You know that internal feeling of “don’t tell me what to do” when confronted by certain phrases or tasks? Or that moment when you’re about to do a thing, then someone tells you to do the thing, and now you can’t. If you are living with ADHD or Autism, you may know the feeling I’m referring to, and it may be causing more difficulty than is needed. It’s what is referred to, pathologisingly, as Pathological Demand Avoidance, or PDA. And it is very common.
You ask your partner to get the clothes out of the washing machine. No big deal, just a simple request. And it doesn’t happen, there may even be some push back. So you escalate to “Just get the clothes out, will you? It’s not that hard.” And it doesn’t happen, even more intensely than before. This is what a Pathological Demand Avoidance profile can look like from the outside. From the inside, it’s a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do when they read danger: it reacts. The demand isn’t the request or the task. It’s the sensation of having your own will taken out of your hands, of losing autonomy.
I’ll note here that people with a PDA profile prefer to use terms such as Persistent Drive for Autonomy or Preferential Desire for Autonomy, which I think are far more accurate and sensible terms.
PDA sits within the autism spectrum for some people, and alongside ADHD for many more, and the mechanism underneath it is anxiety, not defiance. A request, even a welcome one, even one the person themselves has been wanting to act on, can register as a loss of autonomy. The nervous system reads being told to do something as a removal of autonomy, and reacts automatically. (See: When the body takes the wheel.)
This is worth thinking through, because it runs against most of what we’re taught about getting people to do things. Firmness doesn’t help here. Repetition doesn’t help. A reward for compliance doesn’t help, because it’s still built on the same architecture, do the thing, get the approval, and approval is itself a kind of demand for someone whose threat response triggers on being observed and evaluated. What helps, is removing the shape of the demand while keeping the actual request intact.
In the ADHD case, where it’s present alongside PDA or on its own, adds a working memory and attention system that loses instructions in long preambles, that struggles with abrupt transitions, that reads a flat tone as anger. Put the two together and you get someone whose system is working hard, near-constantly, just to handle the ordinary traffic of a conversation.
The single most useful shift is what’s sometimes called declarative language, stating an observation or your own experience, rather than issuing an instruction. “I’m ready to head off when you are” carries the same information as “let’s go now.” One of them asks nothing of anyone. The other one does, whether or not it was meant to.
A few ways this plays out in practice:
Observe rather than instruct. “I noticed the invoice is still sitting there” does the work of “you need to do the invoice” without the demand attached to it.
Offer a choice, even a small one. “Would Thursday or Friday suit better?” hands back a measure of control that a fixed deadline removes. The content barely changes, but the felt experience of it can alter substantially.
Take the “you” out where you can. “I wonder if the roster could get sorted before the weekend” or “shall we have a crack at this” turns a directive into something closer to a shared problem. It sounds like a small trick. It isn’t, because it changes who the demand is aimed at, and the answer, for a nervous system on alert, is “not me,” which now feels safe.
Ask for help rather than issue a request. “I’m stuck on this, any chance you could take a look” activates something closer to a helping response than a compliance response. Same outcome with a different route to it.
Warn before a transition, and then wait. “We’ll probably wrap up in ten minutes or so” gives a brain mid-hyperfocus room to disengage on its own terms, rather than being cut off. And then, having said it, leave the silence alone. The processing happens in the space where you wait, and the person will get there. Swapping around multiple topics, with “demands” means a person is completely overwhelmed, unable to keep up or comply, feels useless, and has a fear response of either fight, flight, or freeze. Panic is also possible in this scenario.
Notice the demand words themselves. Must, need to, have to, now. Small words, and each one carries more weight than its size suggests. “Might be worth” or “whenever suits” says the same practical thing without the trigger sitting inside it.
There’s a second category that’s less about tone and more about structure. Certain phrases assert one person’s frame as the only valid one and remove the other person’s say in it, and they do this regardless of how gently a tone they’re delivered in, or how necessary the task may be.
What you need to understand is…
You have to…
Why can’t you just…
Because I said so…
It’s not that hard, just…
None of these are cruel. Some of them get used with real warmth behind them. But structurally, each one closes a door that a nervous system already primed for threat was watching closely. The alternative isn’t to abandon clarity, or to stop holding a boundary when one is genuinely needed. It’s to keep the content and remove the override. For instance, “I’m ready to help whenever you get to it”, or “This one’s got a few steps, want to think it through together?” The request remain, boundaries remain. What changes is whether the other person’s autonomy is felt to be maintained.
Tap a card to see the demand flipped into its declarative equivalent.
“You need to…”
“You have to sort this now.”
“Why can’t you just…”
“Because I said so.”
“It’s not that hard, just…”
“Put the kettle on.”
“We’re leaving now.”
“You should already know this.”
“Get the clothes out of the machine.”
“Clean up your mess.”
None of this is a script to be performed at someone. It’s about evolving a change in what you’re listening for. The lateness, the avoidance, the sudden go-quiet on a plan they were genuinely excited about last week are not verdicts on the relationship, and they are not, most of the time, about you at all. They are a nervous system doing its job a little too well.
The shift that actually matters isn’t the phrasing. It’s underneath the phrasing, treating resistance as information about a threat response, not as a referendum on whether someone can be trusted, relied upon, or loved well. Get that part right and the language mostly follows on its own.
The difference may well be amazing.
PDA Society (UK). What is PDA? pdasociety.org.uk
Reframing Autism. Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) and Autism: A Guide for Allies. reframingautism.org.au
RSS Feed