Episode 4: You Can’t Make Me! The Psychology Behind Neurodivergent Defiance and Control
Hello, my friends. Today I want to talk to you about that voice you hear when a request or a schedule or an expectation presents something for you to do, and even though you’re not 4 years old, the response in your head is “You can't make me!” It might show up when someone tells you what to do, even if they have that authority. It might show up when you’re listening to a great podcast, and then the host starts going through the steps you need to take to accomplish whatever they’re talking about. It might show up when you’re faced with unspoken expectations or standards, like brushing your teeth again because you got back into the pizza after you brushed your teeth the first time. It might show up most when you tell yourself to do something, like put your phone down and go to sleep already. Maybe you do hear yourself say “You can't make me” in your head, or you actually say, “Nope,” out loud, or it isn’t the words so much as feeling something in you pushing back.
Instead of doing it, you think about the logistics of doing it, or the merits of doing it… “Is it really worth doing it?” “Why do people even do it?” Maybe all of a sudden you feel like you can't do anything, like you’re stuck in mud. Or you become fiercely driven to do — something other than the thing you’re expected to do. Because that thing? You are not doing it. It almost feels like you’re not doing it just for the sake of not doing it, except there is no sake of not doing it. There’s nothing to gain.
I don’t mean the situations when you’ve chosen not to do something for a clear reason. I’m talking about something you want to, or think you should, say “yes” to, and even you are confused that you’re giving more “meh” or even “hell no” than “yes,” because it could be something that’s totally easy, or something you wanted to do 5 minutes ago, or something you know will improve your life. Have you been there? It’s frustrating as hell — sometimes for people around us, and especially for us, because it doesn’t make any sense to us, either! But today I’m going to make it make sense, because what I just described isn’t a character flaw. It’s not because you’re undisciplined or need to get your priorities straight. It’s a real thing called PDA.
In this episode, I cut through the noise about what PDA is, why it’s not pathological, and how it affects your ability to follow through — even when you want to or need to. I’ll tell you the psychology behind that resistance: where it comes from, what it protects, and why so many neurodivergent adults live in a tug-of-war between wanting control and feeling completely out of control.
Let’s start with what PDA actually is and isn’t. PDA was originally called Pathological Demand Avoidance. The term originated in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and referred to patterns of behavior that were similar to, but different than, autism. The term Pathological Demand Avoidance is far more commonly used in the U.K. than in the U.S. and other parts of the world, and it’s now used to identify a specific profile of autism. But it’s common in people with ADHD and other types of neurodivergence without autism, and it can be present in neurotypical people, too.
Because it’s experienced by so many neurodivergent people, PDA has the potential to be a really helpful way to understand ourselves, to be understood by others, and to know we’re not alone. But that name…
“Pathological” is a medical term that means something is related to or part of what defines a disease or a disorder, so the name Pathological Demand Avoidance flags the pattern of behaviors it comprises as inherently disordered, not a variation, but a disease. Even if that’s technically accurate for someone whose PDA is a component of their diagnosed neurodivergence, “pathological” doesn’t work for those of us who don’t see neurodivergence as a disorder.
“Pathological” is also used in the popular vernacular to emphasize that someone’s behavior is unfathomably bad. Not just bad; the implication is that a behavior defies moral standards. It’s unethical to an unbelievable degree, so the person doing it must be, too. Nothing about that helps anyone understand themselves, be understood, or feel less alone.
And then there’s “demand avoidance,” which sounds like a checkbox on a school discipline form that gets sent to the district to go in your permanent record, doesn’t it? And for those of us who get rather caught up in the literal meaning of an expression, doesn’t “demand avoidance” mean one avoids the demand, not fulfilling the demand? Like when you avoid your boss at the end of the day so she can't ask you to do something that will make you have to stay late? Or you let the call go to voicemail when it’s that one acquaintance who always needs your help with something?
Even if the phrasing doesn’t bother you, I’m sure you’d agree that “demanding” and “avoidant” aren’t words we use to compliment people. They’re words we use to describe someone we don’t really want to be around, and don’t really want to be — if for no other reason than that those words describe qualities people should be ashamed of having and should be doing all they can to change. They’re problems to be solved, literally, because Pathological Demand Avoidance, in its most basic context, is a condition to be treated.
But we can look at the same pattern of behaviors in a different way — a way that captures the challenges it brings without implying that those challenges are shameful, or even that they need to be addressed. Those same patterns of behavior are much better explained by the term Pervasive Drive for Autonomy, and we still get to call it “PDA.” Same acronym; better lens, because PDA might look like avoiding a demand or defying an authority figure, but that perspective isn’t accurate or complete, since it’s not really about the demand or the authority figure.
Those of us with PDA are equal-opportunity avoiders and defiers, because the behaviors are rooted in a deep, subconscious drive for independence, for freedom, for what we want, need, and prefer, and the ways it works best for us to do things, to be acknowledged, to be options. Which is why the drive for autonomy could just as easily impact whether or not you comply with a work-related regulation — as it might affect whether or not you spend Sunday afternoon making those muffins you’re so excited to try and already bought all the ingredients for.
PDA is an involuntary response to the perception of our autonomy being imposed upon. The source of the demand, requirement, or expectation doesn’t matter, and the importance, urgency, enjoyment, and ease of the task don’t matter.
Because adults generally expect compliance from children, and often see themselves as responsible for teaching a noncompliant child to step in line, kids with PDA almost always get punished, pathologized, or both. Adults, for the most part, don’t throw tantrums on the floor of the grocery store because we’re tired of grocery shopping but haven’t gotten everything off the list yet. If our partner says, “Hey, you said you didn’t mind bringing the trash cans in from the curb when you got home. Do you mind grabbing them before it starts raining?”, most of us don’t scream “You can’t make me!”
Instead, PDA in adults gets missed, because it’s muddled by the adaptations we’ve adopted to conceal our differences. We don’t tell anyone we’ve only had the oil changed in our car once — 5 years ago. When it comes to work responsibilities or coming through for a friend, we do it all with a smile, but we still haven’t seen a doctor about the wrist pain that’s making everything we do harder, and we just placed a third Amazon order in as many weeks for underwear because all the ones we have are sitting in the hamper of undone laundry. We stay very busy, but accomplish very little, and lament to our partner or best friend that we don’t know why we’re still behind on everything because we’re really trying. When we cancel plans or need more time to complete something we said we would do, we offer very sincere apologies with airtight excuses. And we give ourselves those same excuses, and sometimes even apologies, because we truly have no idea what the hell is going on.
Why in the world would you not take that return back to the store during the 30 days you could get a refund, when the marked bag is sitting right on the passenger seat of your car, and you drive by the store on the way to and from work 5 days a week?
Who in their right mind spends hours making the best day-by-day plan for using the awesome rowing machine they saved up for and could not wait to have, then never uses the plan, or the rowing machine?
What could possibly be more important on a wide open weekend day than working on the project your company’s leadership team requested as a prerequisite for being interviewed for your dream job?
Why would anyone with things to do revise the list of tv series they want to watch but haven’t even started, like you are now?
Why did you just say out loud to yourself, “Stop. Stop going down the stairs to get the toilet bowl cleaner to clean all the toilets. Go do the thing you set aside this time to do” and then, after you said it, could almost feel your body commit to going down the stairs to get the toilet bowl cleaner anyway?
Clean toilets are great, but having experiences like these all the time is really awful. It’s confusing and frustrating and embarrassing — and it snowballs! Because you canceled Date Night with your partner to finish the thing you didn’t get done when the time you blocked for it somehow turned into Clean the Bathrooms Night, and that second time block — the one you had to cancel Date Night for because you squandered the first one? Surprise! You didn’t do the thing then either. Now you’re ashamed, and worried you’re ruining your marriage, and mad at yourself, so naturally you give yourself more of the same advice you’ve been getting for years: You create another routine. You buy lifetime access to the best task management app there is. You set up weekly therapy sessions for the next 6 months because your anxiety is out of control. (It’s probably your anxiety that’s making everything so hard, right?…)
But where’s the logic in thinking that doing an extra thing will help you do the thing you didn’t do, and if you didn’t do the first thing, what makes you think you’ll do the extra thing? I am not trying to be harsh or pessimistic. If I ever come across that way, it’s not because I don’t believe in you; it’s because I don’t want you to buy another $150 planner to add to your pile of planners you never used. And even more importantly, when you’re trying to make sense of that pile of planners — or anything else you didn’t do that you wanted to do, needed to do, or would have benefited from doing — I don’t want you to come to the conclusion that you just suck, that you’re hopelessly flawed, or that you obviously need to work harder. None of those are accurate!
Pervasive Drive for Autonomy isn’t a personality trait. It’s your nervous system doing its highest priority job: keeping you alive — by overriding the systems that keep telling you to your life will be perfect if you just finally use one of those damn planners, and suck up to go for that walk every single day after work, and that if you used that app right, you’ll be able to do extra work project and clean the bathrooms twice a week! Those systems are wrong, because you’ve tried everything and it’s only ever made it worse. Your nervous system is right. It sees you responding to your own struggles by trying harder to be less you and more whatever everybody wants. It uses PDA the way an automatic sensor turns off a space heater that’s getting too hot; it stops you from doing things when the way you’re doing things is dangerous.
No matter what task is up next, you get the message in that pushback you feel. It’s almost like it’s nudging you to take a stand against all the things you’ve done a certain way and at a certain time — no matter what worked best for you — just because it was expected of you. If you pay some attention to that feeling, you might find yourself thinking, or wanting to scream into the void, “I don’t care what anyone thinks. I’d rather clean my bathrooms than do any part of my job.” Or, “There’s no way I’m going to use that app that I paid for for life. It isn’t even user-friendly. I could design a better app right now.” Or, “I really WANT to take a walk every day. I saved the podcasts I want to listen to and I feel excited to get started, but after work, I just need to lie down.”
When you can hear what PDA is telling you, you’ll start to understand the ways your life right now, or often enough in the past, required you to surrender your agency to do things you didn’t want to do, didn’t think were important, or didn’t feel prepared to do, or to do things in specific timeframes and specific ways, even though other ways and timeframes work much better for you. To whatever extent you can lessen your exposure to those types of experiences, you’ll be giving PDA some slack by letting your nervous system take a break from trying to help you get through those experiences.
Now, if you’re wondering, “What if I am just being kind of defiant? Or it really is anxiety? Or maybe I’m subconsciously trying to stick it to my partner because they’ve never carried their weight around the house. How do I even know it’s PDA?” I’m glad you asked, because I don’t want you to take what I’m sharing here and accidentally gaslight yourself with it. Because the answer is: you might not know it’s PDA. Everything overlaps and intertwines. It just does. But almost all of us have dug our heels in against doing something when we weren’t anxious or didn’t forget, or it was something that didn’t involve our partner at all. If you can reflect on situations like that in your past, or pay attention to them when they come up in the future, you might know right away the role those other stressors played, or didn’t play.
And if all of your experiences that seem like PDA also feature plenty of anxiety or passive-aggressive resentment toward someone, that’s actually not a bad thing. If you feel like the only thing in the way of you cracking the code on PDA’s impact on your life is anxiety, or an issue in your relationship, or any other ongoing circumstance, you might surprise yourself and do what you need to do to get your anxiety in check, or have a real conversation with your partner about fixing things in your relationship. Sometimes, the only way to know what’s what, in any context, is to remove possibilities until there’s an obvious change or there’s only one thing left. It’s the same principle behind using an elimination diet to identify food allergies, which works. And if you’re thinking there’s no way you have the bandwidth to do some kind of sequenced elimination of all the stressors in your life, I have good news.
If you’re having significant health problems, you have to go through that long process to know exactly which food is the cause. You don’t have to do that with PDA and the other things that might be the problem, because the reality is that all the problems are part of the problem. It’s always worth tackling the more distinct issues if you can, when you can. But if you never know for sure exactly how much PDA contributes to the challenges in your life, understanding PDA as part of the subconscious processes that direct your experiences, and just being kinder to yourself when you have no idea why you’re not doing something you need or want to do, will make a world of difference.
Before we wrap up for today, I want to share some of the approaches neurodivergent people report are helpful when they’re not at the point of having their PDA all figured out, but really need some clear-cut strategies they can use right now to get the things they need to do done. Keeping in mind that it’s perfectly normal if your gut reaction to reading the word “strategies” was “You can't make me!” I can't, and I actually don’t want to. If I could wave a magic wand for you, it wouldn’t be to make you use all the strategies anyone, including me, said would make your life easier. I would want it to change the relationships and roles you’re in that require you to sacrifice your authenticity and agency for other people’s preference or convenience.
But I don’t have a magic wand, and I still want to help, so here are four things you can try to loosen PDA’s grip on you so you can avoid the consequences of not getting certain things done.
#1, as in the number one thing I can't make you do and that’s okay: Since PDA isn’t about the actual thing you have to do or the reason you have to do it, but the loss of autonomy that comes from having to do it at all, when it comes to the thing, give yourself as many choices as you can. I know it sounds silly, but silly things are often backed by research showing that something like perceived options really changes how we feel about tasks AND how efficiently we complete them. Remember that return you put on the passenger seat in your car, but didn’t return it in time to get the refund? Next time, put reminders in your phone for four different times you can do the return, and if it’s feasible for you, also give yourself the option of not returning it at all, and just deciding that losing the refund is a better option for you than dealing with the return.
#2 thing I can't make you do and that’s fine: Give yourself permission to listen to your body. When PDA derails your intention or obligation to get something done, a lot of the problems that result come from the way we berate ourselves, and hold it over our own heads forever and ever. There’s autonomy, and peace, to be found in seeing that your calendar for next week is impossibly overloaded with things you didn’t do this week, and picking the ones you may as well just do next month, then getting them off of there. And while you’re at, if there are things on there that you just don’t want to do and don’t truly have to, don’t move them to next month; delete them. Pervasive Drive for Autonomy: Satisfied. Plus you have more time now, so maybe you can revisit #1 and give yourself more choices.
#3 thing I can't make you do and that’s totally cool with me: Incorporate whatever you can that you, authentically, enjoy into the things you want to do, or need to do, or know would be beneficial to do, in every way you can. If you have to edit a bunch of reports or grade a bunch of papers —tonight, period, or your job is on the line — and you know that it will be just a little less awful if you do it on the couch wrapped in one of those blankets that looks like a tortilla that you order for same day delivery right now, and you can't choose between your favorite foods, so you have pizza, falafel sandwiches, and pad thai delivered, do all of that, with a Disney Sing-Along-Songs dance break every hour and bath with Mr. Bubble bubble bath instead of a shower when you’re done. You’re the one who has to do it, so make it fun, make it weird, make it beautiful, make it interesting, make it yours.
And the #4 thing I can't make you do and I wouldn’t have it any other way is to honor your social nature in doing the thing. If you love being around people, do the thing with a friend, with your daughter on FaceTime with you, or in a busy place, if that’s possible. If you rather not see or speak to any person while you do the thing, try to make that happen, without guilt or apology and worries about what anyone will think. It might seem ridiculous to get a hotel room just for tonight so you can review those reports or grade those papers, but it’s more ridiculous to lose your job for not getting them done because you feel silly or awkward about prioritizing supporting yourself over all else for that one night.
When it comes to any of these four strategies, if you get stuck in any kind of mental loop about it being weird or dumb or over-the-top, or whatever someone may have said to you or you’re just saying to yourself, consider this: If you’re like most neurodivergent adults, you have compromised to make situations fit others’ expectations better, downplayed your opinions, yielded to others’ preferences, and presented camouflaged versions of yourself enough for two lifetimes. You’ve paid your dues in that area, and you can tell people that directly if they have anything to share about you sitting in your cubicle with your daughter on FaceTime. Take up all the space you’ve relinquished to others. You don’t owe anybody anything.
Until next time, remember — you don’t have to change yourself to deserve happiness or success. Being who you are isn’t the problem; it’s the solution. I’m rooting for you ~ exactly as you are.
