Melanie Weber
speaker
894 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2023
last heard 23 Oct
Melanie Weber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
You know, he was not trying to tell me how much he loved Halloween.
He was trying to communicate to me that he was feeling anxious.
And he had been feeling anxious for several weeks at this point.
And that's when it hit me you know these repeated phrases that has to be real communication, you know the narrative i've been told that it's not real and we should just ignore it.
It was clear that he was communicating that he was anxious and I was just missing it and.
it's that day it really sat with me that echolalia is not just them meaningly, you know, repeating things.
It's often communication in disguise.
So, you know, for too long as therapists, we've been told just reduce it, redirect it, or completely eliminate it.
But what if those repeated phrases are actually the child's most powerful communication tool?
That was something that I like
had to dive into, how could I use this to bridge that gap between echolalia and communication?
So what's hard for people, I think, to understand when we talk about echolalia, it's viewed as this deficit because the meaning isn't always clear to us.
You know, they're repeating vampire's Halloween nightmare before Christmas, but it's not always clear unless you know that child very intimately that that's communicating that they're anxious.
So he was telling me he was anxious by listing all these things that made him nervous.
I just didn't know enough about him.
And I wasn't reading his body language to pick up on that.
And that has happened to me time and time.
And again, when I look back at clients and I can say, gratefully, I learned from this experience and I always started like going deeper and looking beyond like what they were saying to what they would mean.
And I've had clients say things like, you know, that's a green apple.
And that was something he had picked up in feeding therapy where it was he didn't like the green apple.
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