Episode 219: Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) – with Patti Kasper

The episode transcript is below.

Carolyn Kiel: Welcome to Beyond 6 Seconds, the podcast that goes beyond the six second first impression to share the extraordinary stories of neurodivergent people. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel.

Carolyn Kiel: Thank you for joining me today! I’m really excited about today’s episode, because it’s about a topic that I haven’t covered on my podcast until now. It’s about Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, often abbreviated as FASD.

Despite being much more common than people realize, FASD is often left out of conversations about neurodiversity. I’m releasing this episode in September, which is FASD Awareness Month, so I thought it would be especially appropriate to share this conversation now — although of course, FASD awareness is important and relevant all year long.

My guest today, Patti Kasper, will define FASD at the beginning of our conversation. She will talk about the impacts of parents’ alcohol use before and during pregnancy, and some of the challenges that children and adults with FASD may face. A few of these challenges may be difficult for some listeners to hear about – they include suicide and experiences with the criminal justice system – so please use your discretion when listening to this episode. Patti also shares her own personal experience as a person with FASD and how she supports the FASD community.

If you enjoy learning about topics like FASD and neurodiversity, then I bet you’d enjoy my other podcast episodes too! Please follow my podcast on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube. If you’re not on those platforms very often, you can also subscribe to my free email newsletter that will send my latest episodes right to your inbox.

If you’d like to support my podcast even further, I also have a Buy Me A Coffee website, which is like a virtual tip jar where you can make a small donation to this show.

I want to give a big shout-out and a super big thank you to one of my listeners, Ian, who recently supported my podcast with a donation on Buy Me A Coffee! Listeners like Ian help me keep this podcast running, so I can continue to amplify neurodivergent voices and share these important stories.

To learn more about ways you can follow and support this podcast, and listen to my previous interviews, check out the show notes of this episode or visit my website, beyond6seconds.net. Above all, I really appreciate having you as a listener.

And now, let’s get to the interview!

On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Patti Kasper. Patti is a neurobehavioral coach and trainer who is passionate about supporting those affected by Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, or FASD. With over 30 years of experience in the fields of addiction, mental health, and child welfare, Patti recognized a need for greater outreach to help those impacted by FASD.

Patti’s approach to coaching and training draws on her personal experience with FASD, her degrees in social work and psychology, as well as her training as a certified facilitator of FACETS Neurobehavioral Model. She provides staff development training and coaching services, serving not only parents of children with brain based differences, but neurodivergent adults as well.

She regularly guests on podcasts and hosts a weekly podcast called Living with FASD. Her first book, Sip by Sip, Candid Conversations with People Diagnosed as Adults with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, FASD, launched in late August 2023, with its second edition soon to be released with additional interviews and updated research.

Patti, welcome to the podcast.

Patti Kasper: Thank you, Carolyn. I’m so glad to join you tonight.

Carolyn Kiel: I’m very happy to be talking with you about this topic. And FASD is, it’s something that I’ve wanted to talk about on the podcast for a long time because I just feel like it gets left out of conversations about neurodiversity and neurodivergence.

And it is such a, you know, it has such an influence and is, I think, much more common than people realize. So maybe if, if you could, yeah, if you can start out telling me more about like what FASD is so that the listeners understand more about what it is.

Patti Kasper: Well, first of all, you are correct that it gets left out when it shouldn’t be because it affects one in every 20 people, which is over twice as common as autism spectrum disorder. And it’s more common than autism, ADHD, cerebral palsy, and a few others all combined.

So, most people think of a spectrum as a line with going from severely affected to minimally affected. And with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, which technically is not a diagnosis, it’s the umbrella label. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is usually thought of as being the most severe form. But that’s not true. The facial features actually, all they indicate is that alcohol exposure was on days 17 through 21. That’s all that means.

So alcohol is, it’s a neurotoxin, right? It dissolves lipids. Well, what do you think all the protective barriers are in your body? They’re lipids, so alcohol goes wherever it wants to. It crosses the blood brain barrier, and it is more dangerous to the pre born baby than any other substance. It’s more dangerous than heroin, methamphetamines, any of them. It kills a lot of brain cells outright. And those that it does not kill, it alters the DNA through epigenetics. And oddly enough, that also happens because of the father’s drinking in the three months prior to conception.

Alcohol has an impact upon the structure of every cell that it touches. So every system in your body, whether it’s the skeletal system, the nervous system, like the central nervous system being the brain and spinal cord or the peripheral nerves, the immune, Immunology system, the digestive system, the heart circulatory system, no matter what system is being developed at the time of exposure, it will be altered. So it is a whole body diagnosis.

And there was a survey that came out a few years ago from the Adult Leadership Collaboration of the FASD Changemakers. It’s an international group of young people living with FASD, whose motto is nothing about us without us. They partner with researchers all over the world, and they want to make sure they have a seat at the table. Not to be trotted out as the token example, and then shushed up again, but really partnering with the researchers to to steer them towards what’s relevant and what’s not relevant, and what is falsely associated with that narrow view of what is FASD. Because in too many people’s minds, it’s still that 10 percent of the population, which is FAS.

So I hear from families all the time, “I wondered about that!” You know, so many parents are adoptive. And of course, from the foster care system, we know that, you know, up to 95 percent of kids are in the system because of parental substance use. Well, not all of them were using substances during pregnancy. But parents who are fostering or adopting can rightly assume that this is something that needs to be ruled out. And so often they’re told, “oh, he or she doesn’t have the face. Your kid’s, you know, fine. Yeah, there’s issues, but really, really, it’s fine. It’s not alcohol related because they don’t have the changes to the facial features.”

And the FAS is the only diagnosis under the umbrella where you see the characteristic facial features. And what those are, your viewers will probably be familiar with, there’s small eye openings, which you can see I have. This is called a philtrum and it is oftentimes it’s elongated, but it’s usually generally, generally flatter than most. All right. It’s not distinct. And there’s often also a non existent or very thin upper lip. So some of the older diagrams have many more anomalies drawn on them, but the only ones that are reliably alcohol exposed are those 3. But there’s a number of other telltale quirks with body development that should be picked up on by pediatricians, but so often are not because the face isn’t there.

And the other problem with the face being the thing that people look for is, you know, aside from the fact that it’s only 10% of us, as we hit puberty, our face morph into our adult likenesses. None of us are walking around with our baby face. And so features that were once clear are, you know, maybe not observable anymore. So I have a few baby pictures, but I, in order to have FAS confirmed for me, I would have to take them and also go and be subjected to the very few number of people who are actually trained to assess that.

Carolyn Kiel: What kind of cognitive challenges are seen with FASD?

Patti Kasper: It is the leading, it is the number one preventable cause of developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, and intellectual disabilities. However, in saying that, many people assume that people with FASD are very intellectually challenged and in need of lifelong services because of their lack of, you know, or because of their very low IQ score. And that’s very misleading. In testing, you know, a large sample of people for their IQ, the IQs range anywhere from 20, which is like down in the basement, all the way up past 135. So 135 is well into the gifted range. And it’s everywhere in between. But in order to qualify for disability services, it’s either intellectual functioning or it’s adaptive functioning, and the adaptive functioning is where we tend to have so many of the problems.

So there’s a lot of misinformation. One of those things is “it’s safe to drink until it’s pink and then you gotta put the bottle away.” Right? Once you know you’re pregnant, then you have to stop. However, think back to what I said about those facial features pop up if alcohol exposure is between days 17 and 21. And why is that? It’s because those are the, those are the five days during the entire pregnancy where the tissues are formed that later become the facial structures.

Carolyn Kiel: And that’s interesting because probably many women don’t even know that they’re pregnant at that point.

Patti Kasper: They don’t. Not that early.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Patti Kasper: They don’t.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Patti Kasper: Yeah. So, one of the things that I did in my way long ago life was I tried to go through nursing school and I was there long enough to have learned that it just wasn’t a good match for my strengths and challenges.

But I was there long enough to have been shocked by the fact that up to one third of women continue to their monthly cycles through their third month of pregnancy. Well, most women don’t stop, don’t make those lifestyle shifts until their lack of a period makes them think, I wonder if. And they test, confirm, and make all the healthy choices they need to make to, to make that baby be as healthy as possible. And so for the most part, as soon as we know, we stop drinking, except the damage is already done at that point.

Add to that what I mentioned earlier about the guys need to be sober for the 3 months prior to conception if they want to have a healthy child. So you know, it’s just, it’s, it’s a, it’s a call to action to be very intentional about our intimacy.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow. Yeah. And now I can understand why FASD is so common because yeah, yeah,

Patti Kasper: yeah. So we all know, you know, I mentioned earlier that I, you know, I have worked in social work. I’ve worked in child welfare for years and so many of the kids in the system have had parents who struggled with substance abuse.

I know from my first career path in addictions, I never met an addict who did not also drink. So, the the damage from alcohol is much more severe than from any of the other substances. But there are some really scary effects from especially for meth as well.

But alcohol, what it does, because it’s a solvent, it gets places where none of the other substances go. Right? And oddly enough, far more accurate in testing to see if a baby has been exposed, rather than do a blood test on the baby, which is what’s typically done, what needs to be done is tissue samples from the umbilical cord. That’s far more accurate.

Alcohol remains in the umbilical cord for 20 weeks. That’s four months and you think why in the world was it stay there so long? Because there’s no way for it to be metabolized. There’s nothing in the umbilical cord that can metabolize alcohol. It’s just not part of that structure.

And we’re used to thinking about livers being the organ that metabolizes alcohol, right? We certainly know that with adult alcoholics, you know, we look at the, the upper region of the abdomen. Is it big? How sick are they? But the baby’s liver is formed in the 1st month of pregnancy. However, the enzymes associated with alcohol metabolism don’t make their appearance until way down the road.

So there’s primarily there’s 2. There’s alcohol dehydrogenase, which, or ADH, and that’s actually first found in the baby’s brain. It doesn’t make it to the liver until the latter half of the eighth month. The other one, cytochrome 450p2e1, barely makes an appearance at all prior to delivery. So this whole time, the baby’s not able to clear the alcohol.

But if you, if you noticed, I said it is in, ADH is in the brains, which means alcohol is getting broken down in the brain and it breaks down to a toxic particle called what is it? Acetyl aldehyde, there it is! The acetyl aldehyde, basically, it, it kills. It’s like a chemical IED going off in the brain. Just like an IED, the effects are random. It’s not in any one part of the brain. It’s everywhere. So it affects functions in our brain for all kinds of things. Now, if we compare our brain to a computer system, what I mentioned earlier about brain tasks, that’s like the operating system of our hard drive.

Carolyn Kiel: Okay. Yeah.

Patti Kasper: Okay. The hard drive has to do certain things that enables the software to run.

And when we enter in commands, we’re interfacing with the software. But if the hardware is broken, the software is going to have a lot of glitches. It’s just not going to work right. So all of everyone living with an FASD has glitches all over the place.

Because their hardware, the hard drive has had an explosion, right? FASD is basically a closed head brain injury for each time that the mom drinks. And we can’t blame mom because, you know, like we talked about earlier, mom probably didn’t know until it was too late. And alcohol is legal. It is socially embraced. People are in love with alcohol, right? It’s just not, not appropriate.

You know, my, it turns out my mom drank every day while she carried me. She would not have done that had she known. You know, it was back in the 60s. It was before anyone had discovered FAS. She didn’t know.

Carolyn Kiel: You didn’t even find out for yourself that you had FASD until much later, in your adulthood.

Patti Kasper: I was 56. And there’s a lot of us out there that find out in our 40s and 50s and 60s, because FASD is just not talked about, or it’s referenced in such a negative light, why would you even want to consider it? Or you don’t do the things done by the people who have made it such a nemesis.

But let me ask you this. So let’s think about brain tasks for a moment. Tell me three things that you did today between when you got up and, and when we sat down together, three things your brain did for you.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, that my brain did for me? I would say, well, it, it got me to, do my morning routine, you take a shower, you brush your teeth, you eat your breakfast. Yeah, I guess it, it got me to, to go to work and write some documents and then decide where to have dinner. Yeah.

Patti Kasper: All right. So your morning routine, what does anyone’s brain have to be able to do in order to do their morning routine?

Carolyn Kiel: I mean, you have to be able to kind of sequence activities and, you know, I don’t know if you actively remember what you need to do.

Patti Kasper: Mm-Hmm.

Carolyn Kiel: or if it’s just a habit or it’s part of, you know, something you don’t even think about.

Patti Kasper: But even habits are powered by the brain.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Patti Kasper: So there’s memory involvement. You have to be able to access the memory drive. Right? And the particular pieces that you want. You have to pull all those out into your working memory or the, you know, onto your “desk,” right? So to speak, you, you take the papers out of the filing cabinet, you put them on the desk. You have to be able to sort and sequence and all that stuff. Then you have to be able to galvanize the body to act upon all that in the proper sequence. So if you think about taking a shower, you know, how many steps are involved in taking a shower?

Carolyn Kiel: There’s a lot of steps, actually, if you break it down.

Patti Kasper: On average, there’s 18. You have to get your clothes. You have to get your towel. You have to make sure you have all the supplies that you’re going to need. Carry them all over there. You have to remember which way do you turn the water to adjust the temperature. You have to remember to get in, get under the water, come back out, wash the hair, get back in, rinse, get back out, condition, right? Get back in, rinse, get back out, and then wash, shave, whatever else your routine involves. You know, I don’t know about you, but if you’ve ever been so busy thinking about your day that you don’t rinse the conditioner out of your hair, it’s not good!

Carolyn Kiel: If you miss a step.

Patti Kasper: You end up getting back in there.

Unless you mind, you know, if, if you don’t mind walking around with your hair looking like you haven’t washed it in 50 years, you know, but most of us are going to get back in. But I mean, that’s just one thing.

The, the point of all that is we, we take for granted everything our brains do for us.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-Hmm.

Patti Kasper: We think in terms of activities or behaviors, but the problems are the underlying brain tasks. And that’s what like the Neurobehavioral Model is based on, where it really gets into all the different aspects of brain function that make behaviors possible. You know, as, as humans, we are so used to talking about good behavior, bad behavior. Behavior is not moral. It just is what it is. I mean, if you look the word up, it talks about the way a living organism operates, whether it’s plant, animal or person. Right? So we are accustomed to judging behavior as if it is moral. And so when people have, for instance, their ability to learn from experience, or their ability to generalize learning into other situations, when those things are compromised, we tell them they’re not trying hard enough.

Carolyn Kiel: Right. Yeah.

Patti Kasper: Or if they have a faulty memory and they, even though they could do it yesterday, they can’t do it today to save their life, no matter how bad they want to, we judge them negatively for that.

If similarly to what you see with autism, with the social interactions, not being able to accurately read facial language, body language, tone of voice, the inflections and all that stuff. If we struggle with that, then people tend to judge us harshly. Right? And we get bullied.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Patti Kasper: So basically because FASD, only really only 10 percent of the people might get considered for it because of the facial changes. 90 percent of people, more than that really, are missed because there’s no facial changes. So their behavioral struggles are judged to be a result of choice or intention, right?

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Patti Kasper: People with FASD have a 90 percent concurrent mental health diagnosis. Anxiety and depression are among the highest. Anger issues also. So when we are judged, it throws us into the mode of, we have to defend ourselves. Right?

Carolyn Kiel: Mm hmm.

Patti Kasper: And like most people, we respond typically with fight, flight, freeze, or fawning reflexes. And that’s the key. They are reflexes because they’re driven by that survival part of our brain that kicks in whenever there’s any issue about safety. And when we get the message from others, either in their body language, there’s something they say, we go into defense mode. Can you imagine feeling that dozens of times every single day? Because of the way your brain has been rewired from the alcohol, you need different ways of doing things, but our society doesn’t offer that very well. Right?

In California, the, in order to get help from the disability services, your IQ has to be below 70, 70 or below. Well, mine’s 135, but my adaptive skills need some tweaking. They’re not that awful because I didn’t figure it out till I was 56. But, they could have easily, could have easily gotten me into some humongous jams in my transitional years.

Along with sometimes not reading facial language correctly, because we grow up with constant rejection, we are people pleasers. Because we are so often bullied, we are suckers for any outlying groups that are looking for patsies, victims, scapegoats. FASD is way over represented in the, in the justice system because people with FASD are prime targets to be set up to take the fall for other people’s crimes. Or because they don’t realize that what they’re being asked to do is illegal. So they do it and of course they’re the ones going to prison.

You know, there is accountability. You have to account for what your body has done. But where we really need to take into account sentencing, because punishment’s not where it’s at. People need support, they need diagnosis, they need to learn how to be neurodiverse in a harsh world.

If you are constantly, dozens of times daily, hundreds of times, just routinely taken advantage of, or misunderstood, or told you’re doing things on purpose when you’re not, told you’re being lazy, not trying hard enough, whatever the case is, you’re going to end up with depression, with anxiety, with rage. You may become suicidal. FASD suicide rates are sky high. Or you may, if you have an addiction, turn to the substance or activity of that addiction in order to cope with the chronic blame, shame, and punishment for things beyond your control, for the effects of an unrecognized brain injury.

If you’re in an accident or you have a stroke and you go to the hospital, they send you to rehab and the doctors at the rehab say, what was their level of functioning before? And that becomes the target. That’s what you work for. But with FASD, the brain injuries happened before birth. How do you know where the target is?

Carolyn Kiel: How do you, how do you support people who are impacted by FASD?

Patti Kasper: You know, with my background in, in child welfare for the last two decades plus, I got tired of watching kids fall through the cracks and watching families give up because they’re like, “Oh, we didn’t sign up for this!” and because they’re not properly prepared because nobody knows, right? People can’t teach what they haven’t learned yet. And without knowing all the ways that alcohol affects someone, there’s no way that parents can be prepared adequately to care for these kids.

And so I tried trauma training, right? I became a TBRI practitioner and that was good. But it wasn’t enough. And a friend of mine said, you know, my three kids all have FAS. And so that brought me down this, this path of learning about it. And I tend to, I’m, I’m a bit of a geek. I dive in and I go for certifications for things that I want, that I think are going to help me in my work. And so, I took a year long course, well, I had to take several months of training before I could even qualify to take the year long course, to get certified in the FACETS neurobehavioral model.

And as I’m learning about all these primary characteristics, right, or all the ways that the brain is changed from alcohol, I’m thinking, “oh, I do that, I do that. Oh, God, I do that too!” And they have you do an exercise in group and then the homework is to do that same exercise with your family and then afterward you practice having conversations about neurodiversity. Everybody’s brain is different. We all have different strengths. We all have different challenges. We all have different preferences for how we like to learn different kinds of subjects. And if you put those three domains together, we are as unique as our fingerprint. So that is the, we really need to embrace neurodiversity. We embrace diversity for all kinds of things, but you cannot get more central to your identity than how you perceive and interact with the world, which is all about brain.

And so my husband happened to be walking through the room as I was having a conversation with my mom, having just completed the exercise with her. She lives with us, so she’s the guinea pig. And he very flippantly said, “Oh, so that’s what’s wrong with you!” He’s just being a sarcastic jerk, right? Didn’t mean anything. He thought he was funny and he was. And I turned to him and my eyebrows shot up and I’m like, “I don’t know!” And I turned back to my mom and I said, “Mom, did you drink while you carried me?” She’s like, “Oh yeah, every day!” With such surprise as if to say, doesn’t everybody? Because back then, everybody did.

And you know, she came from that era just, just after Prohibition, and she was among the first era of women who really were liberated. Right? And you gotta do what the guys do. And part of that was drinking, especially at parties. And, yeah, so my oldest brother and I both paid for that. So, my, the, the 1 who’s in the middle is, is, yeah he’s not into this. He’s not. Of course, it could be that his wife owns a wine store.

There are some very physical things, right, that, that are affected. It’s not just about the brain. And that’s also part of what confuses everybody. So, it’s a very physical condition. That was something I keep forgetting to get back to with that study, that survey that the ALC did, they found that there are 428 comorbid physical conditions that people with FAS have, FASD, have a significantly higher risk of getting than the general public. 428. So, knowing if you have exposure, you know, it can be really tricky for, for people who have been adopted out of foster care or adopted out of overseas orphanages. But knowing that part of history is part of your medical record because doctors need to know that it, it factors into differential diagnoses, right?

But as far as what I do to help people, I walk them through, how do you identify underlying brain tasks for the behaviors that have been problematic in your home, whether it’s your child or your spouse or your student at school, or your client in your mental health caseload, you know, or social services caseload, whatever it is. I walk people through how do you identify these brain tasks and then how do you identify their learning preferences and their strengths so that you can build upon their strengths in a way that works with how they best remember things and you get those accommodations in place. So accommodations are just workarounds, but they’re as ethical for people who are neurodiverse as they are for people whose disabilities are visible if they’re blind or in a wheelchair.

And the other thing is with FASD is Mental Health will say, “oh this is a developmental disorder. Go over to the other agency” and then the developmental the Disability Agencies will say, “oh, it’s a behavioral thing go over to Mental Health.” And they’re going like this. And then people like me are like, I don’t care who’s, who wants to claim responsibility. I want to give everybody better tools.. So that’s where I come in. Part of my company Patricia Kasper Training Services does professional development training with agencies, whether it’s mental health or developmental or social services, schools, whatever it is.

And then the other part of my company is as a coach. Typically what I find is people come to me and want help with their kids, and at some point, they realize that they themselves are neurodiverse. And the more they learn about FASD, they often begin to think, to suspect that might be the case for them. So not everyone is as fortunate as I am that in my fifties, my mom was still alive to answer that question. I may never have figured it out. I have since been diagnosed.

Diagnosis changes everything and nothing at the same time, right? It doesn’t change your past. It doesn’t change your history. It doesn’t change any of your present circumstances. But what it does do is it, it enables you to see yourself differently and give yourself grace and stop beating yourself up for being different. There’s no shame in being different. But as, as young people, we are, we’re always blamed and shamed. You’re not trying hard enough. You’re not doing hard enough. And, and what happens when you go to counseling and mental health, right? You get the damn sticker chart!

Carolyn Kiel: Oh yeah. Yeah. Right.

Patti Kasper: That doesn’t do any good! Traditional techniques, you know, like, like with autism spectrum, applied behavioral analysis is the gold standard, but really it doesn’t help a lot of the kids. Yeah. Right? And the reason is because it is compliance based. It is motivationally based.

You know, our whole society is built upon and it functions on learning theory. which is predicated on the behavior paradigm, right? The way that we look, a paradigm is, is something that vast populations all agree upon, right? And the behavior paradigm says that all behavior’s chosen. So if you don’t see the motivation, if it’s not patently obvious, then it must be secondary gain. Right? Negative attention’s better than none. Oh BS!

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Patti Kasper: It’s such a crock!

Carolyn Kiel: Right. Yeah.

Patti Kasper: Right? Behavior reflects how well or how poorly your brain is working in that moment. You cannot motivate away, right, through rewards or consequences or sticker charts, you cannot motivate away the reflexive actions of a brain injury. You can’t do it any more than you can punish away an asthma attack or restore sight to the blind by telling them “try harder, you could read it if you wanted to.” it’s no different. There’s no traditional technique that will restore cells that were killed years ago. But what we can do is develop those workarounds, right? We can still do just about anything. We just do things differently.

Carolyn Kiel: And building an understanding of that in society is really important that people understand more that behavior is not about, you know, especially with neurodivergent people often is not about a choice. It is literally our brains and the situations that we’re in and how they interact. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you, Patti, for sharing your, your story and all of the work that you’re doing with the FASD community. Where can people go to find out more about the types of services that you offer?

Patti Kasper: My website is PatriciaKasper.com. Kasper’s with a K. You can find me on Facebook. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find my podcast Living with FASD, Candid Conversations with Patti Kasper on Spotify, on YouTube, on Rumble, on Patreon. There are a couple ways of supporting the work that I do. As you well know, it, it’s an investment to bring a podcast out. So I do have both free and paid levels on Patreon. I also just became a an affiliate for Curious Elixirs, which are craft [non-alcoholic] cocktails. They’re full of adaptogens. So they do boost your mood and enhance your mood and help you relax or help you pep up whatever, whatever you’re looking for, they have a formula for you. But they’re really sophisticated. So if you are trying to quit drinking or you never were a drinker, but you want something other than a carbonated beverage or iced tea, then curious elixirs might be the trick. But that also helps support the work that I do.

I have a book called Sip by Sip: Candid Conversations with People Diagnosed as Adults with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders. And you mentioned that at the very beginning, the second edition is about to roll out within a month. So hopefully by Labor Day, it should be out. So it’s, it’s an interview style, right? So it’s like reading one of our conversations. But I interacted with many other people who figured it out when they were grown up what their struggles had been about the whole time, right? And the relief and the grace that they experienced through that. And then how most adults that I’ve met, that learn as adults, they want to pay it forward by becoming an advocate. So I, I always support the work of those who are doing the same kind of thing.

With my clientele, I have a four month package for parents of littles with FASD. I have a four month package for neurodivergent adults where I go through the, the nuts and bolts of the neurobehavioral or neurodevelopmental approach. But I also, if it’s parents of littles, I also fold in a lot of other things like generational parenting styles and that kind of thing. Trauma, well, the trauma is part of my work with adults too.

Carolyn Kiel: I’ll put those links in the show notes so that people can find them.

Yeah. Thank you, Patti. It’s been great talking with you. I really appreciate you.

Patti Kasper: It’s been so much fun and I enjoy listening to your show, by the way.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, thank you so much.

Carolyn Kiel: Thanks for listening to Beyond 6 Seconds. Please help me spread the word about this podcast. Share it with a friend, give it a shout out on your social media, or write a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. You can find all of my episodes and sign up for my free newsletter at Beyond6seconds.net. Until next time.