The Unfurling

On presence, pressure, and what it means to meet a PDA child where they are

Image by Kristy Forbes

A child gives one word, and the adult wants a paragraph. A teenager shares one feeling, and the parent asks five questions. The person begins to approach, and everyone rushes forward. The nervous system learns that opening the door is dangerous because people push through it.” - from my upcoming memoir on PDA (but don’t ask me about it because I’ll never be able to publish it 😆).

Sometimes, when a child or young person begins to emerge from shutdown, burnout, avoidance, overwhelm, chronic illness, or a long period of being in necessary solace, they don’t come back all at once. They might offer something small: a word, a feeling, a glance, a joke, a moment of sitting nearby, a tiny piece of the internal world becoming visible again. This can be an inadvertent litmus test - an unconscious nervous system signal sent out to test whether the environment is safe enough to come a little further into.

I understand why we rush toward them when they do this. I understand it from many angles - as a PDAer myself, a parent, a professional, a family member, a friend.

We love our children. We’ve been frightened for them. We’ve missed them. We want them to know we are here, that we care, that we’re listening, that we’re always going to be ready when they are. We want to encourage more of this. We want to show them that reaching toward us is worth it. AND, we’ve been encouraged to take these approaches, often by professionals.

The difficulty is that for a child who is avoidant, overwhelmed, burnt out, PDA, autistic, oversensitised or easily flooded, our love can still land as pressure. Even when the intention behind it is entirely good.

A question becomes a demand. Concern becomes a demand. Our visible hope becomes something they feel they now have to manage on top of everything else.

This does not mean becoming cold or distant or pretending not to care. What it means is learning to allow space for the unfurling. Staying present without grabbing. Receiving the small offering without immediately asking for more. Letting the moment stay small enough that the child can survive having offered it.

Sometimes that looks like saying “I’m glad you told me,” and then letting the silence come. Sometimes it looks like keeping the body casual when every part of us wants to turn toward them with urgency. It might look like not making the approach into a conversation, a sign of progress, a teaching moment, or something we immediately share with someone else because we are so relieved, hopeful and/or excited.

I understand as a PDAer that this is another experience genuinely challenging to comprehend unless you’ve lived inside a nervous system like mine. Others can offer all the love in the world.. all the warmth and generosity and good intention, and a person can still experience the closeness as threatening. While what is on offer by a parent or loved one may feel like gentle encouragement from one side of the door, the same may feel like capture from the other. What feels like connection on offer may feel like pressure to them.

These two things can both be true at once, and neither person is wrong for experiencing it the way they do.

Parenting, loving, supporting PDAers and others in similar nervous system sensitisation can be extremely confusing and challenging. The challenges are seldom acknowledged, and so much of what is asked of carers is the opposite of action. As parents, we are asked to hold back when every instinct says move forward. We are asked to stay calm when we’re terrified. We’re asked to make ourselves smaller, quieter, less reactive simply because the nervous system in front of us needs more space than most environments have ever offered.

It is isolating, and feels incredibly counterintuitive.

But this doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

I see criticisms every single day of those who are loving, supporting and raising such children. Cruel assumptions and misguided judgements.

None of these approaches or what I share with you is about inaction. In fact, what carers are asked to provide, especially to PDAers, takes incredible patience, faith and trust, and courage in the face of insurmountable risk and adversity.

Nobody is left untouched or unaffected in our families.

I am desperate for you to know that if you have been showing up every day to a child who can’t always show you they see it, you are doing lifechanging, paradigm shifting work, even when it does not feel that way.

When the days are long and the progress is invisible and you are not sure if any of it is reaching them, I want to reassure you that over time, in all the small ways we as adults may not notice, it is reaching them. Safety is cumulative, as is trust. Every day that you do not push, do not punish, do not demand more than they have available.. that is being stored somewhere in the body of your child, even if they can’t recognise or express this.

One of the questions I get asked often is: how do I know where my child is at if I’m not supposed to ask? How do I get a sense of what they need if direct questions feel like demands?

This is such a reasonable thing to wonder. Because we do need information. We do need to know, roughly, whether our child is closer to the surface or further away. Whether today is a day for quiet presence or a day where more might be possible.

There are ways to get a sense of this without making it a test, or an assessment, without the child feeling like they are being evaluated.

Parallel play is one of the oldest and most underused tools available to us. Being in the same space doing something of your own - reading, drawing, folding washing, watching something, without directing attention at the child at all. Not performing casualness, but actually being casual.

What happens in that space can tell us an enormous amount. Does the child move closer over time? Do they begin to narrate what they are doing? Do they laugh at something on their screen and glance over? These are not signs that we should now begin a conversation. They are signs that the nervous system is orienting toward us, which is valuable information on its own.

Sharing something of ourselves without asking anything in return is another way. Not, “How was your day?” but, “I saw the funniest thing today,” and then telling it, and then letting it land however it lands. Not waiting for a response. Not fishing for engagement. Just offering something from our world into the shared space and seeing what, if anything, it draws out. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes a small laugh. Sometimes a comment three hours later that tells us they were listening all along. But not being attached to an outcome is key. We’re not looking for engagement, we’re offering safety. Like the difference between making and offering food for survival, and making and offering cake for compliments.

Noticing what the child gravitates toward in low pressure moments can also be useful. What are they doing when they are not in survival mode? What are they watching, building, drawing, playing, listening to? When we show genuine interest in those things (not as a strategy), we communicate something important. We communicate that we find them interesting. Not their progress. Not their recovery. Not their behaviour. Them.

Offering without requiring a response is something crucial to begin practising. Leaving a drink near them without saying anything. Putting a snack nearby..even better, making a platter we eat from ourselves but in a communal area so it’s obvious that it’s shared. Mentioning something we know they like - a show, a song, a food, without making it into an invitation that requires them to receive it in any particular way. These things accumulate. They build a picture over time of an environment that gives without extracting.

Sometimes, if the child is beginning to emerge and we want to gently offer more possibility, we might say something very low-stakes and undemanding. Not “Do you want to talk?” but something more like, “I’m going to sit outside for a bit if you wanna come,” and then genuinely meaning it when they do not come. Meaning it so completely that our body language and our affect do not change when they stay inside. Not turning back to see where they are, or whether they’re coming, or asking them again. Because they ARE watching. They are always watching to see whether our offer was really an offer or whether it was a hope dressed up as an offer.

There are also some things that can help create the kind of environment where emergence becomes more possible over time, not as a formula, but as an orientation.

Predictability matters enormously. Not rigidity, but a general sense that the environment is stable and safe. That certain things can be counted on and that the people in the home are not wildly variable in their mood or their response. When a child is carrying a lot of threat in their nervous system, predictability becomes a kind of oxygen that supports them to not have to use energy scanning the room for danger if the room is reliably safe.

Low demand does not mean low warmth. Sometimes when we talk about reducing demands we create this image of a cold, silent, joyless environment where nobody engages with anyone. That is not what it means. Low demand can coexist with enormous warmth, humour, silliness, connection, tenderness. The absence of demand is not the absence of love. It is love expressed in a way that does not require the child to perform receiving it.

Repair matters more than perfection. There will be days when we rush forward, days when we ask too many questions. Days when the relief is too big to contain and it spills out before we can catch it. This is NOT failure. How can such love be failure? What helps enormously is repair: quietly, briefly, without drama. “I think I came on a bit strong before. Sorry about that. I love seeing your face.” And then we move on. Repair teaches the child that rupture is survivable, that the relationship can hold imperfection and that they don’t have to manage us perfectly either.

Our own regulation is part of the support. This is a heavy thing to put on parents who are already exhausted. And, the nervous system of the child is in relationship with ours and ours with theirs. Our exhaustion doesn’t change this. When we are dysregulated even silently, even holding it in, the body of the child can sense it. Just like we sense them. Notice how our entire mood, demeanour and day can shift dramatically when we see our child suffering? This is the impact of co-regulation and co-dysregulation. We’re led to believe regulation means calm, but it doesn’t. It’s the ability to ‘be with’ difficulties and to move through them.

This is not about performing calm we don’t feel, but finding genuine ways to resource ourselves so we can be a regulated presence as often as possible. That might mean getting support of our own. It might mean being honest about how hard this is, lowering our expectations of ourselves, and recognising that simply staying present and not making things worse is sometimes the most we can offer, and it is enough.

Presence without pressure is not doing nothing. It is an active, sustained, deliberate form of support. We’re saying: I am here, I see you, I am not going to rush you, I am not going to make this moment into something you have to perform. You can come closer. You can go back. You can emerge at whatever pace your nervous system can actually tolerate. You do not have to become fully available all at once in order to be loved.

And we, the parents sitting with all of this, trying to get it right, reading things like this at whatever hour of the day or night it is - we do not have to get it perfect in order to be the people our children need. The fact that we are here, still learning, still trying to understand a nervous system that is very different from what most of us were taught to expect is what love looks like in practice.

KF