Multidisciplinary Holistic Therapy for Executive Function and Social Communication Support

When I'm not in session, I like to spend my time with my friends and my family. I have two daughters, lots of pets and everyone in my family is very active. So we like to go hiking and camping and we're engaged in a lot of social activities with our community. Hi, I'm Erica Bland. I'm a speech language pathologist and ADHD rehab specialist. My specialty areas are emotional regulation, executive function, and social communication. I've been with Perspectives Center for Holistic Therapy for six years. What clients can expect when they work with me is a whole child approach. I believe that parents and caregivers are the agents of change and I'm just there to plant the seed. So I'll be working collaboratively both with my client as well as providing training techniques and strategies to support my client. A little bit about my background and why I'm passionate about speech therapy is I have a personal connection to someone with communication differences so I was raised with my sibling who has did not speak until he was three as well as I started out in the field as a special education teacher. So from the time that I was in college, I was working with children with a range of differences and communication differences which led my passion to become more narrowly focused and I really wanted to focus on the speech aspects of helping someone communicate more directly on a one on one basis. What made me want to join Perspectives is that there are a range of therapists with a range of different backgrounds and they're highly collaborative. So I, as a therapist, have an opportunity to be a part of a really strong multidisciplinary team and we're able to meet each family where they need support and support various aspects whether it be siblings, parent training or the individual child, him or herself. Some of the approaches that I like to use as a therapist are primarily all sensory based. I am what's considered a sensory based speech language pathologist which means we're not going to be at the table if a child has a low arousal system, we're going to be doing an emotional check in while we play basketball or we're going to be using a lot of kinetic sand or Play-doh and my foundational principles of working with my client is that I follow their lead. So what you'll see in my therapy is following a child's interests and increasing their intrinsic motivation in order to be a part of the sessions. because they want to be a part of the sessions. We use a range of games, feelings, check ins, a lot of collaboration and reflexive questioning to figure out what is happening, why it's happening, what went well, what didn't and how we can get a picture in our head what to do better. My therapy can benefit my clients because my main goal is to help them understand how their brain works and what works for them when they take in information and what doesn't. My goal is to teach a growth mindset as well as flexibility and situational awareness. Those are pretty foundational skills when it comes to just engaging with the world and if you don't have emotional regulation or executive functioning anything else that you try to work on is not going to have the proper foundational skills or support. Holistic therapy, what that means to me as a speech therapist is that you have to meet a child where they're at and then develop structures around that child in order for them to succeed. So it's the idea that kids do well if they can not kids do well if they want to. In order to make a child do well we have to make sure that there are environmental supports in place, there's enough knowledge around that child's treatment team in order to make that child do well. So holistic therapy to me is looking at all the aspects of that child's life whether it's the family, it's the school, it's their social life and how we're going to make them do well in all of those areas.