Marriage and Family Therapy Intern 70757 6909 Minstrel AveWest Hills, CA 91307818-340-7220E-mail: [email protected] Renee works with all ages, providing individual therapy, family therapy and couples counseling. For more information, please either call or email Renee. Check out her blog here! Renee’s expertise includes… Educational Therapy Study Skills Development Attention Deficit Disorder Reading and Writing Difficulties Dyslexia School and Test Anxiety Evaluation and Testing Special Education Language Processing Problems Tutoring Learning Disabilities Visual Processing Problems Low Academic Self-Esteem Asperger’s Syndrome Non-Verbal Learning…
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Linda Andron-Ostrow, Executive Director I spent a really incredible weekend with 800 therapists learning the importance of play creativity and mindfulness for the brain. We threw beach balls around the room and blew imaginary bubbles. We learned how to listen to each others sentences so that we could start a new sentence with the last letter of the last word. And we learned how to jump for joy. I realized how little time we make in our own lives…
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Mikal Britt, Behaviorist for 10+ years I heard a saying recently – “the only way to get out of your head is to get into your body”. This is one of those ideas that can be applied to anyone. But I find that it works especially well for those on the spectrum. Sometimes the mind can get stuck on a thought or a movie quote. The more the thought loops and spins, it’s like a snowball rolling down a hill,…
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Mikal Britt, Behaviorist for 10+ years This Thanksgiving season, I want to focus on ways we can be thankful for autism, which although a challenging condition at times, is also a wonderful and fascinating part of our world. So I am thankful that autism exists. I am thankful that we have different people in this world; that we are not all the same. I am thankful for brains that operate differently, in interesting and puzzling ways. I am thankful for…
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Mikal Britt, Behaviorist for 10+ years Teaching social skills is challenging because of all the subtleties and grey zones; because social skills are all about nuance and abstract assumptions which are sometimes difficult to explain or verbalize. For example, I worked with a client about hugging. More specifically, not hugging. Because he wanted to hug everyone, teachers and students alike, male and female. He was not a threatening person. In fact, quite the opposite; he is charming and charismatic and…
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Mikal Britt, Behaviorist for 10+ years NOTE: I write purely from personal experience, so any of my comments and ideas about people on the spectrum are my own theories and ideas, not necessarily based on scientific data. We’ve all heard the expression “the student is the real teacher”, right? Well it is true. It is very very true. Below is a list of the six qualities I have learned from my clients over the years. 1) Patience Building: This is…
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Eric Kastan, MA, LMFT, BCBA As a clinician and behavior analyst, I will not only highlight ABA theory and techniques, but expand to a larger sense of having a family with an identified member with special needs. One of the biggest issues I run into in my work, especially when doing in-home behavioral work, is integrating the family to a larger community. The community may include organizations that are special needs aware or support group, but I believe the larger…
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Eric Kastan, MA, LMFT, BCBA This month, I am departing a little bit of the ABA path. Part of being able to effectively intervene, manage, and shape your child’s behavior, is making sure you are also taking care of yourself. This, as a caregiver, is often over looked especially as your child gets older. Caregivers with an adult child on the spectrum are often not prepared mentally to deal with the high level of continued care needed for their child…
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Mikal Britt, Behaviorist for 10+ years OBSERVING: The Good Behaviorist will have an antennae sticking up at all times – monitoring and processing what is happening around. This means going deeper than the surface, seeing the subtext, paying attention to both the background and the foreground simultaneously. This ability makes the Good Behaviorist a better problem-solver, able to see solutions or triggers that other people would miss. LOOSENESS: What I really mean is adaptability. The Good Behaviorist will be able…
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Erica Kastan, MA, LMFT, BCBA There are numbers all around us. From gas prices to knowing what channel number NBC is on. Each one of these numbers has a symbolic and important meaning to its own context. Last month I wrote about understanding the functions of behavior and briefly stated that data collection is needed to understand if you are hypothesizing the right function, baseline, and progress of behavior. There are many ways to take data in ABA: Frequency, duration, latency, andInter…
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