History
In 2001, driven by my background and training in special education and developmental psychology and my vehement desire to guide, educate and teach families to meaningfully understand, respect and engage their child's individual emotional-sensory processing differences in the context of expanded communicative interactions and emergent pretend play, I began working with families in both Early Intervention and private practice.
Specialties
As a DIR/Floortime based therapist/special educator working with infants, toddlers and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and related affect-sensory and social-pragmatic communication challenges. I guide you at each stage to begin to understand and cultivate your child's core Functional Emotional Developmental capacities. This includes learning to join in and attribute purpose and meaning to how your child is navigating his/her world; engaging your child in simple to complex back and forth social-emotional-cognitive problem solving interactions using gestures and words; simple to complex pretend play sequences and full social-pragmatic language/communication and peer relationship skills. DIR/Floortime is a developmental peer reviewed evidenced-based treatment based on Affective neuroscience which targets not your child's surface-behaviors or selective tasks but your child's primary core Emotional Developmental capacities. The latter are critical for your child to be able to maintain continuous back and forth reciprocal emotional-engagement and social-pragmatic communication/ language. 75 minute sessions. Group sessions are available. Services are provided in the family home setting. Virtual services are available. At the request of families and professionals, I've created a FB site: Autism: DIR/Floortime For Families And Professionals providing the neuroevidenced-based foundations, e.g., Infant/childhood mental health, Interpersonal Neurobiology and Polyvagal theory.