PDA fae

Category: demand anxiety

  • PDA lies in the accommodations needed

    Sometimes, even now with an official diagnosis, keeping this blog and my instagram, having connected with the PDA community…

    … I still sometimes doubt that I’m PDA.

    Sometimes I have quite a lot of demand capacity, and these times can last for long durations – days/weeks.

    In these times, I feel little demand anxiety. I am able to meet requests. I am unbothered, or much less noticeably bothered by the expectations of others foisted onto me.

    I can offer to do things, that I could easily avoid.

    I can meet my own expectations for myself, and my bodily needs.

    In these times, it feels unlikely that I truly have PDA.

    However, in these times, my demand cup is being emptied by something.

    It might be someone else’s support. Or getting good sleep. Or having had a restful enough period, or enough demand free time, or a reduction in anxiety. Or I am spending enough time engaging in special interests (this is my recent situation – I have been reading a lot about queerness, perception, baye’s theorem, spending a lot of time on instagram reading about autism and ADHD).

    The fact that I need these things to cope with expectations and demands is part of PDA itself.

  • Externalising PDA

    I had thought for a long time after learning of my PDA neurotype that I was definitely an internalising PDAer, or at most a mixed PDAer who mostly internalised.

    I was wrong. That’s my response to trauma. I learnt to fawn, i.e. comply, to retain control of situation through maintaining safety. That was the only acceptable response as a child and teenager, no matter how much that went against my true nature. It caused an awful lot of dissociation, especially as I got older, and disconnection from my body and emotions. I dissociate less now that I have acknowledged my experience of demand anxiety, but I still struggle to name sensations in my body, which makes the process of therapy rather difficult, as brain spotting relies on doing this to work. I am slowly learning to be able to pay attention to my bodily experience, but probably still spend the majority of the time disconnected. I live in my head, rationalising everything to cope.

    I’ve realised during this hospital stay that my unmasked, authentic self is very externalising. It makes me wish I had been in the early cohort of identified PDAers, that perhaps that would have lead to some understanding – but perhaps that early the successful approaches for PDA children had not been developed?

    I can see now how my externalising lead to the responses that I got from adults. There’s no excuse for how I was treated, all children deserve safety, but I can see how things unfolded. My mum says I was always quick to escalate to meltdown, and adults were determined to take any action possible to prevent that, with very unfortunate consequences. At a young age, I was likely very vocal about my autonomous wishes, and had adults who strongly believed that adults were to be obeyed, not challenged, which was not the ideal environment for me.

    I want to find a way to be my externalising self, authentically, without escalation to meltdowns. I definitely need a low demand lifestyle, so I am very glad not to be heading to supported accommodation, because I have come to the opinion that “low demand” is not possible in that setting (especially not mental health related supported housing, which does not understand anything about autism, let alone PDA). I have a lot more faith that in my own place I can create my own rhythms for “activities of daily living”. I would be willing to have the support of a personal assistant, to ensure that flat maintenance does not suffer – hopefully this will be possible.

  • PDA and dental care

    As a kid and teenager, I was prompted to brush my teeth regularly by my parents, who’d get very involved in the process. Unfortunately, when I reached 17/18 they abruptly stopped this, saying I was old enough now to manage this for myself.

    My PDA t0ok this as an opportunity to be avoidant. I would have benefitted from a much more gradated approach to being in charge of my own teethcare. It didn’t help that my parents had set the expectation that adults use adult toothpaste, which is a sensory hell for me, far too strong a flavour. Instead of being able to continue on with the habit, it turns out it was in no way a habit for me to brush my teeth, and I neglected to do so for about ten years. This was not helped by my worsening mental health, and ADHD, which both likely also contributed to this self-neglect for so long.

    Now, unfortunately, thanks to this, my gums are in a very bad way. I need to see a dentist soon because it’s gotten so bad. I’ve had quite a few bad experiences with outpatient procedures, including dental, because I don’t seem to respond well to local anaesthetic, in that it doesn’t cause me to go particularly numb – I can usually feel the entirety of the procedure, including all the pain.

    As a result, booking to see a dentist was very terrifying for me. I had a panic attack, cried and ended up very depersonalised (a form of dissociation in which your own person/body does not feel real to you). Thankfully I did manage to not be avoidant – more in terms of trauma avoidance here – and did book the dentist appointment. That was mainly because staff here at my hospital will be able to attend with me, otherwise I probably would have avoided seeing a dentist.

  • Fawning as necessary, and moral

    It’s very hard not to feel that avoidance makes me a bad person, naughty, non-compliant, defiant, bad.

    People in authority, with jobs to do, people who might get in trouble for allowing the avoidance put so much emotional pressure on. Everyone has something they’re willing to be coercive over, in my experience.

    It feels, very strongly, that the only means of being safe in this world is to fawn. To comply, and dissociate from the demand anxiety this causes, even if this is at psychological cost to myself. It feels, therefore, that a PDA existence can not be a trauma free existence – because the process of doing this is traumatic in itself.

    It’s awful. I hate this.

  • Almond butter autonomy.

    It’s never a good start to a day when at 4am, after a night of pain and no sleep, you develop a craving for almond butter on toast… and have no means of having that for breakfast.

    I’m likely going to struggle to eat breakfast at all. My demand capacity is going to be quite a bit lower. It might seem odd, but a large part of that will be due to the loss of autonomy of the choice of what to eat, not pain or sleep deprivation. Of course, I’d probably cope better if my stress cup wasn’t filled by those things – see Tomlin Wilding’s page for information on ‘cups’.

    Odd as it may seem though, the simple lack of the food I actually want for breakfast – and the inability to pop to a shop beforehand to pick it up, or that it wouldn’t be listed on deliveroo groceries, is a problem. I’m already grumpy just thinking about breakfast without my autonomous choice. Nothing else is going to be a good substitute, which is not ideal when pain has already reduced my appetite.

    Sigh. I foresee a taxi ride to the nearest big supermarket today.

  • “Just prepping”

    I made a small instagram post about this – the hack of telling myself that I’m not “Doing The Thing”, I’m just “preparing”. It’s something I’ve used a lot throughout life, usually to get myself to study. It started in high school, I would set up my pens, my books, my computer at the kitchen table, often taking quite a lot of time over an exact layout. I’d tend to feel unable to start until things were laid out “just so”, but also that that was all I was going to do – just lay things out.

    Somehow, starting by “getting things set up” reduces the demand anxiety to get the rest of the task done. I think I’ve used this with tidying as well, with setting up llama life, or a pomodoro stream. I wonder if it could be used to effect with cooking, laying out the ingredients and the materials needed, like the dish, frying pan, or chopping board and knife. I imagine that might actually work pretty well.

    It’s strange to me how this is a little hack I came up with years before even having heard of PDA. I guess I have been living my life having to find some ways around the feeling of demand anxiety – a lot of that involved dissociation, which I think I’ve mentioned before I do a lot less now I have acknowledged my demand anxiety.

    It’s good to live a life working with my brain, not against it.

  • Demand cup update.

    Making one of these because recently things have changed at my supported housing in a way that may provide me with more demand capability in life.

    In short, I have been offered a ‘quid pro quo’ of I don’t demand too much of them and they will demand much less of me. As in, I just have to keep telling them I’m alive daily, and nothing else.

    That works for me, I can work with that. I like quid pro quo when it’s not corrupt, so yes, if we’re playing this game I’m happy with it. They’ve also asked me to not tell them what ‘PDAers need’ but what ‘I need’ which, sure I can play that game too. They don’t realise that’s a demand, so they’re gonna hear a lot of ‘I need you to understand that’s a demand’ in the near future.

    But what can they say? They demanded it of me. So I’m happy to become the resident broken record of the scheme for them until they learn how to help, well, PDAers.

    Ridiculous I have to do it this way when I have the diagnosis but, fine sure.

  • Demand free time

    Recently I’ve needed a lot of this. I’ve been dealing with a series of traumaversaries throughout July and August, which has been Very Not Fun, and they obliterated my demand capacity.

    I re-downloaded tiktok, with better knowledge of how to curate a better feed for myself than when I first started with the app back in 2022. It’s now a lot of Autism/ADHD/Trauma recovery content with the occasional pet content (usually cats), and sometimes cleaning/cooking videos. It now feels replenishing to spend a number of hours browsing those videos.

    I find tiktok an ideal way to have demand free time that isn’t ‘understimulating’. Sometimes demand free time does need to be time spent just sitting, maybe with music on, and that can be replenishing in a shorter amount of time. But my ADHD finds that very difficult.. or sometimes there is just a very large amount of demand free time required. In those moments, social media becomes the perfect activity. I can engage in multiple special interests, without being required to expend very much effort at all.

    Of all the things that learning about PDA taught me, demand free time was the most useful, life changing concept I learnt of. I can finally recuperate from life properly, and much much faster. It helps me stave off (and when needed start to recover from) burnout. I now know it is a vital need to empty my demand cup.

  • Low demand lifestyle?

    Am I living a low demand lifestyle? What defines low demand, and how would I tell?

    I’m not claiming I have answers to those, but it is something I want to think about – how many demands are there in my life.

    Living in “move on” supported housing creates demands, because you have to meet expectations to be considered ready to move on. Thus that prevents me from living a truly low demand life. I do have a lot more autonomy here than I had at the rehab ward though, which is good.

    There’s also demands on me because, well. My reason for needed supported housing is more along the lines of autistic skill loss/learning to cope with demand avoidance/executive function issues, than it is mental health issues related. So the support I am offered does not meet my needs, which leaves me to work out how to regain skills on my own.

    I am learning ways to approach doing things that lessens the sense of demand. Whether that’s having an algorithm as to how to tidy or clean (to remove microdemands), avoiding things until it sinks in I don’t have to do them, and other techniques I’ve mentioned on this blog before.

    I think once I am living independently I will actually be able to have a much more low demand lifestyle. I will not have anyone setting expectations on me, and can just work to my own desires – and work on not seeing expectations on myself. I will hopefully by that point be a lot more skilled at regaining skills, and coping with traits of my neurodivergence.

    So right now, I don’t quite have as low demand a lifestyle as I might benefit from, which is hard when I’m meant to be in a supportive environment. I’d suggest PDAers looking into getting this kind of support: refuse “rehab wards” for mental health if you are offered one, and be very very selective about which supported housing you accept, even if it means waiting for longer on an ATU.

  • PDAer frustrations

    Note: In the following post, I am speaking only for myself, and to my own experiences. AuDHDers may have their own experiences of AuDHD, ADHDers may again have experiences that differ from what I describe below. This is valid.

    As an adult PDAer in mental health and trauma recovery, attempting to learn the life skills that allow for functioning:

    Sometimes I really really wish I “just” had ADHD. Or even AuDHD. But not this PDA stuff.

    Not because I think ADHD/AuDHD is challenge free, or easy, or whatever.

    But because the strategies/approaches/tools/whatever you want to call them, to address the challenges that things like poor executive function, or time blindness, or even Autistic inertia cause are:

    • a lot easier to find out in the world, pre-created for you
    • a lot easier to think of for myself
    • would be a lot easier to apply without PDA, because there’s a way in which the expectation to apply the tools is a demand even as whilst it’s a desired thing
    • generally seem more reliably effective than PDA tools.

    For example, breaking down tidying into “5 things: rubbish, dishes, laundry, things with a home and things without a home” always answers the struggle of looking at a messy room and knowing what to do with it. It won’t solve any other issue (task initiation, demands, inertia etc), but that tool is a complete solve to that specific ADHD problem for me.

    Or, visual timers solve issues with estimating how long something will take, knowing how I have left to do something or how long I have to do a task for.

    Whereas managing demands, and demand capacity, is an ebb and a flow of things that works sometimes. And fail spectacularly at other times.

    If my emotion cup is empty enough. If my bodily needs are met well enough. If I’ve been able to avoid something for long enough that the sense of pressure and expectation has decreased – because I *haven’t* had to do it, I’ve been not doing it! If I have enough tools to change up how I approach tasks, to provide novelty often enough. If my mental heath is stable enough. If I am experiencing enough autonomy. Etc etc.

    I might have the demand capacity to do the thing.

    There’s no one tool for ‘having demand capacity’. It’s a whole life approach, to have that capacity just enough of the time. PDA can be very disabling, because life is inherently demanding of adults. (In children, life lacks autonomy, and this is often a bigger problem).

    And on top of that, ADHD and AuDHD are a lot easier for outside people to understand than PDA. They’re an awful lot more logical than demand anxiety is. (Or the pathological need to avoid demands, because PDAers do not agree on what underlies the avoidance – for me it seems to be demand anxiety.) That makes it hard for other people to know how to help, or worse still, feel interested in learning what helps. And worse than that, attempting to help without understanding PDA, in my experience, involves being demanding!

    So being a PDAer is… frustrating, at times, and more so than the other aspects of my neurodevelopmental differences. (It’s not more frustrating than my bipolar, which I count as one of my neurodivergences. That one is just a problem, and one I would absolutely choose not to experience.)