FASD Informed Therapeutic Practice Programme
A bespoke, trauma-responsive programme helping therapists differentiate their practice for children, young people and adults with prenatal alcohol exposure, FASD and overlapping needs.
This programme brings FASD-informed understanding into therapeutic practice. It supports professionals to retain the integrity of their own modality while adapting assessment, engagement, communication, pacing, goals and outcome measures to the person’s neurodevelopmental profile.
Each programme is scoped around those being supported by you, the therapeutic context and the wider system around them, ensuring that participants leave with differentiated strategies that can be used in practice.
Who is the programme for?
Art, drama, music, play and creative arts therapists.
Occupational therapists and sensory integration practitioners.
Speech and language therapists and communication specialists.
Clinical, counselling, educational and forensic psychologists.
Psychotherapists, counsellors, family therapists and systemic practitioners.
Dyadic developmental psychotherapy, attachment-focused and trauma practitioners.
Physiotherapists, body-based practitioners and therapeutic movement specialists.
Equine-assisted, nature-based, forest-school and outdoor therapeutic practitioners.
Mental health, learning disability, neurodevelopmental and specialist CAMHS teams.
Therapeutic social workers, key workers and professionals providing relational support.
Programme aims
Differentiate trauma-informed practice so that it is also FASD-informed and developmentally appropriate.
Understand how brain and nervous system differences may affect therapeutic readiness, participation and progress.
Reduce the risk of interpreting neurodevelopmental difficulty as resistance, avoidance, manipulation or lack of motivation.
Develop accessible, safe and measurable therapeutic goals based on functional ability rather than chronological age alone.
Strengthen shared formulation and consistency across therapy, home, education, health and care.
Equip each discipline with practical, role-relevant take-away strategies.
Four-stage programme
Stage 1 – Understanding the FASD-informed therapeutic profile: prenatal alcohol exposure, brain and nervous system development, and the neurobehavioural impact of FASD. The session explores the person’s spiky profile, dysmaturity and asynchronous development, including differences in adaptive functioning, working memory, processing speed, executive load, interoception and affect regulation. Therapists consider how sporadic mastery, sleep debt, reduced capacity and increasing allostatic load can affect whether a person remains within their threshold for therapeutic engagement.
Stage 2 – Engagement, assessment and formulation: creating predictability and psychological safety through a Low Arousal, low demand approach; adapting consent and assent to the person’s functional capacity; and recognising verbal masking, suggestibility and confabulation. Therapists consider the value of declarative language, visual and kinesthetic cues, somatic signals and supported communication to reduce executive load. Information is gathered across environments to distinguish “cannot yet” from “will not” and develop a strengths-based multidisciplinary formulation.
Stage 3 – Differentiated therapeutic application: adapting the therapist’s modality, session structure, sensory environment, pace, language, relational expectations, activities and measures of progress. Participants develop environmental accommodations and practical scaffolding, using an external brain, co-regulation, re-teaching and set-shifting support to reduce working-memory demands and support perseverance without reinforcing perseveration. Learning is applied to anonymised case material so that every discipline leaves with realistic FASD-informed strategies.
Stage 4 – Safeguarding, integration and transition planning: applying an FASD-informed lens to suggestibility, confabulation, verbal masking and capacity, disclosures, boundaries, dependency and risk. The session considers how rising allostatic load, reduced interoceptive awareness, perseveration or crossing an individual threshold may alter presentation and increase vulnerability. Therapists align therapeutic goals with education, health, care and family plans, agree environmental accommodations and external-brain support, and plan carefully for endings, changes of professional and longer-term transitions.
Delivery, clinical supervision and continued professional support
The programme can be delivered to a single therapeutic service or a mixed multidisciplinary group. Before delivery, we gather information about the service, participant roles, client group and current challenges so that examples, activities and take-away resources are relevant to each discipline. Bitesize live online sessions can be arranged around clinical commitments, with opportunities for guided case reflection between stages.
Delivery can also be connected to a planned programme of FASD-informed clinical supervision and consultation, helping practitioners translate learning into safe, sustainable changes within their own modality and scope of practice.
FASD-informed supervision provides a protected reflective space for therapists to examine how their own modality is interacting with the person’s neurobehavioural profile, trauma history, adaptive functioning and everyday environment. Supervision can explore therapeutic pacing, verbal masking and capacity, working-memory and processing-speed demands, somatic signals, interoception, affect regulation, dependency, boundaries, endings and the therapist’s own responses to complexity. It supports practitioners to notice when allostatic load or sleep debt may have reduced capacity, when a person may be approaching their threshold, and when the intervention requires greater scaffolding, co-regulation, environmental accommodation or a Low Arousal, low demand approach.
Supervision is collaborative and practice-focused. It does not replace the practitioner’s professional or regulatory supervision, nor does it direct work outside their competence. Instead, it adds a specialist FASD-informed lens to formulation, safeguarding and therapeutic decision-making.
This may include reviewing anonymised case material, considering the impact of suggestibility or confabulation on disclosures, differentiating sporadic mastery from reliable capacity, and identifying where consultation with safeguarding, medical, psychological, speech and language, occupational therapy or other colleagues is required.
Consultation for stuck or complex cases is available when progress has stalled, presentations vary sharply across environments, risk is increasing or the professional network holds competing explanations of need. Consultation begins by gathering information from relevant settings and mapping the person’s spiky profile, dysmaturity, asynchronous development, strengths, vulnerabilities, environmental demands and current support. Together, we consider whether apparent resistance may instead reflect executive load, perseveration, set-shifting difficulty, communication mismatch, sensory distress, reduced capacity or an intervention that relies too heavily on verbal insight and recall.
The consultation can support the team/individual to:
Develop or refine a shared FASD-informed, trauma-responsive formulation.
Identify immediate safeguarding priorities, professional boundaries and clear escalation routes.
Review therapeutic goals against functional rather than chronological development.
Adapt session structure, language, sensory demand, pacing and expectations.
Agree external-brain supports, declarative language, kinesthetic cues, re-teaching and consistent co-regulation strategies.
Clarify the contribution of each discipline and reduce duplicated, fragmented or conflicting intervention.
Plan for transitions, endings, changes of therapist and predictable periods of reduced capacity.
Create a practical action plan with named responsibilities, review points and indicators of meaningful change.
Support can be offered through individual supervision, group supervision, one-off or ongoing case consultation, team formulation sessions, review of anonymised therapeutic plans and attendance at multidisciplinary meetings.
Participants also receive FASD Informed™ certification, practical resources and membership of our wider professional network. This provides a route for reflection as new information emerges, helping professionals move from repeated crisis response towards coordinated, preventative and sustainable therapeutic support.
The outcome is not a separate FASD therapy model. It is safer, more accessible and more effective therapeutic practice, differentiated to the child, young person or adults brain, body, communication and everyday environment across a lifetime.
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