Chickens walking around on grass.
Georgianna Sutherland / For Spotlight PA
Healing with Vision Therapy and Chickens
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Asia Tabb
Georgianna Sutherland / For Spotlight PA
Chickens walking around on grass.
Aired; July 30, 2025
Listen to the podcast to hear the full conversation.
When Christine Helm was hit head-on in a car accident with her daughter, she never expected it would change the course of her life. “We had minor, so-called minor injuries,” she recalled. “I had a shoulder injury, a minor neck injury, and a concussion… but mine didn’t [get better]. It just hung on and hung on.”
Christine, a former teacher, found herself unable to return to work. Plagued by persistent concussion symptoms and double vision, she visited specialist after specialist—ophthalmologists, neuro-ophthalmologists, neuropsychologists—searching for relief. “I was told that I was left with this partial double vision and a lot of concussion symptoms, and that was just going to be the new me,” she said.
But that changed when a trusted concussion therapist suggested something Helm had never heard of before: vision therapy.
“I called the vision therapist and explained my situation, and they said, ‘You’re a prime candidate,’” Helm said. “I went there and got tested, and that’s how I found vision therapy.”
The therapy wasn’t easy. For nine months, Helm went twice a week for hour-long sessions to retrain her eyes and brain. “What I learned that I didn’t know before is I had no peripheral vision,” she explained. “My eyes didn’t move left and right or up and down together. They taught me how to rest, how to recognize when I was doing too much, and gave me exercises to strengthen my eye muscles.”
But it wasn’t just her eyes that were healing—it was her spirit too. Helm described the process as both physically and emotionally intense. “There would be times that I would have special glasses on, and they were trying to get your brain to interpret and your eyes to work together… I physically could feel something happening in my brain and that was very odd,” she said. “It was exhausting, but it was truly the only place I felt like I belonged. These were the only doctors who seemed to understand what I was going through.”
While vision therapy helped her recover neurologically, Helm found emotional healing in an unlikely place: her backyard chicken coop.
After losing her job, Helm spent more time with the chickens she had always kept but never really observed in depth. “I would just kind of… watch them. Sometimes I’d write little stories about them because I used to love to write,” she said. “If you sit down and take the time to watch, you can see their personalities and how they live… I don’t think we take enough time to observe nature.”
That mindfulness evolved into what she calls “chicken therapy.”
Helm says many people don’t expect chickens to be calming or affectionate—but they are, if you take time to notice. “It’s really fun to watch them,” she said. “But then every now and then one will get sick… and most vets don’t care for chickens and ducks. So you kind of have to try to help them yourself.”
She’s also faced heartbreaking moments—losing chickens to hawks, foxes, or even possums that snuck into the coop. “It is very sad,” Helm admitted. “But I learned that bad things happen to everybody. I realized that in order for them to be their happiest, they had to sometimes be exposed to danger. That was a big life lesson for me. We try to protect ourselves from pain, but sometimes that means we miss out on joy too.”
Her chickens even became a signature part of her identity in the community. “I called that therapist again, and she immediately said, ‘Oh yeah—Chris with the chickens!’” she laughed. “I guess I talked about them a lot. Even when I was still teaching, I’d tell chicken stories during lunch. So they always kind of knew me for that.”
Now Helm continues to share those stories—and the lessons she learned from both vision therapy and chicken therapy—in her writing and daily life.
“It may sound strange, but these chickens helped me heal just as much as the medical professionals did,” she said. “Sometimes the best therapy doesn’t come in a clinic.”
