Kristen Carder 0:05
Welcome to the I have ADHD podcast where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults. With ADHD, I’m your host, Kristen Carter and I have ADHD, let’s chat about the frustrations, humor and challenges of adulting, relationships, working and achieving with this neurodevelopmental disorder, I’ll help you understand your unique brain, unlock your potential and move from point A to point B. Hey, what’s up? This is Kristin Carter, and you’ve tuned into the I have ADHD podcast. I am medicated, caffeinated, regulated and so ready to roll. I am bursting at the seams excited for our guest today. This topic is the most requested topic that I have had over and over and over in the last year, and we are talking today about pathological demand avoidance. What we’re going to be talking this is going to be two episodes in a row, so like, buckle up, get cozy, get ready. We’re going to be talking about, what does PDA look like in our kids, and how can we help pathologically demand avoidant kids thrive. And then in the next episode, next week, we’re going to talk about, what does it look like in adults, and am I pathologically demand? Avoidant, we’re all gonna find out together. I am so excited today with me, I’m gonna read her bio. Here is Casey Ehrlich PhD. She is the leading researcher on PDA in the United States, a mother of two PDA children, and the founder and CEO of at peace parents, which you should all go follow on Instagram right this second. Following her account changed my life and changed the trajectory of my entire family. So I just ah, you got to go follow right now. Casey has coached 1000s of parents of PDA children and teens using empirical evidence cutting edge science and her own personal insights and empathy as a neurodivergent woman, and she is here with us today. Casey, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. You’re so welcome. I am so glad that you’re here. I’m like a fan girl, big time fan girl. I don’t get excited about celebrities. I don’t get excited about musicians. I get excited about nerds in the in the neurodivergent field. So excited. I was saying to my husband last night, I have two interviews tomorrow. I’m so excited. I cannot wait. I cannot wait. I cannot wait. This is my Super Bowl.
Casey Ehrlich 2:35
Thank you for being of course, I’m super excited to
Kristen Carder 2:39
tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?
Casey Ehrlich 2:44
Yeah, so I am a reformed political scientist. I am a mother of two. PDA, children, 10 and six. I live in Michigan, and that’s my hometown. That’s where my home state, where you’ve been.
Speaker 1 3:05
I believe I’m autistic. And here for the conversation, anything you want to know.
Kristen Carder 3:14
So awesome. Okay, so let’s just start right off the bat. What is pathological demand avoidance. How would you describe it? What is PDA? Because it is the kind of thing that’s like bubbling up in in the conversation, but it hasn’t there’s not much out there on it. When I googled it a year and a half ago, because I was inquiring about my own family situation, I didn’t find a whole lot, and so I’m curious, how would you describe it? What is?
Casey Ehrlich 3:46
PDA, yeah, so why don’t I explain how to think about it, and then I can give a definite, like an operationalized definition, that can help parents separate it from other neurotypes. Okay, love that. Okay. So I first want to start with the fact that all of us as humans have a survival part of our brain, and we have an amygdala, which is the part that, on a subconscious level, is always detecting safety, danger or life threat. And when the amygdala perceives threat, it will tell the nervous system to activate, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, shut down. So all of us have this nervous system mechanism, regardless of neurotype. What makes PDA unique and distinct from other things that can activate the nervous system is that what tells the amygdala Hey, you’re in danger or under life threat, is the subconscious perception of losses of autonomy, or if someone. Else or something is above that person. And when we think about it with kids, especially, they’re constantly perceiving losses of autonomy and equality because the education, therapeutic and parenting conventional wisdom is very much about like us being the authority, explicitly teaching them and making sure they’re compliant. So these kids, teens and adults, are constantly perceiving threat that they might not even be aware of, and they’re hitting it’s accumulating in the system, not just over a day or a week, but sometimes months and years, and then often, we learn about PDA when they hit what we call burnout, which is just when that accumulation is so far past their threshold that It’s starting to disable them from accessing basic needs, and almost any interaction or stimulus is going to set them into a into a nervous system response, yes. And there’s a few other characteristics that I’m happy to speak to, but I’ll pause there for now.
Kristen Carder 6:19
What is so wild to me is that it could be a subconscious it’s subconscious so often, right? Yeah, and what you just said is that kids have so little autonomy, yeah, they have so little authority in their own lives, at least in the traditional way that we’ve kind of generation after generation parented kids, like I was parented by boomers. It was a very like children should be seen and not heard generation. And that is really tricky when it comes to having pathological demand avoidant tendencies. Yeah. So can you give some examples of what? What does it mean to not be equal or someone be above like for a kid? What does that look like and a loss of autonomy? Can you give some like, practical examples of that? Sure.
Casey Ehrlich 7:16
So let me use a couple anecdotes to illustrate what this might look like. So my older PDA son, who’s now almost 11, I was initially viewing him through the sensory processing disorder lens and some ADHD tendencies, and so I thought like his avoidance and dysregulation to like getting his shoes on, putting his clothes on, getting in the car, buckling his seat belt. Was like, sensory like, Oh, this is super uncomfortable. He doesn’t necessarily have the executive functioning to know where his shoes are. The tags are bothering him. That was the root cause I was thinking about. But then I noticed a pattern where it’s like, if you’re getting to choose where you’re going, like, we’re going to a trampoline park, or we’re going to, like, see a friend. The shoes come on, the tags don’t matter. The seat belts buckled. And so it started to appear like, Okay, this isn’t just demand avoidance because of a sensory thing or executive functioning, or him not understanding what I’m saying. It’s because when he has a choice and he has autonomy, his nervous system stays regulated and he stays in his thinking brain, and so he can access those skills and do all the things that I thought were related to these other challenges in his brain wiring, feeling above. So there’s patterns that we see pretty frequently with these kids. So you know, it might be one. Very simple example is like, sometimes we see these kids needing like, they go on the top of cars. They climb on the edges of Windows sills. They go on the tops of couches. They need to have the last word. They need to have a little bit more than their brother. They need to be first up the stairs. And they’ll physically, like, push you out of the way, but it’s, it’s, as a parent, you can observe. It’s an automatic response, like, it’s not conscious, right? And so, like, what we call an accommodation for PDA is, like, can we facilitate this child feeling above me by me, like sitting below them on the floor while I’m trying to have a conversation so they stay in their thinking brain. So that’s like a physical example of needing to be above. You know, I think my younger son, William is six, and right now he’s in. Burnout. So he had a huge accumulation of all of these neurocepted threats in his system, and now we’re working to get him out of burnout. And so he does what I call equalizing, which is like needing to feel above to get back to safety. So like, if you listen to him. So he’s in Minecraft all day because we’re unschooling, and he says under his breath constantly, idiot, stupid. And he’s like, saying things to the Minecraft characters. And also, like, the thing that’s therapeutic for him is that my husband will play collaboratively in Minecraft on the server, and he just, like, explodes and kills my husband over and over and over again. And it’s like, annoying, and my older son used to do it, like physically to me, of like, controlling my line of vision when we’re watching a show, or like, calling me stupid or physically lashing out. My younger son has a different expression of that, but it’s this need to feel above to get back to safety. And when you think about it like if we’re I don’t want to go too dorky here, but go on. Go full nerd Okay, full nerding. You know about trauma and nervous systems, right? And so one of the things we know from polyvagal theory is that mammals, unlike reptiles, like lizards, have the ability to socially. They have a secondary vagal pathway that can down regulate the immediate fight, flight or freeze responses through social signals of safety, right like we’re providing to each other right now, of like you’re
Kristen Carder 11:50
saying, like magical
Speaker 1 11:53
so for PDA kids, especially in burnout, it’s like they’re not getting the mammalian signals. They’re just in their reptilian brain. And so what are the, what are the mechanisms that a lizard has to stay safe, it’s to flee, it’s to freeze, or it’s to be the bigger lizard. So that’s kind of how I think about it, of like, let this kid be the bigger lizard. Yes.
Kristen Carder 12:19
How do you know? Like somebody listening could be like, it would be valid to be like her son just sounds like a jerk. Yeah? Like your son just sounds like he needs to know who’s boss, absolutely right? Or like that child just needs some discipline. Like, how do you how help us think it through in a in a nuanced way? Because I think that that would be like a knee jerk reaction, yeah, like your child’s playing Minecraft all day long, and he’s blowing you up, and your other kid is, like, hurting you. What that what the hell is going
Casey Ehrlich 13:02
on? Yeah, so my older son does not do that anymore. That was a burnout, and it’s because I doubled down on very strict parenting. I was never a gentle or attachment parent. I was like, I’m freaking sleep training this kid at 12 weeks. And I am like, 123, magic, like, put them in the timeout. Like, you cannot act like this. Like, very traditional, yes. And how’d that work out for you? Oh, that’s why we got to the violence. So I think the other piece, and I’d love to just give that the working definition we use for research and for our work with families is PDA is a survival drive for autonomy and equality that consistently overrides other survival instincts, like eating, sleeping, hygiene, safety and or toileting. So one or more of those basic needs is going to start to be impacted when you, when they’re reaching burnout, or when you’re doubling down on the like, well, they just need to, like, do the thing, or they just, they can’t talk to you. Like that. It reaches a point where there’s so much stress in their system that control starts to coalesce around a basic need, one or more, and then physiologically, they’re impacted by how much stress. So my son stopped eating and stopped speaking and he stopped walking. So that’s where we get out, out of the like parenting strategies and into like caregiving and
Kristen Carder 14:40
disability, yes, like, my child is not okay,
Casey Ehrlich 14:45
yeah, and so, like, we, I can speak to the basic needs patterns, because I think this is a missing link for a lot of people, sure, but I don’t want to just ramble.
Kristen Carder 14:55
No, I this is fat, like, I am riveted. Um. Um, so if you could go there, that would be great. So your son stopped say it again. He stopped eating, walking, walking and speaking and speaking. How old was he at the time? He was four and a half, and this was until, like, otherwise, like, kind of neuro spicy, but fairly typical kiddo.
Casey Ehrlich 15:21
So I always he was my first child, yes, and I just thought I sucked as a mom, because I was like everyone else seems to, like, still have a life and like, go out to dinner. I used to live in Washington, DC, and I had a job in an office downtown, and I couldn’t really function besides that, because it was like, when he was born, he did not sleep like at all. My friends were so worried about me, they got me a night nurse, and she recorded his sleep patterns. And it was like, she was like, I’ve never seen a kid like this. Never seen an infant like this. It’s like, he’ll sleep for 10 minutes and then be awake for two hours, and then I’ll sleep for 20 and then he’ll be awake for another hour and never napped. No, it was insane. Yeah, I see that you’re recognizing this on a level that
Kristen Carder 16:09
is uncomfortable for me. Yeah, I’m relating to it on a level that’s uncomfortable. And I will just, I will share. So one of my kids was very similar, and we tried everything, yeah, and I did not sleep for the first year of his life. And I wasn’t like the co sleeper. I wonder now if that would have helped, maybe, but at the time, you know, I was very traditional, like you were, and I was and all of my friends were having babies at the same time, and my kid didn’t sleep, and then my friends would give me advice, and then I would just cry and get angry because I’m like, I guess I don’t, I guess I just, I guess I just suck, or I or my kid sucks.
Casey Ehrlich 16:55
Yes, both. That’s the part, right? So dyad,
Kristen Carder 16:59
that’s the part that I’m ashamed of, really is like thinking that it was his fault, or that he was doing it to me. And I remember saying to my husband, I know he’s only six months old, but I feel like he’s trying to manipulate me, yeah? And like he’s six months old. Like, what are you even talking about? But that is how I felt about my infant, yeah.
Casey Ehrlich 17:21
Okay, yeah, I felt even worse things okay than that. So it’s very common, okay, yeah,
Kristen Carder 17:29
he, so you were saying you were just describing him as a kiddo. So he didn’t sleep, so he didn’t
Casey Ehrlich 17:35
he didn’t sleep, he, he didn’t play or engage like he I could entertain him. Yes, I could build things for him that he would destroy. I could do jazz hands and improv, but he couldn’t. And I had, now I had a second infant, and so I saw and he’s more internalized than Cooper, but he wouldn’t like reach out for toys or play. He couldn’t be independent because he’d hurt himself scream or hurt someone else, and this extended all the way through burnout and beyond. So he needed undivided attention, like not mom’s in the room, and also folding laundry, but, like, I am full on, hands on, but then he’d go off to school or preschool, and he was, like, charismatic, a leader, no problem. He would spend the night at my mother in law’s house in DC, and he would eat differently, go to sleep earlier, not be defiant or break things, and the second my face showed up,
Kristen Carder 18:43
meltdown, yeah, I’m hungry. I’m time limited.
Casey Ehrlich 18:48
Yeah, so he, my older son, is so fight flight. That’s his nervous system, pathway and his his equalizing is so outward that I saw the mechanisms like I once I started to understand PDA, I could see every activation, like what caused it. But I want to also say for parents like my son’s basic need, his stickiest basic need is what I call it, that he was disabled from was eating. And for two years, he ate three processed foods. Okay, lays potato chips, popcorn and pirates, booty. I’m not exaggerating like he was at risk of a feeding tube. Wow, yeah. And, and when I would put supplements and stuff in chocolate milk before he dropped he would know he would drop it. Oh, now it’s no longer a safe food, yeah. And we, you know, we went through therapy and all the things, but for other parents, they the kid might eat fine, but they might still be in diapers at seven or eight, or the kid might be peeing everywhere, except for in the toilet or. Or having a toileting regression, UTIs and caprices, things like that. So that would be like the toileting basic needs. And this can be teens and adults too, how it impacts them. And this has nothing to do with social communication, lack of skills or intelligence. This has to do with access and what’s happening in the nervous system and brain. This is why I consider it a disability. Eating can also look like compulsive eating, but with teens like we often see arfid and anorexia diagnoses that are not helped by traditional methods. Yeah, for sleep, we might see constant night waking, needing to co sleep or movement into a non 24 hour sleep cycle. Yes. For hygiene, we might see complete refusal, but like to the point where they’ll fight you physically about teeth brushing, bathing, nail cutting, hair cutting, or it might be safety. So this could be self harm, unaliving ideation, and then, yeah, or towards others, like physical violence towards others. So, so those five things get in the way of these children’s ability to live, and it is fluctuating because it’s cumulative. But yeah, I think of PDA is a nervous system difference or disability. If somebody
Kristen Carder 21:44
is listening and they are thinking, Okay, I see a lot of this in my kiddo, but, or it’s not that bad. Yeah, that extreme is it still something that they should learn about and pay attention to.
Casey Ehrlich 21:58
In my world, there’s no shoulds. I’m always trying to give everyone their own
Kristen Carder 22:06
I appreciate it. I can handle it. So shoulds people, no, no.
Casey Ehrlich 22:10
Shoulds, you do you? So I think it can be really helpful for parents who have neurodivergent kids who have learned a lot about neuro diversity, and so they’re thinking about sensory they’re thinking about executive function. They’re thinking about social communication, restricted and repetitive interests to add to their repertoire. I love the way you said that the idea that what is causing challenges, avoidance or struggles in the relationship could be based on the perception of autonomy and equality, because it’s often the missing piece. So for like a true PDA child, it’s the defining feature. It’s the it will override other things. It will be the first lens that we want to see them through. But I think for ADHD and autistic kids, neuro spicy kids like there is a strong drive for autonomy. It’s not necessarily a disability, but we can do a lot more collaboration and relational safety if we’re taking that into account? Oh, I 100%
Kristen Carder 23:23
1,000,000% agree with that. I I think that. And we’re going to get to the point where we talk about, like, low demand parenting, and what does that look like? But I’m curious if, under the hygiene umbrella, would that also be like their space?
Casey Ehrlich 23:46
Ooh, that’s a good question. So is it mostly their body? So the reason that I focus on those five basic needs is because, like, a space doesn’t have to be clean to stay alive. I see, but like, teeth eventually will get infected or, you know, so there’s like a second tier of things we can think about, like activities of daily living. So like leaving the house, leaving their room, movement, connection, learning, which a clinician can argue with you and say those aren’t necessary to stay alive. So it’s not a disability, which is why I frame it as such, because I very strongly believe that this disables a subset of neurodivergent children and should be taken seriously, but in terms of, like, not being willing to clean their space. Yeah, that’s certainly a pattern we see for sure. Am I in your house?
Kristen Carder 24:54
Right? You know, it’s so interesting because. Is I always have this, I always have this like line that I’m walking on this podcast, which is the best thing I can do is be vulnerable and connect, yeah, and the worst thing I could do would be to share something about my family member that they wouldn’t want shared. I understand. And so I just feel like I’m always on this tightrope, yeah, yeah. I think that, like being vulnerable and connecting is so important. And my my kids autonomy, absolutely, their ability to own their own story is really important too. And so it’s like, ah, but I will say, Yes, you are in my home and burnout, I do believe that my son went into like a PDA burnout phase, and it was very scary, yeah, and that was a couple years ago, and finding your content and being able to just understand the lens to look through, and the ways to build safety for him. It it changed everything that’s great. I’ve never gotten teary on this pod ever. Y’all, my goodness, but the the ability to understand him through that lens changed everything. And so that’s why I think it’s just so important that parents hear what you have to say. Because some parents will hear you and say, like, Nope, that’s not my kids, and then you just move on. And that’s like, great for you. I’m so happy for you. So happy for you. But anyone who is like, oh my goodness, like, my my kid is, you know, like ADHD or autistic or OCD or something, but there is more there. Like, he’s never or she’s never fit the mold, and they’ve always been like so hard to understand. And I don’t understand why there’s always like this battle, the constant battle that goes beyond oppositional, defiant like constant battle, like why? And I think pathological demand avoidance, understanding that it’s even a thing and a concept, can just change so many families,
Casey Ehrlich 27:30
yeah, and it gives us much more compassion, right? Than just being like your kid is oppositional, yes, or a bad kid, because, like you think that as a parent, like, I’m a bad mother and my child is not a good kid, you know, with a lot of these behaviors, yes, and it’s an invitation to see it a different way that can be really healing for Families.
Kristen Carder 27:56
Yes, absolutely okay. Let’s move to right now, from what I understand, the conversation around PDA is under the umbrella of autism, I think. And I’d like your clarity on this. My listenership is ADHD, but I when I’m coaching, and, I mean, I coach 1000s of people and and what I hear is a lot of PDA tendencies, yeah, and so I’m a little bit confused about whether or not someone with ADHD can be PDA, and we can talk about it In terms of teens and kids. Is it exclusively under the autism umbrella, or is it, like, broader than that?
Casey Ehrlich 28:47
Yeah, it’s a great, it’s a great, it’s a great question. So I am not the definitive word on this, but I can talk to like, why don’t I talk a little bit about, like, how we got here, sure, and where we are now, and what it’s
Kristen Carder 29:04
a developing conversation. Yeah,
Casey Ehrlich 29:07
so PDA was a term that was first coined in 1980 in the UK by a woman named Elizabeth Newson, and she conceptualized it as adjacent to ASD autism spectrum disorder, but was noticing a lot of social strategies for avoidance. So the way it was termed was like an anxiety driven need for control. Okay, and the children used social strategies often to avoid tasks, and so I think now there’s this conversation evolving, because we’ve had a lot of PDA adults on social media and in their own content, talking about their lived experience. Audience, right? So we have Sally cat, we have Christy Forbes, we have Demi Burnett. We have lots of creators where you see a different internal, lived experience, and it is often placed under the autism spectrum disorder umbrella. So like in Australia, it’s diagnosable under ASD. But personally, because I’ve worked with so many families and seen the patterns, I think there are many adults who identify with PDA and do not identify as autistic, and there are many of their children who would never meet the criteria for autism because they’re like, super social, and like my older son, social, outgoing, makes eye contact, he is autistic, but like by a clinician, he would be viewed much more as ADHD, sure, but he identifies as autistic and PDA, yeah, so I’m hedging a little bit here. I’m just gonna say it. I think you can be ADHD and PDA, I don’t think you need to be autistic, but that’s not a popular opinion.
Kristen Carder 31:18
I love that you were just like, I’m just gonna say it. I
Casey Ehrlich 31:23
hedged for a lot. No, yeah, but I as a researcher, so there’s two things. One is like identity and lived experience. And I’m never gonna tell someone you have to be autistic in order to be PDA, if this is your experience. And I’ve worked with a lot of adults and met a lot of adults who are like, I’m PDA, but I’m ADHD and PDA, right? Or I’m just PDA, then we have the clinical stuff, which is like political evolving, and not something that, like I have a big say in, right? Yes, but I feel very strongly because like the pattern I do see is that so many families who could be helped by the PDA lens are not taken seriously because their kid doesn’t present as typically autistic. And that’s why I want to keep this conversation open, acknowledging that, like the the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, keeps changing, right? Like 2013 pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, and Asperger’s were scooped into the autism spectrum. So it it’s pretty broad.
Kristen Carder 32:39
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I’m gonna get some hate on this
one. Listen, there’s no good way to tell the truth without getting hate. Yeah, there’s just not. There’s no way to tell your version, whatever version of the truth that it like. There’s no way to say what you think without getting hate and and I just appreciate your willingness. I appreciate your willingness to like open yourself up to that hate, because what it does is that allows the 1000s and 1000s of people that are ADHD and listening to this podcast to say, Wait, maybe this is actually something that I should consider, yeah, without drawing the line and saying, Well, I’m not autistic, I don’t think I would meet the criteria for autism, so this is not something that I need to even think about. Yeah, and I think that’s a very generous interpretation of of PDA and and listen, I my husband would be like this girl right here is the most demand avoidant woman in the world. And I just, I don’t think I would meet the criteria for autism, but I have a lot of these internal battles of and we’re going to talk about this in the next episode of like, the struggle of being an adult and setting tasks for myself to do, and then feeling that, for me, it’s more like freeze in those moments of like, I can’t do it, I’m not going to do it. You can’t make me do it. And that’s me talking to me totally, yeah. And that’s like, I like, it’s not normal, because it’s like survival brain and front is exactly that. And I, like, have been in burnout shutdown modes in some ways, not maybe to the extent that you’ve described with your kids, but certainly not able to function, yeah,
and I
just so anyway, I appreciate the generosity of your interpretation, absolutely, I absolutely appreciate that. So how do you know the difference between a child who is PDA and a child who’s a little
Speaker 1 37:32
a hole? I don’t think children are a holes. Oh, gosh, should I take that part out? No, no, no, here’s the thing. They can act like eight holes, yeah. And sometimes my husband and I will finish the day of caregiving and be like, Man, he was such a dick today, right? So, like, I don’t say that as, like, a judgmental thing at all, but my spiritual belief is that, like, our children are acting in a way that is in asshole genre because of something, not because they are an asshole, right? And so there’s always, to me, a root cause, like, I don’t think that, and I could be wrong about this, right? And people will argue with me like but I have a spiritual belief that in each child is it, and human is a divine light that can never be corrupted, and our job as parents, clinicians, teachers, is to facilitate that light to shine, and so like with our PDA kids, the threat response is what we’re interacting with. It’s not the child.
Kristen Carder 38:46
Say that again, it’s the threat response that we’re interacting with, not the child.
Casey Ehrlich 38:52
Yeah, like you’re not your nervous system and you’re not your thoughts and you’re not your emotions. You are the witness of those things, whether you call it consciousness, soul, spirit, and not to be too like, woo, woo. But yeah, I have that belief, and I had to develop that belief to stay with the hardness of my son like I was not a spiritual person before my son’s burnout.
Kristen Carder 39:22
What’s so interesting, as you say, that is I come from. It’s so interesting to even have this conversation, because my like family heritage is like fundamental Christianity, which views children through the lens, and I’m speaking broadly so like people chill, but chill out. Just chill. This is it views children through the lens of like you were born with this in nature, yeah, and it’s the parents job.
Casey Ehrlich 39:59
Yeah, and this is horrible, yeah. It’s the opposite of what I
Kristen Carder 40:03
it’s the opposite of what you just said. Like, it’s the parents job to rid the child of their sin nature, and we do that by understanding that the child is, you know, born with original original sin. I’m like, what is that word again? So you’re born with original sin, and you like, have to be corrected at every turn in order for that to be made, right? Yeah. And that’s how I was parented. That’s how I started my parenting journey to my shame and what we forget and like, sorry to make this Christiany, but like, what we forget is that, like, we’re also made in God’s image. Hello. Yeah, right. Like you have to if you’re going to be like, a fundamental person in that way, like you can’t also neglect the part where, like, we’re made we’re image bearers, yeah. So, like, your child is an image bearer. Like, what are you doing? Kristen, thinking that your child is just like the worst person, right? Yeah. I like, I mean, I like your version so much better, because I want to view my child as good.
Casey Ehrlich 41:18
It’s a Buddhist version. Can I give you a quote? Yeah, so Buddhism says that the challenge for humans, or the problem with humans, is not that they’re sinners, it’s that they’re blind to their true nature, that they forget what they are, which is like part of source. It’s exactly what you said. Yeah, right, but I think we can get really far away from that, because everything in our culture is and I have this internalized of like, I’m not worthy just because I exist. I need to be productive, I need to be palatable. I need to
Kristen Carder 42:01
do things right, productive, palatable, pretty, yeah, all the P words. We got to be all of them, yeah.
Casey Ehrlich 42:08
So I think, you know, I was raised Catholic, Episcopalian and Catholic, depending on where we were in. My parents divorce and I sort of abandoned all religion to be more of an academic. You know, it’s not popular to talk about spirituality in academic circles, most of them, but I had to find something to trust, because my child, for all intents and purposes, to me, looked like kind of demonic and like I’ve had to do a lot of trauma work on that. And so I had to decide, am I going to see this kid as bad, or am I going to see him as good and act from there? And I chose the latter, and I’m really glad I did, because now I see the beautiful human that he is behind that threat response. And so I try and approach all people from that lens. And sometimes I get pissed off and don’t do it, but like, I try and have that as my baseline.
Kristen Carder 43:19
Yes. Okay, so
when we are encountering a kiddo who is defiant, whether they’re pathological, whether they’re PDA or not, what you’re saying is we’re interacting with behavior. We’re not interacting with the person,
Casey Ehrlich 43:37
the Yeah,
Kristen Carder 43:38
like the self, the truest self,
Casey Ehrlich 43:41
yeah, the higher self, or, like, the spirit of that child, the heart of that child, we’re interacting with a nervous system response, I think sometimes it can be trying to get their needs met. You know, I’m not totally discounting behavior that is goal oriented, but what is the goal right like? And I’m not trying to blame parents. It could be like something’s happening at school, or they don’t feel seen, or they have neurodivergence that we haven’t recognized, and so it feels out of nowhere. And sometimes the needs are invisible to us, like they need lower lights in the room. So I try and view it like that. And it had, you know, it saved my family to to think about it like that, because
Kristen Carder 44:40
I was ready to head for the health look at I was like, I’m done with this. Yes, okay, so let’s chat about, how do you exist in a family? And like, have a family that is. You know, I mean, you got to put food on the table. Yeah, kids need, I don’t know. I would say like, kids need the rhythms education of some sort, whether even if that is like unschooling or whatever, like, we need to be moving things forward. How in the world do you do that with a pathologically demand, avoidant child, especially if there are other kids in the
Casey Ehrlich 45:27
mix? Yeah, yeah. So I always encourage parents to, like, take one digestible bite at a time and to start with things that don’t require changing the family system or necessarily involving anyone else. So like, let’s say we just have one parent who wants to experiment with a different way of being with the child. There are a couple, like, simple, but not easy changes we can make. So like, one of the most simple things is wait until they speak to you instead of asking them questions, right? Like that. You can do that without changing anything. You can still have your family dinner. You can still have a curfew, but even just our interactions throughout the day can be activating that threat response, right? So not speaking, waiting for them to initiate conversation. When they do initiate conversation, allowing them to talk about what they want to talk about without an agenda. We can also think about experimenting with autonomy in ways that is less scary, right? Like we can think about small examples like, let’s say you have a neurodivergent an ADHD kid who just like, keeps wanting to eat with their hands, and you’re trying to be like, No, I need to teach them to use their utensils.
Kristen Carder 47:00
It’s my job as the parent to teach them like that. That’s in us totally.
Casey Ehrlich 47:06
But the assumption with PDA is they already know. They already know. They just aren’t accessing that frontal lobe where the skill resides and the executive functioning resides. So what if we could give them autonomy around that. Like, they’re still at the table, we’re still eating dinner, you’re still feeding them, but there are so many things with your hands, yeah, like parents immediately go to the like, well, I can’t pull them out of school and just like, no curfew. Chill, chill, chill. Like, one step at a time, because then when parents make even small tweaks. I’ve seen it different. I’ve seen it in my house. Yeah, I’ve seen it in my own it’s, you’re not lying, people.
Kristen Carder 47:50
I know you’re not lying because I’ve done it and I’ve so my husband and I had, like, a very frank conversation about, like, Where can we just chill? Yeah, where can we add support, with with tasks that seem age appropriate, that he should be able, like, should yeah, that’s the lowering demand, right? Yeah, should be able to do this. And it’s like, so like, I just started cleaning his room every day. Yeah, it was so easy for me. Yeah, just clean his room and, like, for him to enter into a clean space and not have a fight about, like, Why aren’t your clothes in the in the hamper? Like, why can’t you just did it up? It was just like, I’m just gonna take care of it. Yeah, that one tweak changed so much, yeah. And it all comes back, though, to that fundamental assumption, is it my job to teach them to be good and give them the skills to do so, or is it my job to facilitate
Casey Ehrlich 48:54
their true self coming out? And so it’s like, that’s where we always get stuck, right? Because I have the same conditioning of like, and I get fear of like. You know, I can’t be writing my son’s homework for him because he’s already in fifth grade. But it’s like, Well, if he’s learning the information and he’s having avoidance or freeze around the actual task of writing, because he did it all day at school. I’m just gonna write the thing that he’s dictating to me. I’m lowering the demand of writing, but then the back of my head I’m like, I’m a this is bad parenting. Because of my
Kristen Carder 49:32
he’s never gonna learn. He’s
Casey Ehrlich 49:34
but he already knows he did it all day at school. It’s just he, he’s at his threshold. Yes, so there’s so many hundreds of interactions we have with our kids that don’t require, you know, throwing, you know, not having a bedtime, not having a curfew, you know, having chaos in the home. It’s it’s really about, can we let some stuff go? Yeah, and facilitate them being, you know, like, like, my kid is attending school, and that is getting him to his threshold. So everything else at home I’m going to support, even if he can cognitively and physically do it in other moments.
Kristen Carder 50:21
That’s so important. And I just wonder, have you had to work through like, it triggering you 100%
Casey Ehrlich 50:29
all the time? Yeah, of course, that’s not just me. Oh, my god, yeah,
Kristen Carder 50:36
because it’s like, I think that I also have that equalizing in some ways. And so then I’m like doing that with a child, which is inappropriate, inappropriate, right? And so like letting him be, letting him have the last word, letting him, letting myself be lower. It is. And that’s, I think, for me, like family stuff, maybe not neurodivergent, but more like trauma, where I’m like, nobody’s gonna have control over me, right? Yeah, I see mine probably more through the lens of trauma, maybe, or like my desire to equalize, but it’s like, it brings the worst in me up to the surface, and it’s a constant invitation for me to regulate, to soothe, and to make a choice of like, yeah, who you going to prioritize here and what’s most important here?
And I hate it, yeah, it sucks.
Speaker 2 51:40
It’s not fun, it’s not fun, but it is. It is the thing that helps me and has helped other parents who would relate to you a lot,
Casey Ehrlich 51:54
is to really focus on a couple things. One is, first and foremost, just like that belongs like Absolutely. I’m fucking annoyed with my kid, and I feel resentment. This belongs like, welcome resentment. It’s all good. There’s no judgment of self, all the self compassion The second is realizing that we can find meaning in it, and so like for me, every time I interact and have that knee jerk, reactive human nature that I have, and I can pause and sort of recenter and then act from love, I feel like I’m growing and so it’s like there’s something in it for me, you know, and there’s meaning. And then if you have a strong drive for autonomy, like one thing that’s helped our families, a lot of the parents are PDA themselves, is recognizing that you have a choice, right? It’s cumulative. This is what I love about PDA, okay, so, like every interaction is a choice to activate or accommodate, and it builds in the system, right? But because it’s building over time, we can accommodate two out of three times and still make a huge amount of progress. So that third time you can just be like, not fucking cleaning the room today. You know? Yeah, it’s still gonna be okay, because you have your baseline.
Kristen Carder 53:38
I love that. There is still choice in it for the parent, and there’s still a measure of like, as long as the ratio and the scale is it tipped in this direction, I know a little bit you can be your
Casey Ehrlich 53:53
imperfect self that all of us are.
Kristen Carder 53:58
Everyone with ADHD knows what to do to improve their lives. You go to bed at a reasonable time, you wake up early, you make a list, you cross things off the list in order, blah, blah, blah. Like, yeah, we know what to do, but ADHD is not a disorder of not knowing what to do. It’s a disorder of knowing exactly what to do but not being able to get yourself to do it. That’s why I created focused. It’s an ADHD coaching membership for adults with ADHD. I’m a life coach with multiple certifications, and since 2019 I’ve coached over 4000 adults with ADHD from all over the world. I know what it takes to help an adult with ADHD go from Hot Mess express to grounded and thriving, I’ll teach you how to understand your ADHD brain, regulate your emotions and your behavior and accept yourself, flaws and all. And with this foundation, we’ll build the skills to improve your life with ADHD. And not only do you get skills and tools and focus, but you’re so. Founded by a huge community of adults with ADHD who are also doing the work of self development right alongside of you. Dr Ned Hallowell says healing happens in community, and I have absolutely found this to be true. So if you’re an adult with ADHD who wants to figure out how to be motivated from the inside out and make real lasting changes in your life. Join hundreds of others from around the world in focused. Go to I have adhd.com/focused to learn more. That’s I have adhd.com/focused to check it out. Take me back to every interaction is an opportunity or a choice between
Casey Ehrlich 55:43
activating the nervous system or accommodating it. There’s no yellow zone. There’s no gray space. Say more. Okay, so often a place I got stuck here too, that all the stuck places are places that I’ve been like, brought to my knees on, you know, like, when I was first trying to do therapy with my son, it’s like trying to teach him the zones of regulation. And, like, what I observed is like, there’s red or there’s green, like, there is no in between. That’s just boom, boom. And so the way I think about it is like, you can’t hedge, you can’t be like, Okay, I’m going to be flexible, but in the back of my mind, I’m still going to be trying to teach something in this moment see right through it. Yes, they it’s like, energetic perception. So I don’t like to operate in binaries like I’m always all about the nuance, but this is the one place where I coach families to be like you. If we don’t accept this logic, we’re never going to make progress. Fascinating, because it’s from that logic that we can, we can actually, like, engage in a new form of decision making with a new logic that can actually support peace in the family. But if we’re still trying to make decisions around things like boundaries, school screens, siblings from a place of if I just say it differently, or if I just find a tool on the internet to make it so that they don’t get activated when I get give them a boundary, you’re going to stay stuck because you’re looking to fix what is a disability. You’re trying to make it so that they don’t have PDA, because the nature of it is, when they neurocept, I don’t have freedom, choice, autonomy and equality, their nervous system goes off. Yeah. That doesn’t mean we never set we don’t set boundaries. It does mean we have to make decisions accordingly. Yes. Does that make sense? 100%
Kristen Carder 57:53
I appreciate you saying there’s green or red, yeah, like no yellow. Very clear. That’s very clear, is that why things go from zero to 100 in a snap second, and you’re just like, Wait, what just happened?
Casey Ehrlich 58:07
Yeah, that and the accumulation. Okay, yeah. So, like my older son, because we’ve been doing this for six years with him, he has a window where, like his he still gets activated anytime I set a boundary with him, sure, but because he has a window of tolerance from all the work we’ve done, he he might be like, be like, Shut up under his breath instead of and recover Sure, instead of, like, an hours long meltdown, meltdown.
Kristen Carder 58:37
Okay, so is the lower demand parenting all about increasing their window of tolerance, increasing their ability to have a little bit more access to their thinking brain.
Casey Ehrlich 58:53
Yeah, so I think there’s, there’s three things that are the goal.
Kristen Carder 58:59
I can’t wait to hear so excited. Tell me the goals.
Casey Ehrlich 59:03
One, the very first goal is felt safety on a subconscious level with you, the connection. So they can be very attached and emotionally attached to you, and still be perceiving danger around you. Okay, so the goal is to, like, get you guys back on the same team where it’s like, because once you’re on the same team and they trust you, you can, you can do a lot more than when you’re activating their
Kristen Carder 59:36
nervous experience both, yeah, it’s shocking,
Casey Ehrlich 59:39
yeah. So the connection, trust, totally.
You want to say more? No, I don’t continue, sure. Yeah,
I’m positive two. It’s to create a window of tolerance in their nervous system. So we teach 12 accommodations, and I don’t love the words. Is low demand parenting because, Oh, interesting. The true root cause is like autonomy and nervous system safety and lowering demands. I think of as one of the 12. Like doing things for them. I see they can cognitively or physically do for themselves. So like putting their shoes on and tying them even though they can’t, or delivering food. So the more we accommodate, the more that they develop a window of tolerance, that their cumulative nervous system stress comes down, and then the third is creating new neural pathways back to the thinking brain and regulation. So like, let’s take a scenario where we want our kid to get off a screen, right? And we’re like, Okay, it’s time to get off the screen. They’re gonna have that internal activation,
Kristen Carder 1:01:01
and I’ve braced myself for it already. I’m like, it’s gonna freak out. I’m having anxiety about setting that limit, like I’m worked up already. Yeah. I mean, it’s hard stuff. Okay, continue.
Casey Ehrlich 1:01:14
So the next decision point is, like, they’re not getting off, yep. So are we? There’s a couple ways to do this, like boundaries. I I define as what you do in response to something Sure. So there’s choices. We could turn off the Wi Fi. We could physically take the iPad out of their hand. We could start yelling at them while we take the iPad out of the hand. So let’s say, instead of just removing the iPad, as a regulated parent being like, I’m sorry, but it’s it’s time knowing that they’re going to activate, we choose to also get mad and try and teach. Instead of one activation in the system, we have two, okay, yes, and then they have meltdown. So now we have another choice point or decision point, we can bear witness and de escalate, or we can get even madder, like you can’t throw things, you can’t call me names, and then they’re they’re just going further and further into life threat, yes, and The pathway is just going down the like, fear pathway into the survival brain and going deeper and deeper in that. Or we could maybe add on some autonomy, like, hey bud. You know, I’m thinking in about 10 minutes, we need to get off the iPad, and they’re like, Fuck you, or they hiss at you, or no, depending on the age. And then we might give them 20, right? So we add in a little, you know, they stay in their thinking brain a little bit longer. And then we do have to take the iPad away, but we’re doing it with a lot of just like, hey, but it’s time for bed. I’m going to take the iPad away, and they go into this huge, huge meltdown. There’s activation there. But then, instead of trying to teach or incentivize them to do it differently, we just sit with them and bear witness and be like, I’m so sorry. This is so hard. I love you. And then we repair afterwards. It’s like their neural pathways are more quickly coming back to safety, and that’s what we want to teach our kids. Like, you’re safe. You can get back to your thinking brain, where you can access empathy, connection, executive functioning, rational thought,
Kristen Carder 1:03:35
and I’m a safe place for you to have this freak out, which is not fun for you, either, like, it’s not fun for the child, no, right? And so when we are, like, resisting it, upset about it, adding to it, it’s it’s taking something that’s already so difficult for them and escalating it so much, rather than just like, I’m here for you and I’m strong enough to, like, contain this moment,
Casey Ehrlich 1:04:00
yeah, yeah, because it’s just the nervous system. It’s not your kid, yeah, right. It’s not their self. It’s just and accepting, like I’m going to set the boundary and they’re going to activate. Both are going to be true, yeah? And there’s no strategy. There’s no
Kristen Carder 1:04:18
you know what is the three quick tips.
Casey Ehrlich 1:04:23
Hey, chatgpt, how do I set this boundary so that my kid doesn’t have an activation? Part of what we work on with families is like that radical acceptance piece of there will be an activation, especially if they’re in burnout, because they don’t have the window yet and they don’t have the felt safety. So how can we accept that and act from there? And it’s hard, like it brings up all our own traumas and our own shit, right?
Kristen Carder 1:04:49
It’s a constant invitation, and like you either accept the invitation and you do your own healing, or you fight with your child for the rest of the world of their lives. Yes, like, that’s kind of where I’ve been, like, okay, either I’m going to do the work in myself so that I can be safe for him, or we’re going to be at odds, and there will be periods because we’ve experienced that of him under functioning and being impacted in a really big way, because of, because of the way that either his brain is working or our family system is working, or something.
Casey Ehrlich 1:05:27
Yeah, and there’s no blame here, like I speak from doing literally everything, quote, wrong. And this is why I don’t say any shoulds it’s like I tried everything, and I tried to make him not PDA, and I railed at, you know, I howled at the moon, and hated my life and hated him and all the things. And so I would never judge a parent for hearing this and being like, Casey, like, depending on where I was in my journey, I would have listened to myself and been like,
Kristen Carder 1:06:01
Get out of here. Get out of here. Yeah, I say I have explicit memories of people suggesting, like, softer limits, and me being like, what are you? You’re crazy. Absolutely not. That’s ridiculous. And you know, that’s what I needed. He did. He needed soft. He needed softness. He needed to be hard and live in a soft environment. And that’s a tricky scenario for a parent to set up. It is,
Casey Ehrlich 1:06:38
it is, but so much of our resistance isn’t about actual need for the family. It’s about our fear that we’re doing it
Kristen Carder 1:06:49
wrong, or our programming of like this is how it should be done. And if I’m a good parent, this is what I should do. I should he should eat like his room should look like this. The Table manner should look like this. The homework time should look like this. And if it doesn’t, that’s an indictment of me and my motherhood.
Casey Ehrlich 1:07:07
Totally, yeah, and I will say a lot, like parents listening, or if you think you might be, PDA, like your intuition knows it’s just you. You feel like you’re doing it wrong.
Kristen Carder 1:07:19
Yes, like, I can’t follow my intuition, because I would be doing it wrong if I did. Yeah, yeah, as we wrap it up, thank you so much for being here and for parents listening, who are like, eyes are opening mind blown like, Oh my goodness. I really think this might be the lens that I should be looking at or looking through at my child. What hope can you offer to them, like, what? Where are some places that they can start with understanding what’s going on and maybe shifting the dynamic in their family? Yeah.
Casey Ehrlich 1:08:02
Okay, so the first thing I’d love to share is just strengths, because we haven’t talked about it. So these kids are awesome, like they’re an adults. When they are in regulation and safety, they are incredibly charismatic, great senses of humor, very creative, like I talk about something called transformation activities, where they have this knack for transforming things from one material state to another in ways that no one else would think about it, energetic, truth radar,
Kristen Carder 1:08:43
you know, which is hard, the BS meter is that what you’re talking about, spirit,
Casey Ehrlich 1:08:48
connection with animals, strong drive for justice, social justice, even within their own families. So I see all of these very strongly in my children when they are not in their threat response. And so if you’re coming to PDA for the first time and what you’re seeing is the threat response, you’re gonna feel like my kid is a bad kid and or struggling a lot. And so the thing I need to do most is to do all this therapy and all of this conditioning and training them not to be that way. So I think just like putting that on a shelf and focusing on your interactions with them first, so I would say reducing speech, reducing the amount of questions, allowing them to have the last word without correction, noticing the places where you’re trying to do teaching moments, and just allowing them to be instead of teach right like with my. Younger son on Minecraft. I’m so conditioned to do this where he’s like, asking me to spell something, and I’m like, Oh, I got to teach him how to read. And it’s like, just spell it for him. Yes, right? Lower the demands that feel like you shouldn’t right, like, the remote is right next to their hand, and you’re in the kitchen, and they’re like, I need the remote, or remote, just put it in their hand, you know, because you’re reformulating the relationship right now. Tie their shoes for them. Pack their backpack for them. When they have a meltdown, think of it as a panic attack, and that’s good. Like, hold space and repair, right? Like, I bring my kids like a popsicle afterwards. Instead of being like, you can’t do that. I’m giving tips here. This is so good. This is so good thinking about for autonomy and equality. Thinking about for autonomy, think about where, when and how, rather than if so. Like with eating, like, maybe they could eat somewhere other than the table, in a bowl that you don’t usually use at a time that’s not usually a meal time. Yes, equality would be letting them be above you, like, let them climb on the car while you’re eating dinner, sit on the floor while they’re talking to you. So just starting to experiment, like, just take two weeks and try out some of this stuff and see the difference, see if your child shifts, and if they do, it’s like, oh yeah, maybe this is one of the root causes of what why things are hard.
Kristen Carder 1:11:59
I I I think that experiment is so important, because if things do begin to shift, that is such a clear, open wide, like, Okay, let’s do more. Let’s do more. Let’s do more. Like, what else can we do to accommodate in order to expand their window of tolerance, tolerance, oh my gosh, their window of tolerance, so that they have more access to their thinking brain, so that they can just be themselves. Yeah, they can just like, live their lives,
Casey Ehrlich 1:12:33
and you’ll feel better like, as my husband said, I don’t know about all this stuff, but I do know that what we’re doing now is making me feel like shit as a parent because we were doing all the strict stuff. So you know, also recognizing that like it might feel better for you if you’re not constantly in conflict,
Kristen Carder 1:12:56
100% what it looked like since my son was a teenager by the time that I discovered your work and really began to look at him through the lens of PDA, what it looked like for us was me cleaning his room, doing his laundry and putting it away, Just like doing all of that, cooking him food whenever he wanted it, and offering all the time. Do you want some food? Can I make you anything? Whereas before I was like, He’s X amount old, like he can take care of it himself, I was cooking dinner for the family at age 12, like he can make food for himself. You know, like parentified child’s just like, it’s fine, hashtag. We’ve got some drama. But when you think about yourself as a kid and then your own child, you’re like, I don’t need to do this for him, like I was independent at that age, giving him way more screen time than we’re comfortable with, way more screen time,
Casey Ehrlich 1:13:59
way more so much more, so much effort, so much fucking screen time, so
Kristen Carder 1:14:05
much and part of that was seeing one of your reels that said that screen time is a regulator for them. Yeah, and I knew that intuitively it was obvious that that was what was happening. But in my brain, if I’m if I’m letting him be regulated through the screen, then I’m doing it wrong, because he needs to learn how to regulate on his own, yeah. And so I need to take away the regulation tool so that he can go figure it out. And it was a very much like, go figure it out. And he was just like, What are you doing to me? Like this is torture, yeah, so really, just letting him have a ton of screen time, and then just looking for ways where I could just say yes instead of where, when he was a kid, I literally said no all the time. Right? And, gosh, it it wasn’t pleasant for anyone, and it was a stupid way to parent anyway. But, like,
Casey Ehrlich 1:15:08
it’s fine, but you think, like, that’s what your job, that’s what
Kristen Carder 1:15:11
my job. Like, my job is to show him where the limits are, where the edges are, where, like, the right and the wrong is. And, of course, there’s black and white everywhere. There’s no gray. It’s just black and white. So I’m just it’s a no no and everything’s No. And now it’s like, say yes as much as possible. And even in a no, find a yes, yes. Where can I find the Yes? Here, right? Like, where can i You can’t do that, but, like, we could do this instead, and it’s changed everything.
Casey Ehrlich 1:15:39
I’m so glad, but it’s awesome. Well, you did the work amazing.
Kristen Carder 1:15:44
Gosh, Casey, this I know this episode is going to blow up. I just know that the ADHD community is really hungry for this information. I know that to be true. I work with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of parents who are parenting kiddos who are really just trying to figure out their neurodivergent kiddos and just like what is going on here, and I know that our community is starving for this information, so thank you. Thank you for your generosity being here. I can’t wait to talk to you next week when we talk about PDA and adults, and one of your colleagues will be joining us for that conversation. So guys, stay tuned. Like, share, subscribe all the things. Send this to your partner, send this to your kids, send this to your mom, send this to all of the people who you know will benefit from it, and we’re going to see you again next week. Bye. You. If you’re being treated for your ADHD, but you still don’t feel like you’re reaching your potential, you’ve got to join focused. It’s my monthly coaching membership where I teach you how to tame your wild thoughts and create the life that you’ve always wanted, no matter what season of life you’re in or where you are in the world. Focused is for you. All materials and call recordings are stored in the site for you to access at your convenience. Go to I have adhd.com/focused for all the info you.
