06/09/2025
Whenever I post about PDA, a lot of people identify with the experience of demand avoidance.
I want to be cautious that you do not misunderstand PDA as simply a tendency to avoid demands. The main difference between PDA and other types of demand avoidance is the REASON for the avoidance.
Demand avoidance is something everyone experiences. PDA is SO MUCH MORE than that.
My PDA neurotype is not a behavior - it's a type of genetic brain wiring like Autism or ADHD. It's been with me my whole life, it's part of my DNA. While it's frequently extremely frustrating to have to sort out what my body really needs to feel autonomous, I wouldn't change my PDA neurotype for anything because that would fundamentally change who I am.
PDA is not a behavior, and beyond that it's also not a medical condition. PDA is a neurotype or neurological identity.
Noteably, PDAers experience ALL sorts of stress response to demands, not just avoidance. Sometimes PDAers avoid demands, but other times we have aggressive fight responses to demands. Some PDAers fawn and compulsively comply which feels like being hijacked by my own body.
With PDA, what makes something a demand is the fact that we perceive a threat to our autonomy. Anything that threatens our autonomy becomes a demand. Whereas without PDA, demands exist when we don't have the capacity to meet the expectations of daily life.
With PDA, our nervous system will react to any threat towards our autonomy. Without PDA, a person may be able to compromise on autonomy needs *sometimes* in order to meet other needs, like a trade-off between self-direction and connection.
In addition to autonomy-based stress responses to demands, PDAers have other traits too: more tendency towards fantasy and make-believe than other Autistics, creative thinking, resistance to hierarchy, sense of humor, highly social (possibly masking), uses social strategies as part of avoidance (distraction, pretend, role-play).
I made this chart last year to help explain the differences between PDA and non-PDA demand avoidance.
For PDAers this is not an either/or, we experience both ! These two columns co-exist for PDAers. A person with the PDA neurotype can experience many different kinds of demand avoidance.
But not everyone who is demand avoidant is PDA. People can be severely demand avoidant and not be PDA! *The main difference is the reason for the avoidance.*
Loss of capacity due to burnout, depression, shutdown, or chronic illness are the most common reasons for non-PDA demand avoidance, both internal and external.
The text version of this image is posted at my blog: https://www.traumageek.com/blog/the-pda-neurotype-vs-demand-avoidance
💫 My year-long mini course, 50 Vagus Exercises in a Year, is still open for enrollment! We started in February and the course runs through January 2026. We have 14 recorded sessions so far and 10 remaining classes in the series. This is a monthly vagus exercise class, a monthly Q&A, and my book-in-progress, The Nervous System Study Guide, distributed one chapter at a time as I write it.
Details here: https://traumageek.thinkific.com/courses/50-vagus-exercises-in-a-year
