The PDA Paradox: The Highs and Lows of My Life on a Little-Known Part of the Autism Spectrum

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E's difficulties around eating were entirely sensory in nature, bar when she feels unable to eat due to feeling overwhelmed.

My daughter is PDA and uses manipulation to escape demands, but it seems like he has the more garden variety type of manipulation. I can’t articulate how beneficial it is to have a greater understanding of the autistic experience for those who have an autistic child. I now recognize these were also moments of physical violation, of injury, of emotional and physical pain for him. Where outwardly expressing her distress and melancholy was met with untold invalidation and abuse, E now internalises everything she feels. net/publication/329001126_An_Interest_Based_Account_Monotropism_theory_explanation_of_anxiety_in_Autism_a_Demand_Avoidance_Phenomenon_discussion (Accessed 24 November 2018).But that does not make it impossible for us to become aware of these risks, identify the challenges in our own lives, and acknowledging the pain we’ve caused in the past or continue to cause in the present. It was here that E was met with the most egregious systemic ignorance, gaslighting and abuse, that caused her already fragile mental health and emotional well-being to deteriorate even further. As time went on, we adapted and changed our parenting style to a more child led style and the violence reduced until it was only happening when he was going through a development jump or growth spurt.

Our monthly newsletter contains details of our upcoming sessions, opportunities for parents/carers to participate, and all the latest SEND news for Cambridgeshire. My (autistic) son was treated appallingly by CAHMS and their approach to ARFID and atypical anorexia. There are several ways to either complain and ask for an investigation (family could do this) or by writing yourself to the CEO of the Trust involved. For example, Thompson remembers one young PDA girl he worked with who went for weeks without showering, until she saw her older sister using a curling iron.These are the remnants of my own expectations for how I thought things would be when I became a mother, for the child I imagined I would raise, for the life I thought I was destined to live. As I thought about it more, I realized that unlike the person-first formulation – which I correct intentionally – I want to keep the words “violence” and “violent” in my writing. c. Strong, involuntary emotional threat responses in the context of perceived demands (can be implicit and ever-present, such as attending school and work; or explicit such as a direct request or direction or suggestion) on the person’s autonomy, which may be expressed as; anger, aggression, rage, anxiety, fear, desperation, and at its extreme, meltdown (panic). When the younger sister ran to her mom asking to curl her own hair, her mom was able to explain that curling irons don’t really work on dirty hair.