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What do PDA & ODD Have to Do with the Nervous System? – Rabbi Shoshana(podcast#269)
What if behaviors that look defiant are actually signs of a nervous system under threat? In this episode, Rabbi Shoshana unpacks PDA, also known as Pathological Demand Avoidance or Pervasive Drive for Autonomy, and explains how nervous system sensitivity, autonomy, and co-regulation shape behavior in neurodivergent kids. She explores why traditional approaches often fail, how aspects of modern life intensify dysregulation, and what it means to truly trust a child rather than assume oppositional intent. Get ready to rethink “difficult behavior,” understand what may be happening beneath the surface, and walk away with a more compassionate, nervous-system-informed approach to supporting your family. Download a free tipsheet "Top 10 Ways to Stop Meltdowns in Their Tracks" to stop yelling and tantrums from everyone! What do PDA & ODD Have to Do with the Nervous System? – Rabbi Shoshana Amazon Music | iHeart | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | Youtube About Rabbi Shoshana Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman is a PDA Autistic woman and creator of The PDA Safe Circle™, a transformative online community for PDAers and their loved ones that centers her strengths-based PDA Safe Circle® Approach. Rabbi Shoshana is known for her in-depth content on PDA that helps PDAers of all ages to thrive within the constraints of their vulnerable nervous system. After a previous career in Jewish congregational leadership and climate activism, she is now a sought-after coach and trainer for PDA adults, parents, and allied clinicians. Her writing has been published in many venues, including The New York Times and Psychotherapy Networker magazine, and she is the author of two children’s books. Connect with Rabbi Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Rabbi Shoshana Elaine Taylor-Klaus Download a free tipsheet "Top 10 Ways to Stop Meltdowns in Their Tracks" to stop yelling and tantrums from everyone!
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Our Discussion
I’ll share a little of my story first- Mm-hmm … and then define PDA, um- Perfect … just to help people get to know me. So, um, I am 43, Ashkenazi Jewish, white privilege, you know, every- just, uh, obviously the caveat that everything I say here comes from my lived experience and my, the research I’ve been able to do, but I can only ever speak for myself. I’m the mom of a kiddo who is autistic, has a level two autism diagnosis in terms of autism support needs, and his PDA is particularly disabling, um, in many ways, much higher support needs around the specifics of PDA, and we’ll get to what that is. I am also autistic, late diagnosed. I figured it out when I was 40. It made my entire life make sense, like- as I’m guessing many of your listeners, or at least some, will resonate with. And then there was always this piece of, but something also doesn’t make sense. Like autism as we understand it today, right, monotropic attention, the sensory differences, the deep, deep, deep passions, the social, like body easily dysregulated by social stimulation. I mean, physical stuff. I could go on and on. Literally, it was like the way I described figuring out I was autistic, and this… Sorry, figuring out I was autistic, and this’ll get to the PDA, was if you all remember those little connect-the-dots puzzles where there was, right, like 50 dots on a page numbered. So I have always felt like one of those, like a scatter plot of unrelated random things, like obsessed with certain teachers, also always get nauseous in the car, like random things. Then, when I realized I was autistic, it was like, oh, actually, all these random dots, if you follow the lines as autism, they all are part of a holistic, comprehensive way of being human that is actually not that rare, right, and makes me make sense. And then to extend the dot metaphor, there were always like several very large dots like over-
On the side. Right.
That kind of were still like, “What?” So I come to this work in some ways very new. I am deeply humbled and grateful that you figured PDA out so early in this, compared to the rest of us. I come to this work by way of the social justice, like progressive social justice organizing world, which brought me into wanting to be a rabbi and lead a community to do social justice work and prayer from a grounded place and all of that good stuff. I was very, very new to the disability rights world, to the neurodiversity world until I had my kid, like so many of us. My work tends to be really on the big picture of it takes all those skills of congregational rabbinic community organizing chaplaincy, plus my autistic gifts of pattern recognition and the way that, like, I was an avid journaler. And by avid, I mean like the PDA rule was I had to journal every day. So I have a very strong memory of my own childhood and essentially all the chapters of my life are very, very vivid. So what happened was I found the neurodiversity movement and it was like, oh my Lord, here is the place that makes me make sense. Here’s the place that makes my child… Well, the other way around. Here’s the place that makes my child make sense. And oh my God. Oh my God, it makes me make sense.
Yes.
Oh, it makes the world make sense.
Yeah.
And then The PDA Safe Circle was, is a natural offshoot of the way that I work in the world, which is to autistically go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into something, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, then create in some way that is satisfying and often, not meaning to pat myself on the back here, but often of service, meaning that’s how I find the fulfillment, is learn, make something, in this case a model, an approach, a business, and do that in relation to others and to build power for a better world.
Beautiful. So let me pause you for a second, ’cause I totally hear it, and we still haven’t defined PDA.
Yeah, let’s do that. Well, here’s the thing. My definition of PDA is not a one-liner. But I’ll give you the one-liner, and then I’ll give you the real definition that I like to use. So the one-liner is that PDA is pathological demand avoidance/pervasive drive for autonomy, an emerging neurodivergent category profile that is defined, according to me and according to thought leaders on whose shoulders I stand, as a nervous system disability in which a person’s autonomic nervous system has extremely sensitive triggers to losses of autonomy, even small ones. Losses of control, even small ones. And I don’t say small here to minimize the PDAer’s experience, but subtle, right? Losses of social status or equality. So social status or social equality with another person in a mammalian social structure, like great apes, right? So you’re tracking status. So we are people with extremely sensitive triggers to losses of status. And then the fourth one, which I add to the mix, is loss of co-regulation, even small ones. So people with extremely sensitive nervous systems to those four defining threats.
So that’s a very down-the-rabbit-hole explanation. I wanna pull back for people who really aren’t yet familiar with it. The research that was initially done that helped us begin to discover PDA was done out of autism research in the United Kingdom, actually. And what they discovered was this kind of subset, or what was often known as a presentation of autism, that they defined as PDA. What they began to see was a bunch of people, particularly kids at the time, who were extremely resistant to and avoiding any kind of expectation or demand that was placed on them. That’s where this starts from. Yeah. So when we have kids who feel defiant, who feel oppositional, who feel like they’re avoiding, this is one of the places to look, particularly if there’s an autism diagnosis, because the way that it manifests is a resistance to expectation.
Is that fair? So, well, yes and no, and this is why-
OK.
Everything you’re saying historically, absolutely.
I just wanna give the context of it before, because the modern interpretation, it’s developed a lot in the last 20 years.
Yeah. Yeah, and there isn’t a consensus. You know, I’m speaking out of the grassroots that is, in my not humble opinion, far ahead of any clinical research you can find about PDA.
Right. I feel that.
It’s not far ahead of research on nervous systems or, you know, quote-unquote, “ADHD/ODD,” oppositional defiant disorder. Like, there are studies of those kids where they actually were tracking their nervous systems, and clearly somebody with an ADD, ADHD, and ODD diagnosis 20 years ago is PDA today. And so we actually do have some studies on that. However, yes, the piece where I like to start with the nervous system and then go into what it looks like is because actually PDA can present in a lot of different ways, including with kids. But yes, for the listeners in your podcast, absolutely it’s super important because probably the folks who are listening have more of the presentation of behaviors that are labeled oppositional and defiant and manipulative and aggressive and all this stuff. But that is only one aspect of how PDA can manifest. So that’s just important to note, and the whole thing makes sense through the underlying nervous system. So on a big level, this is something that we’ve always seen, these behaviors. What we haven’t always understood is where they’re coming from and how to help, and that’s the really exciting piece about being alive today.
So I love that. And I wanna let you take a deeper dive into it after the break. I have one question before the break, ’cause I think what I just heard you say, it used to be that PDA was gonna show up in the autism world and ODD was gonna show up in the ADHD world. Now there’s a ton of overlap in those two worlds. They used to be distinct worlds. Now there’s a lot of overlap. Are you saying that PDA is now something that could be identified with or without an autism diagnosis?
Yeah. Yeah. There’s no consensus about the autism piece. There’s actually a ton of controversy about that. There’s a world of people who say it’s, you know, no, this really is a profile of autism. We don’t have official profiles of autism anymore. Ninety-nine percent of the people who find me are autistic and PDA, or their kids are autistic and PDA. But what I am particularly passionate about is defining it through the underlying nervous system triggers because it moves away from the conversation of what is this and into a much more, in my… Obviously, look, the clinicians and the DSM folks are gonna figure out whatever they’re gonna figure out. I wanna help people. And we, and I don’t mean that they, I don’t mean that they don’t want to. Of course they wanna help people. I mean, I’m really interested in what is the mechanism that we can understand, not what are the external behaviors that we need to- Right, yes, that.
Well, and there’s taking the knowledge that we have now and doing something with it now, which is what you do. Yeah, which is what we’re doing. Yeah, which puts us ahead of the research in a frustrating way, but it means that we can help people now with information we have now, and we don’t have to wait 20 years for that. That’s right.
And I come out of the climate movement, and I have a lot of background in what I like to call movement ecology. Everybody’s got a role to play, and the great thing about being in the grassroots, which is where you and I sit, I mean, you’ve more or less said at this point we’re in the thought leadership. But we’re coming out of the grassroots of lived experience, is that we can move so much faster than these establishment institutions.
Exactly.
And that scares the institutions, and that’s OK. We’re gonna stay grounded in what is actually helping our people, and the research will catch up.
Yeah, 100%. 1,000%. My guest is Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman. Did I get that right?
You did.
It’s a mouthful. I messed it up a couple of times, everybody. Um, and we are talking about PDA, and I wanna move… And we’ve spent a lot of time kind of defining it and defining where it sits in the larger realm of neurodiversity or diagnoses. What’s important for parents to understand about this nervous system-based situation?
Yeah. So, and I wanna also say, it’s important to understand a couple of really key things, and then I’m gonna very briefly describe the metaphor that I hope you can walk away with as something really useful as a tool. So A, it’s important to understand that if your kiddo is being labeled with ODD or just, you know, defiance, et cetera, that this is not gonna be a helpful frame for their behavior. Full stop. I believe in that absolutely.
I’m with you 1,000%.
Right. A better, useful, and much more accurate frame is to understand that all human children are social mammals. I go deep into the cultural anthropology and evolutionary psychology. We are social mammals who want to take care of ourselves, learn and explore, contribute to our social group. That’s how our species got to where we are at. Kiddos who are displaying behaviors, it’s not because they’re not social mammals. It’s because their bodies are struggling to feel safe in an environment that isn’t working for their brains and nervous systems and-
Yes… and minds.
That’s why. So our job as adults is to get really curious. Why can’t my kid brush their teeth? Why can’t they leave the house in the morning? Why are they melting down or getting manic after school? If I take as my absolute baseline assumption, and this is my element one of the PDA Safe Circle approach, is trust the PDA-er. And here we’re gonna say, trust the child. Any parent listening to this podcast, this goes for your kids whether or not PDA fits. Trust the child. By that I don’t mean blindly, like you’re gonna trust them to drive a car tomorrow. I mean trust that their innate human strengths are there, and therefore it is our job to get to be detectives, understanding the mechanisms of the nervous system and understanding that we are living so far outside our evolutionary continuum. Meaning we are unchanged from 100,000 years ago biologically. Unchanged. The speed at which human culture has changed is so fast, it’s lightning speed for evolution. So our bodies and minds have not kept up. That means that sensitive nervous systems, autism, ADHD, PDA, anybody who’s got these extra, what I call antennae, these extra threat detectors, are having a hard time in this environment, and we are having an increasingly hard time if we are children in the 2010s and 2020s, where expectations of what it looks like to be a child, the way that parents interact with children, so much speech, so much expectation of schedule, et cetera, is really maladapted to the nervous systems and minds that we have. Right. So that’s the most important envelope to understand.
So I’m gonna simplify that, if I can. Please. Um, what I heard you say, and what I agree with 1,000%, is that the way we as humans are designed to function in the world is very different from the world we’re functioning in. Yeah. And the expectations we have on our kids to function in the world that we’re in is out of sync for a lot of them because their nervous system isn’t kind of caught up and able to handle it. Maybe not caught up is the right word, but their nervous system doesn’t have the fully developed capacity that it would need to live in the world as it is now without some adaptation. Is that accurate? That’s right.
Yeah. And I think that is, and for me, I feel very strongly that PDA is, and listen closely here, a physiological disability. Physiological, not psychological. Physiological meaning it lives in the nervous system. It’s a physiological disability that is exacerbated, made worse, by cultural context.
By cultural context, you mean?
By cultural context, I mean we are living in an industrial world with very low autonomy for children, high expectations for kids’ compliance. Parents talk, in our culture, we talk at our kids all the time. All the time. That is cultural. That is not, quote-unquote, “natural” for humans. I mean nuclear family. I mean school, which is an evolutionary mismatch for pretty much every kid, unless you’re in an alternative environment. I mean loss of access to outdoors. I mean kids divorced from real, meaningful, contextual work. So instead of learning from elders how to make and build what the tribe needs, our kids are isolated from that meaningful work. So PDAers, as a group, what we find is we thrive in meaningful, contextual work. I’m gonna give you a very concrete example. Several weeks ago, my husband asked our kid to pick up his Legos. It was not a great moment for my husband. Asking our kid directly to help pick up Legos is just not gonna go well. But there it was. It happened. They had to have a repair moment after. My kid could not pick up the Legos.
Right.
I don’t… Right. OK. Flash forward, we have our new dog. She is a gem. I’m so grateful to have her. We are doing decompression. Sidebar, everything about PDAers and everything about supporting a dog’s nervous system, 95% of it’s the same, so that’s very cool, and I’m excited to explore that more. Cool. But this dog is very mouthy, so my kiddo spends most of his time in the living room. So I said, “Hey, kiddo, we’re ready to introduce Nelly to the living room. You could go pick up your Legos so that she’s not in danger of chewing on them.” He goes, “Of course.”
Right.
Right? Cleans the room spick and span. Now-
Meaningful contextual work.
Yes.
Yes.
Of course, because to nobody’s surprise except our culture, my kid wants to be a contributing member of his household, and when he can, he does. Right? When it’s framed in a way that makes sense. Can I, do we have time for me to give like the three-minute version of what the safe circle means?
Sure. Yeah.
OK. So if you picture yourself in the middle of a circle, everyone has one. This is your safe circle. Everything inside it feels safe to your nervous system. You stay regulated when you’re in contact with it. It doesn’t feel threatening. Everything on the outside of that circle dysregulates you in some way. You might feel afraid, you might feel shut down, you might feel like, “I gotta please people or they’re gonna be mad.” Whatever it is, it’s outside your safe circle. Some things are on the boundary of the safe circle because the circle itself changes size. It’s a metaphor for your capacity to feel safe in the world. And then there’s this concept called hearts outside the circle, which is something that you love with your mind and your heart, but your body finds dysregulating.
Oh.
And this has been-
Give an example of that?
Yeah. So for PDAers, socializing is a nearly universal heart outside the circle. Yeah. Almost all of us want to do it, and almost all of us who I have been in contact with have bodies that are very easily dysregulated by social contact.
Yeah. As my kids would say, “Peopling, mom.”
Peopling. Peopling is so hard. And part of why, you know, I would say the only thing that I want to just gently correct from your introduction about PDA is that particularly kiddos who don’t have an autism diagnosis and fit this are very possibly fitting PDA and autism, because many PDAers do not remotely look classically autistic. And so, so many people miss it because we have that social drive, we often have special interests that might be more typical for our age bracket, et cetera. So the way that my model works is that you’ve got that circle, and the circle is ringed with antenna, which is a metaphor for the nervous system protecting itself. Is somebody I love leaving me? Am I physically hurt? Right? Am I in sensory distress? Is this light too bright? We all have those antenna. What makes PDA unique is that in addition to whatever other neurodivergent antenna we have, we also have these antenna that are constantly scanning for losses of autonomy, losses of control, losses of social equality or status, and losses of co-regulation. And every time one of those antenna gets zapped by one of those threats, it shrinks our safe circle. It’s exhausting on the body. And so what we call demand avoidance, what the clinicians call demand avoidance, is simply when a person’s safe circle gets too small to fit the task inside.
Yeah.
It’s exactly as you said it in the beginning. The nervous system capacity isn’t there. And what our community calls equalizing, which is attempts to regain a sense of regulation, that can look aggressive, it can look like revenge, it can look like controlling behaviors, is simply when a person is trying to get back in their safe circle and calm that antenna down. And so what I do in my work is supporting people using this extended metaphor and a lot of other tools to live well with a PDA safe circle. Mm-hmm. How do we live well with these antenna? There’s an art to it. It’s very countercultural, but it is possible.
Yeah. It is possible, and that doesn’t mean you’re gonna consistently live well all the time without any dysregulation. That means-
Not at all.
Right? It’s about understanding what’s going on well enough to be able to figure out how to respond when you are dysregulated, when those spidey senses do go off, so that you can return to a place of-
That’s exactly right. It’s like when you’re in that buffer zone right outside your circle, before you go into full threat, is there a way to de-escalate? And I talk about cycles of expansion-contraction cycles. Right. It’s natural and normal for our circles to expand and contract, and riding the contraction cycle, letting us rest, is key to avoid burnout.
Yeah. There is so much more we could talk about, and we’ll have to have another conversation at some point because we have just… You guys, we have barely skimmed the surface of what’s important for all of us to understand about whether it’s a PDA identification or not, about what’s happening in the nervous system and what’s happening with our kids, because the nervous system is constantly under assault in the world that we live in. And so, for me, that’s my biggest takeaway from your message, is that it’s really applicable to absolutely everybody in our community. Because when, you know, in our community, when we talk about when kids get triggered, when we talk about assuming best intention, like, there’s so much of our model that’s about understanding that this is not naughty. There is something metabolic and neurologic that’s going on.
That’s right. Yeah. And meds are a big piece for pretty much everybody I work with.
Yeah …
Yeah, it’s metabolic and exactly.
Beautiful. Beautiful. All right, and we’re gonna bring this conversation to a close on this part, and I promise we will open it up again at another time. Let me tell y’all, if you wanna find out more about Rabbi Freeman, you can go to pdasafecircle.com. Is that right? You got it. And you can also find her on Instagram, and we’ve got all of this stuff in the show notes, of course. Before we wrap the conversation, is there anything else you wanna bring up that we haven’t talked about that you wanna make sure you don’t leave before you’ve shared, or something else-
Yeah. Thank you. I guess a bit of a self-promotion, that I run an online community, PDAers, anybody where this resonates, adults, spouses, parents, can join. No one’s turned away for financial reasons. It’s essentially a secular online congregation around my whole model. And the other thing that I just wanna say is that this is the coaching I do is for PDAers, and many of my clients are parents, most of them, and of PDAers. And I would say that 70% of them, where it’s a biological kid, and even also with an adopted kid, at least one parent realizes that this makes sense for them, too. And the power that this model of the antenna, the idea of being in your buffer zone or full threat response, the power this brings to a marriage or a romantic partnership, as well as if you’re single parenting, it’s huge. So I think it’s just important to translate whenever we say kids, it’s all relevant to adults. Yeah. Agreed. And most of us were under-diagnosed, unaccommodated kids, too.
Yeah. Yeah, totally. I’m with you. We’ll have another conversation where I’ll explain to you how we figured this out.
Oh, sure. Great. Sounds wonderful.
Great. Thank you. Thank you for the work that you’re doing. It’s powerful. And before we wrap, is there… Do you have a favorite quote or motto that you wanna share?
Yes. And I’m so glad you prepped that because I wanna give a huge shout-out to my beautiful friend, teacher, I’m proud to now call her a close friend, Amanda Diekman, Low Demand Amanda, and-
Low Demand Amanda.
Low Demand Amanda Diekman. Oh, yes, if you don’t know her, she’ll be a great other guest. And she says that… I just have to find the exact quote. She says, “Neurodiversity is a movement to claim the many ways there are to be human.” Neurodiversity is a movement to claim the many ways there are to be human.
I love that. That I concur in so many ways. That’s beautiful. Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
It’s truly a pleasure. I really enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to more. So, I’m gonna thank you for being here and turn to the audience for a minute. For those of you tuning in, tap in for yourself. What’s your insight from this conversation? What’s… What are you taking away from this episode? What’s the one awareness, gem, nugget, insight that you’re taking away with you that you may wanna bring forward with you into your week? What is it that is landing for you from this conversation? And as always, thank you for what you’re doing for yourself and for your kids and for the people you work with, the families you support. At the end of the day, it makes all the difference. Next on the podcast is gonna be Zach Gershon, who has founded the first young adult support groups as part of ADDA, and is a fascinating guy, and I’m really looking forward to talking to him. And if you like what you’re hearing on this podcast, please take a moment to like or follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. If you can leave a review, even better. Every moment that you can offer to that helps us get this out to more people who need it. So thank you for that engagement. Hope you have a fabulous week, and I will see you on the next one.Minimize Meltdowns!
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