At Peace Parents Podcast

There is a lot of noise in the PDA space right now, and some of it is making parents doubt themselves and feel more confused rather than less. So I am re-airing this episode from May 2025 because I think it will help you feel more confident in the path you are on.
In this episode I share a story from a feeding support group that crystallized for me why PDA is a distinct experience, not one that can be folded into autism, ADHD, or anxiety strategies without losing something critical. I walk through two examples of content I have seen in the PDA space that would have sent me spiraling five years ago, and I close with a Buddhist concept called the near neighbor enemy that gave me the strength to say something I know is controversial.
Key Takeaways

The Support Group Story and What It Clarified | 00:01:39 Shortly after moving to Michigan, my husband and I organized a babysitter and drove to a support group for families of Autistic children with feeding challenges. All the other children played in another room with their special interests. One non-speaking child sat calmly with a car magazine. Others played with trains and Legos while their parents talked. I wept on the way home, because I knew with certainty there was no version of that scenario that was possible for my son. He could not have gotten in the car. If he had come, he would have needed undivided attention the entire time and any lapse would have produced a meltdown or destruction of the other children's things. The behavioral feeding therapy that had worked beautifully for these families would have produced panic attacks for mine.


PDA Becoming Trendy and What That Is Costing Families | 00:10:56 As PDA awareness has grown, I have noticed content that lumps PDA strategies in with ADHD or Autism approaches and presents them as interchangeable. Two examples I have seen recently: correcting behavior an hour after a meltdown once a child is regulated, and movement breaks every few minutes to help complete homework. Both of these may work beautifully for ADHD children. But for a PDA child who is still well past their threshold of tolerance, going back an hour later to discuss the behavior will most likely push them straight back into activation. A parent trying either of these strategies with a PDA child and seeing them fail is likely to conclude they are doing it wrong, when the issue is not implementation but neurotype fit.


PDA Is Not an Anxiety-Driven Need for Control | 00:16:36 When PDA gets folded into the anxiety frame, it leads to recommendations about building frustration tolerance and increasing exposure. That is often exactly the right approach for anxious children. I have panic disorder myself and have worked hard on my own exposure and frustration tolerance. But PDA is not anxiety. It is a survival drive for autonomy rooted in the way the nervous system perceives safety and threat, and it can disable access to basic needs in a way that anxiety alone typically does not. Treating them as equivalent leads families toward strategies that do not fit and away from the ones that do.


The Near Neighbor Enemy: Why Sameness Undermines Compassion | 00:18:14 A concept from Buddhist practice helped me find the courage to say something I knew was controversial. A near neighbor enemy is something that resembles a value but undermines it. The near neighbor of love is control. The near neighbor of fierce compassion is sameness, the idea that calling different things the same is itself a form of compassion. When we call PDA the same as Autism, ADHD, or anxiety in the name of inclusion, we erase the specific logic, the lived experience, and the sense of belonging that PDA families need and deserve. Difference is not division. It is precision.


Why This Distinction Has Brought Peace to Thousands of Families | 00:19:31 The premise of my work is that PDA is a distinct neurotype with its own nervous system logic and its own approach to accommodation. That premise, not a technique or a strategy, is what has shifted things for my family and for the thousands of families I have worked with. When a parent finally has the right logic for their child's brain, they stop blaming themselves for strategies that were never going to work. They stop doubting their observations. And they start making decisions that actually fit the situation they are in.

Relevant Resources

Understanding PDA — Free class where I teach the nervous system disability framework and the unique logic of the PDA nervous system that distinguishes it from autism, ADHD, and anxiety.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout period I describe, and why strategies designed for other neurotypes can deepen rather than relieve burnout in PDA children.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where the distinct logic of the PDA nervous system is practiced as an embodied skill across twelve weeks, with live coaching and a community of families who share the same experience.

Seven years ago I created a huge spreadsheet trying to find the cause of my son's meltdowns. How many hours outside, how many minutes on screens, how many calories eaten, and much much more. But I couldn't find a consistent pattern. Something that triggered him one day might be barely noticed another. The problem was, my logic was wrong.
In this episode, an excerpt from our free Understanding PDA Masterclass, I explain why the standard ABC framework of antecedent, behavior, consequence fails for PDA children and introduce the cumulative nervous system activation model: how drops build in the bucket over weeks, months, and years toward a tipping point, and why what you do this week may determine whether your child can brush their teeth three weeks from now.
Key Takeaways

Why the Spreadsheet Did Not Work | 00:00:00 When my son went into burnout, I tracked everything: screen time, calories, sleep, fresh air, meltdown frequency. I was looking for the antecedent - the thing that happened right before the blowup - that would tell me the cause. What I now know is the reason the spreadsheet could not find the pattern is that the logic of the PDA nervous system is not event-based. It is cumulative. The antecedent is not the primary cause. It is the tipping point.

The ABC Framework and Why It Does Not Apply to PDA | 00:01:45 The ABC framework - antecedent, behavior, consequence - is the foundation of most behavioral approaches in schools, therapy, and parenting. For some neurodivergent children it can be useful: the fluorescent lights went on, the meltdown followed, the consequence was leaving the room. For PDA children, the same surface-level event can produce completely different responses on different days, because the behavior is not caused by that event in isolation. It is caused by the cumulative level of nervous system activation that has been building in the system toward a threshold of tolerance over days, weeks, months, and in some cases years.

TDrops in the Bucket Toward a Threshold | 00:03:19 I use a glass of water to illustrate the threshold of tolerance: the point at which cumulative nervous system activation tips past the window and begins to disable basic needs. Every subconsciously perceived loss of autonomy or equality is a drop. With a PDA child, we may have fifteen drops before we have even finished breakfast. Those drops build continuously, which is why burnout can feel sudden, especially for internalized PDA teens who masked successfully for years before suddenly being unable to leave their room. My son's escalation into burnout felt like an autistic regression because it was so rapid, but looking back, the drops had been building in the system for years without anyone seeing it.

Why Behavior Fluctuates and Why That Makes It Hard to Trust the Disability Framework | 00:09:40 A PDA child may be able to brush their teeth at the beginning of the week but not by Friday. My older son's test scores drop between the start of the school year and the end, not because he has lost the skill or knowledge but because cumulative activation has made it harder to access. When things fluctuate like this, parents can doubt whether what they are seeing is really a disability, because the inconsistency does not match how we think disabilities look. This fluctuation is actually a feature of the cumulative model: accommodation brings activation down, and the child moves away from their threshold. Activation builds it back up.

Two Out of Three Is Enough | 00:12:58 You do not have to accommodate perfectly for this model to work. Every accommodation removes a drop from the bucket. Every activation adds one. If your co-parent is not yet on board, your accommodations are still helping, just more slowly. If your child is in a school that is adding drops while you remove them at home, progress will be slower but not impossible. The practical implication is that what you do this week, this month, in the next three weeks, is directly connected to what you will see in basic needs access, nervous system reactivity, and connection and engagement a month from now.

Relevant Resources

Understanding PDA — The free masterclass from which this episode is excerpted, covering the full nervous system disability framework including the cumulative activation model and threshold of tolerance described here.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout threshold I describe, including why escalation into burnout can feel sudden even when the activation has been building for years.
Tracking Progress — Free class on how to track the three dimensions that reflect cumulative nervous system activation over time: nervous system reactivity, basic needs access, and connection and engagement.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where the cumulative activation model is applied practically, with live coaching to help parents identify where drops are being added and removed in their specific family system

When autonomy is low, meaning has to be high. That is what I learned during the two years I spent as a full-time caregiver for my older son, isolated in our home, and putting myself physically between him and his eighteen-month-old brother when things got bad.
In this episode I share how I found a sustaining "why" during that period, and how other families I have worked with have found theirs. I also introduce a practical tool I call the "hang your hat on the day" goal: a way of redirecting from goals that depend on another person's behavior to goals that are entirely within your own control, so that you can give yourself genuine credit for what you are doing every single day.

Key Takeaways

When Autonomy Is Low, Meaning Has to Be High | 00:00:00 Parenting a PDA child or teen introduces an almost constant rock-and-a-hard-place dynamic: every choice has a cost, and there is no option that gives you genuine autonomy without a trade-off. When you want to go to the gym, there is a cost when you come back. When your partner takes over for a few hours, there is a cost to their energy level. That sustained low autonomy is depleting in a way most people around us will never understand, and what I have found, from my own experience and across the families I work with, is that meaning is the variable that makes it sustainable. We need a "why" that gets us through the day.


How I Found My "Why" in the Basement | 00:01:46 I was in the basement of our home in Michigan, putting myself between my older and younger sons when things got violent, feeling my own violent rage moving through me that I want to name as normal rather than shameful. My older son needed constant undivided attention and dopamine or he would go after his brother, and I was isolated, sensory overwhelmed, and out of resources. I had been reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and had a seed planted about the idea that a clear why makes almost anything endurable. In that moment in the basement I realized: my entire doctorate had been on nonviolence and grassroots peace building and there I was, finally practicing it. Not theoretically. In my own basement. That was enough meaning to sustain me through that period.


What Other Families Have Found as Their Why | 00:06:27 The meaning does not have to be mine. Across the thousands of families I have worked with, the sustaining whys have included: healing intergenerational trauma, becoming the parent they wished they had, practicing becoming a less judgmental person, learning non-reactivity as a skill, learning about disability and neurodiversity in a way that changes how they move through the world, and healing themselves through the relationship with their child. None of these are about outcomes for the child. They are about what the parent is becoming through the practice of showing up, which is the only part any of us actually controls.


Why Goals That Depend on Your Child Will Undermine You | 00:08:29 One of the most consistent patterns I see across the families I work with, and in myself, is attaching goals to things another person has to do: my child will go back to school in the fall, my child will be independent by this age, my partner will come on board if I explain it clearly enough. When these goals drive our sense of progress, we are setting ourselves up for a particular kind of suffering, because we have no control over another person's nervous system or choices. The shift I ask parents to make is not to stop wanting those things. It is to stop basing today's measure of success on whether they happened.


The Hang Your Hat on the Day Goal | 00:10:06 This is the practical tool that helped me through the most acute period of caregiving and that I return to now in harder seasons. The hang your hat goal is the one thing within your own control that you can point to at the end of a day and say: I did that. Some days it is "I showed up more regulated than I would have a year ago." Some days it is "I stayed in the PDA lens for most of the day even though I fell back into the old pattern at bedtime." Some days it is "I brushed my teeth, I ate enough to stay alive, and I did not scream at my kids." All of these count. None of them depend on what your child did. And giving yourself genuine credit for what you did, even when no one else can see it, is one of the most sustainable things you can do for your own nervous system over the long term.


Relevant Resources

Finding Meaning — Free class where I go deeper into the meaning-making framework described in this episode, including how to identify a sustaining why that is true for your specific life and journey.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout period I describe, including the two years of intensive caregiving that led me to Viktor Frankl and the hang your hat goal.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where meaning-making, the hang your hat goal, and the full accommodation framework are practiced together across twelve weeks with live coaching and a community of families in the same season.

What does shame have to do with PDA? And why do behavioral approaches fail so consistently for this neurotype even when implemented well? I speak with Dr. Gillian Boudreau, a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in autism, ADHD, and anxiety across children, families, and adults, to explore the roles of shame and power in PDA children and teens.
Dr. Boudreau draws on her early career supporting high-need autistic students in a school system, her psychodynamic training, and her work with families to explain why these children frustrate adults, why that frustration is data, and what it looks like to help parents construct a resilient narrative from a place of compassion rather than blame.

Key Takeaways

What the Adults Around PDA Children Are Feeling and Why It Matters | 00:12:00 In her second year supporting high-need students in a school system, Dr. Boudreau shifted from behavioral interventions to asking the adults on the team a different question: what is this child bringing up in you? The answers were consistent: I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, I feel powerless, I feel like I'm going to lose control. Through a psychodynamic lens, clients often make helpers feel the very way they feel inside and cannot express. When the adults named their own feelings of shame and powerlessness, and the team began offering children more autonomy and genuine collaboration before demanding compliance, the big behaviors began to shift in ways that star charts had not produced.


Shame Is at the Root on Both Sides | 00:52:00 PDA children often carry years of cumulative shame - due to numerous factors - and w hen a child in that much pain escalates, adults respond from their own activated shame response. This produces a shame-blame cycle that makes everything worse.


Hurt People Hurt People | 01:00:00 One of the most common fears parents bring to Dr. Boudreau is whether their child has empathy, whether they are raising someone who will become abusive. Her response is direct: true sociopathy is extraordinarily rare, and PDA nervous systems are characterized by overactive fear and often hyperempathy. She uses an example from my own family to illustrate radical empathy as a clinical stance: if a child locked someone in a basement, the question to ask is not what is wrong with this child, but what level of threat must they have been perceiving in their body to do that?

Why PDA Children Cannot Help But Call Out Arbitrary Power Structures | 01:05:39 Dr. Boudreau describes PDA as a nervous system that is exquisitely sensitive to the emotional electricity of agenda and control. From an evolutionary perspective, she suggests that the presence of PDA across the population may serve a function: some nervous systems are wired to detect and resist arbitrary or exploitative power dynamics that others have learned to tolerate. The problem is not the sensitivity. The problem is that schools and many family systems are not built to respond to it without escalating into shame cycles.

What Parents Need Most: A Resilient Narrative and Permission to Grieve | 01:15:15 When Dr. Boudreau works with parents of PDA children, she starts by helping them catch their own shame response at the root before it cycles back toward the child. She holds space for grief, including grief for the life and the parenting experience that was expected. She also shares what she knows from seeing many PDA journeys longitudinally: this will likely turn out to be pretty cool at some point. The goal is not to minimize the hardship but to help parents construct a narrative that has room for the full palette of human emotion.

Relevant Resources

Clear Connection Psychology on Instagram — Dr. Gillian Boudreau's Instagram where she shares content and resources on emotional safety, connection, and supporting all brains and hearts across children, families, and school systems.
PDA North America: PDA-Affirming Providers Directory — A directory of PDA-affirming providers maintained by PDA North America, referenced in this episode as a resource for families looking for clinicians who understand the PDA profile.
Turning Passive Into Active: A Building Block of Ego and Fundamental Mechanism of Defense — Reference document on the concept Dr. Boudreau introduces in this episode as the psychological term underlying what I call equalizing behavior in PDA children and teens.
Understanding PDA — Free class where I teach the nervous system disability framework and the neuroception logic that underlies the shame and power dynamics Dr. Boudreau describes in this episode.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout period I describe in this episode, including the six months with my younger son and why the shame-blame cycle is most dangerous when a child is deepest in burnout.

If you've lowered demands for your PDA child or teen but still aren't seeing much progress, this episode is for you. It explains one of the most common sticking points I hear from families: that due to the name - Pathological Demand Avoidance - parents focused on lowering demands, when what their child needs more is increased autonomy and equality.
This episode is an excerpt from my free Understanding PDA Masterclass. In it I walk through the distinction between demands as a surface-level behavior and autonomy and equality as the root-level mechanism. To help make the difference clear, I describe how in a typical morning autonomy losses often accumulate before a child even gets out the door.
Key Takeaways

Demands Are the Surface. Autonomy Is the Root | 00:00:00 The name Pathological Demand Avoidance points toward the behavior: avoidance of demands. But if we think about PDA as a pervasive drive for autonomy, we get closer to the actual mechanism. Parents who have lowered demands and are not seeing progress are often still inadvertently signaling a loss of autonomy through expectation, energy, agenda, or position of authority, even when the demand itself has been removed. The surface level behavior is demand avoidance. The root level cause is neuroception of a loss of autonomy or equality.


My Younger Son's School Refusal: The Autonomy Mechanism in Real Time | 00:01:33 For two weeks, my younger son could not get his body to go to school. Each evening he would tell me he genuinely wanted to go the next morning, naming specific things he looked forward to. When I asked whether he would like me to prompt him in the morning, he said no, because if you do, then I will not go. That is the PDA mechanism: in his thinking brain, with full autonomy and no external expectation, going to school felt possible. The moment an agenda or a prompt from me entered, his amygdala would register a loss of autonomy, activate the threat response, and make going impossible.


A Morning Audit: Fifteen Activations To Start The Day | 00:06:02 I walk through a typical first hour of a day with a PDA child to illustrate how many autonomy and equality losses can accumulate before the family has even left the house. Being woken up by a parent or an alarm is an externally imposed loss of autonomy. Being expected to come downstairs, eat, eat in a particular place, be told what is and is not available for breakfast, clean up the plate, get dressed, put on shoes, pack a backpack, receive a gentle correction after pushing a sibling on the way to the car: each one registers in the amygdala as a threat event. In a loving, gentle household with no intentional pressure, there can be fifteen or more of these activations in forty-five minutes. That cumulative load is what makes PDA disabling, not any single demand.


Equality Is as Important as Autonomy | 00:04:50 The equality piece is often underemphasized. It includes any energy of another person being above the PDA child in stature, authority, or position: not getting the most ice cream, not being first down the stairs, not getting the last word, having a parent try and teach them something in the moment of a behavior. Even gentle parenting's recommendation to take the child aside after a dysregulation and debrief produces this perception, because the parent is placing themselves above as the teacher and the explainer. The child is not in the right part of their brain to receive it, and the teaching itself is perceived as another activation.

Relevant Resources

Understanding PDA — The free masterclass from which this episode is excerpted, covering the six characteristics of PDA including the survival drive for autonomy and equality described here.
Burnout — Free class with context for how cumulative autonomy losses build over time to the point of disabling access to basic needs.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where the shift from a demand lens to an autonomy and equality lens is practiced as an embodied skill over twelve weeks of live coaching.