For listeners of Autism: A New Perspective, Kat Lee is a familiar and comforting voice guiding conversations on child development and growth. But in a unique role-reversal episode, the tables turned as Dr. Sheely stepped in to interview Kat about her own life, career pivots, and entry into the autism community.
A Passion for Radio and Connection
Long before autism entered her vocabulary, Kat’s heart belonged to music and broadcasting. By age 19, she was entirely driven by the prospect of working in news or running a campus radio station, waking up at six in the morning with a deep passion for the dynamic, ever-changing nature of the industry.
While her career path looked entirely different in those early college days, Kat’s early experience interviewing people navigating real-life struggles—including a Sunday morning show featuring stories of overcoming adversity—inadvertently built the foundation for her future work with hurting families.
The Shock of a Two-Year-Old Diagnosis
That trajectory shifted abruptly when her son began showing signs of trouble around the age of two. Receiving an autism diagnosis back then often felt like hitting a brick wall. Kat recalls a well-meaning doctor telling her there was nothing that could be done and advising her to focus instead on her older daughter.
Instead of accepting a future written off by clinical limitations, Kat and her husband chose to keep parenting the way they always had, trying to figure out how to teach their son as he experienced increased dysregulation and speech loss. Like many parents facing a sudden diagnosis, Kat entered what she describes as “tunnel vision”—a state of intense “saving mode” where everything else moves to the background.
Building a Community from Scratch
Finding herself in a landscape with virtually zero services in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Kat didn’t wait for help to arrive. She connected with other families facing a massive wave of new diagnoses, eventually stepping in as president of FEET North Texas to help parents who were completely lost. At the time, their primary focus was behavior-analytic work because options simply didn’t exist.
Finding RDI®: Training the Parents
While early interventions offered structure, Kat often found herself asking the difficult, “irritating” questions that therapists struggled to answer: What does this mean for his learning in the future? How do we address his actual internal vulnerabilities?
Traditional training models were built to train professional therapists, not parents. It wasn’t until her son was 11 years old that a trusted consultant pointed her toward Dr. Steven Gutstein and RDI®. For Kat, discovering a program specifically designed to teach parents how to build a real guiding relationship changed everything.
Stay tuned for Part 2 as Kat dives deeper into her transition to becoming a full-time RDI consultant and the importance of protecting family life and avoiding burnout.
Learn More and Get Connected
Want to learn more about the RDI® approach and how it supports meaningful relationships and long-term development? Click here to discover more about RDI® and connect with a certified consultant who can walk with you on your journey.
Full Transcript
Kat Lee: Welcome back to Autism A New Perspective, the podcast show where we help you understand what’s going on in the mind of your child and we always always encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee and in this week’s podcast, Dr. Sheely asked me how I got into RDI. Let’s listen in.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: When we first met, which was I think at a training Steve did in either Dallas or Fort Worth, Texas, you were, you already had the diagnosis and you had been thinking about the trajectory you wanted for you and your husband and your son. I’m not sure your daughter was born, I think she was. Anyway, but what I was always curious about was how you made that switch from your early goals for yourself to being in the field of autism because were you head of an organization in Dallas or Fort Worth at the time?
Kat Lee: Yes, I was actually at that time president, when you all came, I was president of Feet North, Texas, the parent group that we had started as so many had in the country to help just help parents and our main focus at that time was behavior analytic work because parents in Dallas, Fort Worth, there were just no services for anything. I mean that’s not hyperbolic and so they didn’t know what to do. They were part of this big increase in diagnosis and it wasn’t really as much like we’re just giving the diagnosis more, we were seeing really highly impacted children.
We didn’t know why. When we first had a diagnosis, we thought, oh, you know, it’s one in ten thousand, you know, wow, that’s so unusual, but then there was somebody a few blocks over, somebody a couple of miles away, we all just started finding each other. So that’s what I was doing at the time, just trying to help parents and we all kind of got together to try to help other parents.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: And that’s continued, that’s continued, but what I suspect about your early career, graduation from college and and what you were thinking of doing wasn’t about having, wasn’t about sharing parent groups.
Kat Lee: So I love music. And by about 19, all I wanted to do was either news or a DJ on the radio. And so I pursued that at college with the campus radio station, end up running the station.
That’s how I would get up. I’d get up. This is motivation for a college student.
I’d get up at six in the morning, go turn the station on. It was a real passion. And I, as soon as I could not take classes and do internships, I did.
I think one year, I think I had two internships in a job. I just loved it. I still love it.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: Could you talk for a minute, Katherine, about how, how your life shifted when your son was given the diagnosis of autism?
Kat Lee: Well, as I know, I’ve said before, the way the information is given is really significant to parents. So in our case, and I think, unfortunately, even still today, it was, you know, kind of like an end at the ripe old age of two years old. The doctor who was kind, but was like, there’s really nothing you can do.
You need to pay attention to your daughter who is a little bit older. And, you know, there’s some speech therapy, things like that, but there’s really nothing that you can do. And I remember saying to him, that can’t be true.
Like that can’t be true. And he’s like, well, you know, that is, and I’m sure he was thinking, well, well meaning, but thinking she’s just gonna have to learn to accept this. So, so that we didn’t accept that.
And for one reason or another, I don’t know why, but we just decided to keep parenting him the way we had because it had been going really well. He was just more distressed. He was pretty laid back as a baby and we had a lot of fun with him.
And so we thought, well, we’re going to keep doing what we were doing, but we’re going to try to figure out how to teach him because what he had lost was his, some of his speech and connection with us. He was dysregulated more. So that’s, that’s how it shifted.
And then eventually we talked to other parents and we decided to start an ABA program in our home, the two of us, and I started learning what I could and started teaching him. And that’s kind of was the big shift for us.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: And at that time, having, having had this wonderful career that was getting going and having had the college experience, did you feel that that was over for you or did you have in the back of your mind, maybe I’ll get back to it. What was your feeling about your own career?
Kat Lee: You know, at that time I was so, I don’t know if overwhelms the right word or focused or both of what was going to happen to our family, what was going to happen to our daughter, what was going to happen to Brian and I and our relationship, what was going to happen with my mother who lived, you know, what was, and then of course what was going to happen to my sweet son. I, it kind of shifted for me and I got, as my mother said, I got almost, almost as she put it, tunnel. Like I like, I like the way I’ve heard people talk about it.
It’s a, it’s a saving, like you’re trying to save your child. So when that gets in place, if anybody’s experienced that, you know, that other things tend to move to the back, but I, I never stopped loving that industry. I still do.
And I, I think that, you know, that’s always been there. I used to tell my husband when I drive by a station, I think of just running in and asking him if I could read the news. So I’ve never stopped.
Whatever brings, life brings to you, you learn from your experiences and you can bring that into other areas. And that’s what I think is wonderful about what you and Dr. Gutstein have allowed me to do, which is these podcasts and interviews over the years.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: It’s been fabulous. And as I said, you really are, we wouldn’t use the word poster child, but you are the face in many, many areas of RDI. Tell me about the shift that you went through from being, being a behavior analyst to becoming actually an RDI consultant.
I mean, that’s a pretty big leap because, could you talk about that a little bit?
Kat Lee: Yes, it’s really a beautiful story. I think anyway, at least I think it’s a beautiful story for us. Brian and I love to be very involved with our children and he would come home after work, no matter how late it was and throw his tie off and do something with both of them or one of them or whatever.
And we just wanted to know what we now call, we wanted to know how to guide our child who had some pretty severe vulnerabilities, particularly in what he understood in terms of communication and then what he could put out. And so we went through training that therapists go through to learn how to teach him. So the thing was, and I’m always careful with this because I know that everybody who did mentor and help us was well-meaning in those early days.
They really were used to training therapists, people who were going to go into this field, not to training parents at the level that we felt like we needed to be trained in order to really know what was going on inside his brain and to be able to teach him. And while we have always had, since that time, great people with him, we felt like they could teach him all they could, but if we weren’t involved in that and didn’t know what was going on, we could see that we would further and further behind in understanding vulnerabilities. So kind of moving forward, I’m a mom and I could ask, I think, pretty challenging questions.
I laugh at that. I think back to the day when I would just pop out in meetings with our therapists there and our consultant, and I would just ask these questions and he would just look at me like, how am I going to answer this lady’s question? And again, he really tried, but I know I was irritating sometimes because as moms and dads, we ask different questions.
Like if we have to do this, what does that mean for his learning in the future? Because we’re just in a different place. And so when, you know, after many years, and he was around, I think 11, when I had a wonderful consultant by that time who had gone down and heard you and Dr. Gutstein speak on RDI. She was a BCBA and she had known me for several years then. And she said, you need to go down to Houston. You need to hear them speak.
And I’m telling you, she was not a person who would say, if she was saying that, I knew it was true. So actually you all ended up coming up to Dallas and she was right. I did need to hear you speak and I did need to hear Dr. Gutstein. And for me, as they say, long story made long, here was this training designed for parents on how to guide their children. And that part of it really attracted me to become a consultant and to work with parents to help them learn that because, and you and Dr. Gutstein showed me that that required a special design, keeping parents in mind and that guiding relationship. And then of course there were the wonderful goals for the children as well.
Dr. Rachelle Sheely: One of the things that I love about what you just said was you were always asking the questions and you are still always asking the questions.
Kat Lee: And thanks for joining us for Autism, A New Perspective, the podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child. And we encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee.
See you next time.
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