogetic Medicine, as needed, but the goal is not to produce a child who never struggles. The goal is to give them enough felt safety and to give you enough skills to speak up for them and support them when they struggle. A lot of the work needed to do this is not only your own healing journey, but it is what will allow you to step forward and offer your gifts, once you have healed mentally, physically, relationally, and found others you can trust to hold space for your child.
This is the alternative to mainstream diagnosis, accomodation, and behaviour modification. Earning rewards for good behaviour doesn't fix what is making them feel sick, and what is preventing an easier life. It is so common for the parents of sensitive kids to be sick too. Whether this is the stress of parenting a difficult child that weighs them down, or the passing on of feeling sick that makes their kids hard to parent, is irrelevant, when you treat the entire family to understand everyone's needs. Mainstream has caught onto this at least, with caregiver studies, that insist of appointments for the person they are caring for to be appointments to address the caregivers health too.
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