Avoiding Leaving Myself

Reflections on attunement and PDA, from inside the experience

I’ve been reflecting this morning on attunement and PDA.

This is very, very clumsy, and I’m continuing to edit as it all unfolds in real time. Of course this is based on my lived experience, as it happened, and continues to.

PDA has never been about pathology for me. Or encapsulated by symptomology, characteristics or deficits. Behaviour is always an outcome, an end result for me that follows an internalised experience I either understand and cannot communicate to others for various reasons (disbelief, judgement, criticism, punishment, etc) or I am still working it out.

I want to share a little about my internalised experience of the world from what is termed being a PDA (Pathlogically demand avoidant) child.

As a child, I wasn’t just being difficult. I wasn’t refusing for no reason, or rejecting adults for the sake of it, or trying to win or control anything.

I was sensing, on many levels.

This is yet another experience challenging to communicate.

I could sense into the essence of a person - their motives, their fears, their insecurities, and their strengths too. I could see things about them that they couldn’t see about themselves.

From the youngest age - preverbal.

It’s not an ego thing. I don’t think I’m special or different necessarily. I actually think this is a common experience but we’ve not been supported to know and understand, let alone believe in our human experiences when they are inconvenient for others. Or, when they make us more difficult to control.

It wasn’t something I felt good about. Most of the time it was a burden, and a lot of the time it was the very thing that made me unsafe.

It was a form of ‘seeing through’ that I had no choice but to trust because it never, ever steered me wrong.

I’d observe people in how they were with others. Even the word ‘observe’ feels far too intentional, it was more of a choiceless noticing. I’d notice how they treated themselves, how they considered the people around them, how they moved through the world and through their days.

I could see the gaps between what they wanted and how they actually went about meeting their own needs.

I could, if invited to (often absolutely not invited but communicated anyway) outline the error of an adult’s ways to redirect them toward the very thing they wanted. More peace in their life, a closer relationship with their pet, as mild examples. I could almost see, energetically, the proverbial mathematical equations floating in the air around the scenes playing out. I’m being funny there, but honestly this is hard to describe!

I didn’t set out to be this way. I was just naturally wired like this and again, it caused me great pain. I could see (sense) things others couldn’t.

It generated a lot of fear. The power of it’s accuracy bypassed any attempts at reassurance from adults. “It’s going to be okay, they know what they’re doing” from an adult was translated to “No, there’s real risk here - this person is hoping for the best but I’ve seen how insecure they are and self doubting. I know there’s a chance this won’t be okay” as an example.

So I resisted a lot. And I resisted because I knew there wasn’t anything neutral or normal or meaningless in what was being asked of me in what others considered mundane daily tasks and activities.

This isn’t the same as someone having sinister intentions, but because so often their instructions came from a place of compliance in themselves that they didn’t even understand; that they were following rules they’d never questioned while attempting to pass them directly on to me, I resisted.

I could not comply with anything so blatantly unexamined.

And yet, I didn’t understand this (I can barely communicate it now), and so I was left in a very uncomfortable, dangerous, yet uncompromising position for much of my life.

A child who senses this way, and is physiologically unable to move forward with compliance is rarely a safe child. Adults do not take kindly to children who say no, who can’t, or who don’t do the things they’re directed to do.

That mindless compliance from the adults around me made me feel incredibly unsafe, and it took me a long time to understand why.

But I know now, that it poses a barrier.

When someone is just complying, going through the motions of rules they’ve never looked at, there’s no actual person there for me to reach.

It blocks off my ability to relate to them, to connect with them, to find the real human underneath. I couldn’t possibly hand myself over to someone who isn’t really there..whose essence is overshadowed by majority unconscious.

What I sensed underneath what was asked of me, provided insight into whether the adult was steady inside themselves.

I could feel when their kindness had pressure under it, when their calm was actually control, when their smile was covering frustration. When their help was really a plan to move me somewhere I hadn’t agreed to go. When the request came with invisible strings. When their need for me to comply was bigger than their capacity to actually meet me.

But it was still more than that. It was more than the impact it had on me via demands.

It was the despair, the grief, the loss, the fear I felt in the first years of my life, seeing those around me who had been afforded the privilege and benefit of so many more years than I, to only be able to live in accordance with what appeared to be blatantly obvious varying forms of indoctrination.

Why weren’t they questioning it?

Why couldn’t they hear my questions, receive my questions are sincere and genuine attempts to understand their compliance without question?

Why were my questions and observations so offensive, confronting and insulting to them?

Think this, say this, eat this, wear this, go here, move this way, etc etc.

I felt incredible panic, terror, fear and grief for so many lives unlived. People going through the motions; their gifts and talents, their skills and their joy unexplored or snuffed out.

Utter grief.

And, an undeniable inner knowing that I did not have the luxury of choosing compliance.

Sometimes I wanted to. Oh man my life would have been so much easier had I been able to just force myself - to just do it. But I couldn’t.

So my days were filled with terror - because I knew that life was a demand avalanche wearing a flower crown. And I knew it was going to be hardcore for me because my body would not comply.

I didn’t have language for any of that as a child, so it came out as no. It came out as resistance, avoidance, argument, shutdown, silliness, running away, becoming impossible.

Any means to survive.

Underneath all of it my body was adamant that this place, this world, this life isn’t safe for me. That this world doesn’t feel safe for me anywhere I turn.

I have to reiterate that it wasn’t because the people around me were always bad or meant me harm, but because I could feel the instability and see unquestioning compliance in them.

The incongruence, the lack of conviction.

And if an adult wasn’t safe inside themselves, I couldn’t be safe with them.

Complying with them meant handing myself over.

We were all prisoners. We were all being swallowed whole.

My nervous system knew before my mind could make sense of it.

We don’t question why we feel hungry every time we do - we eat. We can learn later about digestion, nourishment, etc but first we eat. It’s survival. As was and as is my resistance.

I knew I had no choice but to comply with what my essence, my soul, my spirit needed, or I would die.

That’s why “just do as you’re told” can feel like danger. The question underneath, the one the child can’t actually voice, is something like: can I trust you with me? Can I stay intact here? Will you still see me as a person if I don’t comply, or will your need for control matter more than what my body knows is true?

Does who I truly am at my core matter?

I was so often treated as though my refusal was the problem. But when I look back, I can see it was a form of intelligence - messy and costly, sure, but a body doing its best to protect a self it knew was at risk of being swallowed.

That is what PDA is to me. My body protecting WHO I AM at all costs. A preservation of self.

This was never the RESULT of trauma. I was this way to begin with.

The way I survived outside of the unaliving attempts in my primary years and my teen years was to find ways I could be the most myself. I ended up in caring roles, advocacy roles, writing and creating, making music, baking and singing.

Helping others was a means of externalising helping myself while effectively abandoning myself.

My spirit found such creative and intelligent ways of accessing what I truly needed - I’d avoid school to steal the hours where I could light candles and listen to classical music. I’d make cakes and sing, and feel horrifically useless and guilty because I wasn’t at school instead. There was no other time in the day, in my life where I could access myself, my joy.

My soul longed for liberation of self. Not as a luxury, as a means of survival.

I needed to recognise and know my Self in order to stay alive.

Today, as a PDA adult, I am recovering from abandonment of self.

I am recovering from overcaring for others and never myself.

I fear PDA children being taught out of that powerful inner knowing. I fear anyone being disconnected from that knowing.

And, of course, I know and understand that systems, power, and coercive societies make this challenging, and impossible for so many. But this was my thinking as a child..

I can’t help but sense that this is what I, and so many others knew in our bones and feared so deeply as children. That if we all complied, we’d be feeding into said systems.

I could sense that all channels of compliance unquestioned flowed into rivers of normalisation that flowed into oceans of control.

My burnout throughout life (PDA burnout) was my body saying “Nope. If I can’t be who I am in my wholeness, in the richness and fullness of it all, then I am unable to move forward.”

I've never expected or needed people to be perfect. It's longing for imperfection and honesty about imperfection, because to me - that is perfect.

This is not choice. It is not an enactment of privilege or entitlement.

It is incredibly isolating, confusing, painful and brings more trouble from the adults and systems in our lives than it brings peace, safety or liberation.

We are taught to take our self abandonment and project it onto our coming generations in order to normalise so we don’t see the gaps. So we don’t notice. So we don’t feel.

Loss. Grief.

A person’s no, including a child’s no - is never meaningless just because it’s inconvenient.

Sometimes that no is the most truthful thing that exists in a world where many of us have become lost, or abandoned ourselves, and the child isn’t avoiding life at all.

They’re avoiding leaving themselves.

KF