Play therapy has been a valuable tool for our son. He meets with a play therapist about once a month to work on things like anger management and stress management. His counselor used to work in the school district for many years and has written several books related to autism, anger in children and oppositional defiance disorder. Our son enjoys meeting with this particular therapist and I think it helps that he is a male counselor, which is unusual it seems. This counselor charges $90 per session and doesn’t take insurance. He does, however, give a detailed receipt with the diagnostic code so I could self-file if I chose to.
He meets once a month for an hour and they talk while playing baseball, hitting the punching bag, kicking the ball or even building Lego’s. He has given our son multiple tools to help him stay calm. It is changing slowly.
Other counselors and Licensed Social Workers.
He has met with a couple of other counselors over the past few years. One, who was a Reactive Attachment Specialist met with him twice but felt he wasn’t a good fit, and referred us to another counselor as it was her opinion that he was probably going to be diagnosed with PDD-NOS.
He met with another lady who, because his behavior in her office was exemplary could find no reason to keep treating him, although she was completely aware of the issues we were having at home.
We have met with another group counseling center who specialize in reactive attachment therapy; however, our son absolutely refuses to work with them. It didn’t go well. I am ok with working with him at home for now, we seem to be making progress and that’s all that really matters in the end right? I am learning how to help him maximise his learning styles too. ADD children apparently learn in a very different manner than very left brain kids, so to help him ace school and feed his perfectionism I am learning how to help him learn! If that makes sense?
Most of the counselors we have used have been out of network, and range anywhere from $90 per hour to $135.00 per hour. We usually try to limit the amount of counseling partly due to this reason. Although if I had the money I would definitely do more.
Leave a Reply