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.