Performance Anxiety on Steroids: The Exhausting Reality of PDA Mornings

Waking up morning after morning to your child who you love like they are literally a piece of your own self and more sometimes. Mix this in with a scrap of hope, the tug of the day's responsibilities, and a swirl of apprehension. Not excitement, but apprehension.

These are the first moments of the school morning of a parent whose neurodiverse child has Pervasive/Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA).

It's the first day of the new school term and some part of you had hoped it would be different this term. You know they need you regulated, but your nervous system is faaaaa#####$ed. Maybe you've raised your voice for a moment, and even while it happens, you know it's the exact opposite of what everyone needs right now. Your nervous system is shattered into a thousand shards. But by the time you've managed to get yourself and your child ready for school, you feel like you've run a whole obstacle course worth of strategies and ridden a rollercoaster of emotions. Both emotionally and physically, you are exhausted. And once again, you are grieving.

Grieving the nervous system your child has, and grieving for your own nervous system that is now frayed, frozen, or ready to escape.

By this point, you've cycled through every strategy in the book. You’ve tried everything that everyone has ever suggested; both the advice you sought and that which you did not by the well meaning but judgemental. None of which worked. You’ve moved through every emotion you thought possible, and you suspect your child has too.

You hope drop off goes well, maybe it does because they seem to put on a mask at school that doesn’t show the challenges faced at home which, albeit thankful, feels like an invalidation to your own experience. Or maybe it doesn’t go well because they can’t hold that mask for anyone, they’ve been labelled as “oppositional’’, the naughty kid and you hope you don’t get a phone call to collect them early today.

As you drive away, your head is full of the quiet thoughts no one actually want’s to say out loud; you question how it got to this point and if you can do it for another day. As the tears fall, you wonder how you can arrive at work somehow functional enough to not fuck that up. Because you start to wonder, as much as it seems you are doing most things “right” with your child, things are going so wrong. So, those quiet doubts, the questions arise: How did it get to this point? What went wrong? What did I do wrong?

Because there is no way you become a parent of a child with PDA and don't, at some point ask yourself those questions, have those doubts. Of course you do; it's reasonable to. If you didn't reflect, you'd be doing yourself and your kid an injustice. Reflection is a starting point of learning and change.

Meanwhile, you've got to get your own head into a space of enough clarity for work, which feels often like a reprieve, so you can get what can done before it comes to an end. So, if any residue of hope remains, you focus on that and you wonder if maybe your child is going to wake up tomorrow and things will be different. For now, you try to ignore the fact that you’re out of ideas and it seems so is everyone else you’ve sought help from is too.

Later, at the end of the day, after they’re finally asleep (let’s talk about PDA-ing sleep another time) and you begin to reflect again and realise it feels like a trap.

The thing is, PDA parenting often does feel like a trap. And it kind of is a trap, the problem is, your child’s nervous system is out of sync and on overdrive, and also entirely dependent on your nervous system being calm and regulated enough to weather any and every storm they throw at you so as to support theirs through every demand placed on them. Because every demand is an opportunity for them to fail somehow, to not get it perfect and that drives anxiety. They don’t know how to fix it or manage it, so they avoid it and in the end they avoid even things they want to do. So what can you do?

Pause.

Like someone has you on VHS and hit the pause button, then hid the remote to go pee so they don't miss anything. At first everyone is up in arms, but then you realize you too need to pee, and maybe you need a snack. And some water.

Finding the pause is so essential. That pause gives their nervous system and yours a few moments to slow down, to find a moment of regulation, and maybe a flash of connection. Connecting back into that love that is the glue, even though sometimes it feels like it isn't enough. I get it. Those times are when our nervous systems are most shattered, and it's exactly when it is most important to pause.

"Have kids," they said. "It'll be fun," they said. "A love like no other," they said, "you can't comprehend it until you're a parent."

They got that right.

Luckily, we don't have to be perfect to raise emotionally healthy kids. As f#$ked as it is though, it seems perfectly regulated nervous systems are exactly what our PDA kids need from us. So how does it work? How does it get better?

It happens in tiny, incremental moments every day. Pauses. Pauses that get a bit longer, long enough to regulate and return. Because we don't need to be perfect. Not really.

Our children also need to see that it is okay to not be perfect. They need to see it's okay to get it wrong, make mistakes, to mess up and still have worth, to still be good enough and continue to be loved. Because when it comes down to it, more often than not, our child's PDA nervous system is like performance anxiety on steroids. It doesn't need a flawless parent; it just needs to feel safe through all the mistakes.

To feel safe. So what does feeling safe actually mean?

That is a question most of us struggle to answer because most of us who have PDA kids struggle to know and feel this within ourselves, too. These mirrored nervous systems create what feels like a trap. So as we pause, not freeze, but take an intentional pause and those pauses get longer, it allows us to practice using strategies to recover our own nervous system to bring our child’s nervous system back from the brink of collapse and help break the cycle. The goal being to do this while holding our boundaries and give them choices within those boundaries. We engage them with calm connection and compassion rather than that authoritative approach we were raised with. That's the goal right… And it is a lot. It is hard, as a generation who often needs to be parenting ourselves with compassion while parenting our children with compassion and connection. 

This is so often my morning too, so as I see you, in my waiting room and in my therapy space, please know I get it. I get it in a way that is rare for most parents let alone therapists because I am too, after all, just a person. 

Your therapist,