PDA fae

Category: low demand living

  • 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.

  • “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 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.